Steven Jarvis, CPA
Hello, everyone, and welcome to the next episode of the Retirement Tax Services Podcast, Financial Professionals Edition. I’m your host, Steven Jarvis, CPA. And joining me this week in a very special episode is Jason Wenk, the CEO of Altruist, one of the great custodians that we get tax reporting documents from every year, and Jason, welcome to the show.

Jason Wenk
It’s my pleasure. So nice to meet you. Feel like I’m completing my Jarvis, you know, kind of family connection. So awesome to finally connect, you know, sort of audibly and visually and not just on LinkedIn.

Steven Jarvis, CPA
Yeah, well, as far as financial planning goes, you have completed the full circuit. We do have five other siblings who are not in financial services. So if you really want to get the full Jarvis checklist off to make some introductions for you. But Jason, I really appreciate you setting aside time for this. We’re going to get into some of the details. This did come out of maybe not an ideal situation, but that’s really what I want to talk about, because one of my consistent messages to financial advisors is that if you’re going to do tax planning and all of you should be, that it’s ultimately your responsibility to make sure things get reported to the IRS correctly. And I think where advisors go wrong sometimes is that they assume that all they need to do is say, hey, Mr. and Mrs. Client, here’s this thing you should do. All the best of luck. Let me know how it turns out. And they don’t always recognize all the different steps that go into things getting reported to the IRS correctly and really where they’re responsible, versus where the custodian’s responsible, versus where other vendors they might not even be aware of are responsible and then what they should do when something goes wrong. So, Jason, I’ll let you go first if you can kind of paint this picture little bit of kind of where some bumps came along this year from a tax reporting standpoint.

Jason Wenk
Sure, yeah, no, happy to. And I think it’s worth noting that I’ve been doing this for, I mean, gosh, it’s been so long, it’s over half my life now. But first licensed, I guess, a little over 21 years ago. I’ve had clients for that entire time period up including to this day, And including clients on Altruist that have their tax documents provided by Altruist. So what I’d say is that…you know the majority of the time everything works fine meaning like at every custodian I’ve had along the way I was with TD Waterhouse way back in the day and then it became you know TD Ameritrade and you know Folio-institutional at one point, and then they became Goldman Sachs, and then Ameritrade became Schwab, and so I guess I’ve got, in addition to my work at Altruist, decades of kind of dealing with custodians, 1099s, corrected 1099s, K1s, and the whole plethora of them, right? So just sharing that, to say, walk more than a few miles in the shoes of an advisor, have dealt with all sorts of things. One thing I think I’ve learned is that…

Jason Wenk
No one’s immune to having some problems, being no advisor, no investment philosophy, meaning it gets like, you can’t just hold, well, if just have nothing but index funds, maybe I’ll never have an issue. Like, well, you could still theoretically have some challenges, right? All those things don’t matter. And so I’m also very sensitive to it because it’s definitely not something you want to budget in your schedule. the surprise call from a concerned client or going down a rabbit hole chasing down a corrected document or being the one reporting that it’s incorrect and then having your vendor, your custodian scramble to get you a corrected version. Yeah, definitely all these things happen. For Altruist, we’ve had mostly, I’d say like pleasant tax seasons. This past year we had a bunch of cool new features we developed, some of which were, they were so widely used because advisors liked them so much. that when they then create a tax reporting issue, it becomes of course magnified because of the use. So I know in our case, we’ve had, I think two pretty notable ones in the past year. Created multiple corrected 1099s, in some cases incorrect, know, Roth conversions, so 1099Rs. And a lot of it’s actually, it’s from, stemming from innovating a platform that is hard to test in real time. Meaning like, the only way you fully get the end-to-end testing is when our front end communicates to a back end, which maybe has a downstream vendor, and then it creates a document that gets pushed to the front end, and at that point, in reality, in real time, you start to see, oh, there was clearly something that from our front end application back to a downstream vendor didn’t reconcile, produced an inaccurate 1099 and now you have to correct that. So in our case with a two in particular, one was Roth conversion. So if somebody was doing any form of Roth conversion, but specifically if they were doing some for those under 59 and a half, oftentimes you’d be like your mega backdoor type of things.

Jasin Wenk
Any of those folks, they got coded as premature distributions, as you can imagine. If you’re a client, you have a little panic, the advisor sees it goes, know, holy shit, right? Like, I just did this planning exercise, pulled $200,000 out, my client’s got this massive tax problem if this is corrected. The good news, obviously, is as annoying and frustrating as that is, it’s very easy to correct. All those were, of course, then corrected. No client was negatively impacted, other than probably some level of frustration for a short amount of time. The second one was we had excess removal, so if someone did excess contribution, and then they decided after the fact, I want to remove some of that those, it was the same exact kind of coding where it’s like our front end was passing a message to a backend vendor, a downstream vendor. It didn’t then get translated into the actual documents that got sent out. So, you know, again, similarly. And all of these kind of stem from digitizing money movement. So it’s kind of interesting in our case, we’re probably unique compared to most custodians in that. Most of students, when you want to do things, you fill out forms and you fill out a form, you have the client digitally sign the form, you send the form in, and then some human being codes it directly into the backend. We’re building essentially, first of its kind digital self-service. So, you know, you can just go online and you can do things like, again, Roth conversions. You can just go online and do money journals. You can do things that otherwise would be hard to do or impossible at some other custodians. I think sometimes because of that, there is a risk, especially that first year that you launch that new feature, something may go wrong. Now the positive is of course we fixed all these things, not without wearing a little egg on our face. Hopefully advisors will forgive us and then they’ll experience multiple years of non-issues while still gaining all that digitization and automation, but in our case, those are some of the big ones. There’s one interesting thing, don’t know if you’d be wiser than me to kind of know this, one of the things we did this year that was kind of interesting was we normally do corrected 1099s in three or alternate as I say like delayed 1099s in three waves so like it’s just kind of a standard practice for custodians they don’t send everything all at once they kind of do three different waves usually this is for like more complex instruments that are harder to classify income so they kind of give this extra time to delay and usually it’s like you get some very quick in January you know some that might come out you know very quickly in you know early February.

Jason Wenks
This year the normal middle date would have been the Friday preceding Presidents Day weekend. In essence, over our reporting cycle, we’re like, gosh, it ended up bundling wave two and three so close that we just skipped wave two. So we ended up having a big amount of documents. It just kind of came out a week later than people would normally think. And some of was just the way that the calendar worked. We learned after the fact, course, the feedback from advisors, we don’t care. We’ll take that extra four days or five days or whatever it was of additional time. We thought we were doing people a favor. You learn the hard way that, you know, maybe three waves has been the case for many custodians for decades for a reason. And so to stick to the three waves, kind of again, making sure people get their documents, you know, in the fastest time kind of possible, regardless of the complexity. Those were some of the things. Again, I could go deeper, of course, if you really want to, but what I’ll say is that as a custodian, no laughing matter when somebody gets something wrong, also not for when somebody gets something late. It’s especially, probably the most frustrating thing I think for a lot of folks is when their returns are already done and then they get a corrected 1099 after the fact, really close to or even after the traditional filing deadline. All of which again, can happen, sometimes happen and we’ve had little bits of that all in kind of one year.

Steven Jarvis, CPA
Jason, I really appreciate the background and the transparency on how that stuff works. I want to highlight a couple of things for people listening because it might be easy to sit back and listen to this as an advisor who’s not running a major custodian and think, well, like I’m never going to be guilty of any of that stuff. And I can assure you that regardless of which profession you’ve chosen, at some point you will make a mistake, and how you handle a mistake will be very indicative of the course of your company and your career after that. So I mean, I just want to point out that Jason’s not here making excuses. He’s not blaming other people. He’s not telling advisors that they’re being ridiculous and they shouldn’t be frustrated with this situation. He’s owning what happened and providing context. And for myself, that those are things that I always look for when I work with vendors and when I’m the one trying to be accountable to my clients as well, because while it is the exception, these things do come up. And so being able to say, hey, here’s what went on so that the people we work with have an idea that this wasn’t because as a client, as a consumer, I want to know that the vendors I’m working with aren’t just being negligent. If it was, you know what, we could have done this just fine, but we just we wanted to go on vacation instead of addressing the quality issues, like that’s a different problem. But especially if we want to be involved in innovative things, especially if we want to keep asking for new and better features, I think you’re right, Jason, we have to accept that there is some level of iteration that has to go on, and that’s not always going to be perfect. But we want to be looking, for those partners who are going to come to, take a seat at the table and say, okay, how do we make sure that over the long term we get this right way more often than we get this wrong and then when we do get it wrong we’re proactively addressing it and making sure that we’re minimizing these risks in the future. As I work with advisors, I think I mentioned this before we hit record, I mean one of the themes that I repeat very very often is that advisors need to be responsible for making sure things get reported to the IRS correctly and that’s not to say that every vendor involved in the process shouldn’t take some level of responsibility but as the advisor you are the one with the highest degree of information as to what went on. And then Jason, as you’re describing kind of some of these interactions, every time there’s another level of interaction, which are just necessary to the process, a little bit of context is going to get lost. And so sometimes even when everything goes as intended, as the advisor, you’re still really in the best position to go back through and say, okay, did this game of telephone happen correctly? And so there’s still this level of responsibility, I think, that the person making the recommendation needs to assume throughout the process.

Jason Wenk
Super well said, yeah, and I think being a great advisor, to steal a phrase from the financial family side of the Jarvis, but to deliver massive value, like you should be doing some things proactively, and I think that’s one of them, is there’s the tax planning work that goes on, but then ensuring that the planning is actually carried out in a way that is reflected in the clients, whether it’s the tax bill in the coming year, the reporting that goes on to their CPA, or like in your case when you’re doing the actual planning prep work, et cetera. So we don’t take it lightly. mean, think in the end, one of the greatest areas of value and advice you can provide is tax alpha. And there’s lots of different, that’s a very catch-all kind of phrase, but I it could be their investment management philosophy, it could be how they help organize sort of the state planning, it could be how they think about retirement accounts and their usage. I mean there’s so many elements. I you could probably teach me for days all of the things that can and should be done. All of those things are pretty moot if you mess up the actual 1099s and K1s and all of the real documents that kind of make their way into the tax returns. So we know that we play a pretty crucial role in taking that planning work a great advisor or planner is doing and turning it into reality by giving you accurate documents. So, absolutely something that you don’t take for granted. In fact, don’t even get mad when somebody pushes us on something that’s not done timely or accurately because this stuff is so critically important to delivering that kind of outside value.

Steven Jarvis, CPA
That is one thing I noticed. I mean, since I’m involved with so many advisors, I see tax documents from a lot of custodians every year. And it seems like it goes in waves. It’s usually a different custodian each year that I’m getting forwarded emails of, did you see what they did? And I will say to Altruist credit, I saw more more timely responses from your support team than I saw from any other custodians. Most of the time when advisors are forwarding me things from custodians that have gone wrong It’s usually with this question of I don’t even know who to call or email or how to possibly get a response and so I can only imagine what it was like on your team as this stuff was getting discovered because I would imagine there’s also not just like a fix-it button that it’s like” We can just click this one magic button and it’s all perfect tomorrow and here we go”. I would imagine there’s an process, maybe a little bit of internal panic, what do we do, how do we make sure that people are taken care of, maybe panic’s a little extreme, but there had to have been some process where, I mean, you guys care a lot about doing a quality job, and so there’s gotta be some piece of that, it’s like, how do we get this corrected, make sure everybody’s taken care of, and then…I would imagine that as we were recording this in May, as this comes out in June, I would expect that most people on your platform are aware of this, have seen the corrections come out, but maybe just speak to a little bit if there’s anybody on your platform listening, who should they be reaching out to if they have questions about how these things got corrected?

Commercial
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Jason (Wenk
Yeah, first, thanks for sharing too that they, the team makes a pretty deal of pride in supporting advisors. So the service side beyond the technology. I will say like, you know, more often than not, actually when you build things with codified solutions, there is a fix-it button. Now it’s not quite as simple as a button, but it’s basically a line of code somewhere, right? That like, you know, some general now, I don’t think we kind of willy-nilly do like hot fixes to, you know, source code. So of course we’re, doing a proper retroactive, how did this happen, documenting everything, making sure that it becomes part of essentially the go forward plan so it doesn’t happen again. So it might take us, I don’t know, I’d say like two weeks or less to kind of go through that full sprint cycle and kind of take what was an error or a mistake or something and turn it into a correction in production. A lot of it happens faster. We get things, we can fix them in 48 hours or so. So think there’s some benefits to being this sort of digital native modern architecture. People hear these terms like APIs, and what does that mean? And just, you know, like in our world, Altruist is just a giant collection of small services, right? So small, know, smaller piece of code that aggregate in this like larger piece, which allows us to isolate problems and work on them without having any impact on, you know, the vast majority of the other services, right? So things like statements, documents, you know, money movement, like all those things are just simple, smaller services, easy to diagnose, easy to then fix, deploy, and then get corrections out. I make it sound easier than it is, it’s like you make it sound more dire than it is, it’s somewhere probably in the middle. The team still hates it, right, when it happens. It does sort of sound a fire alarm. When we see something like this, we call it a P zero, so priority zero. That means we’re waking people up in the middle of the night, we’re getting online, finding the problem, we’re trying to fix it before the market opens basically the next day, right? So we take it super seriously, we move incredibly fast. And I think most of the industry knows that I’m probably an unusual custodian CEO and that I’m very easy to get a hold of. I’m not suggesting everyone calls me directly or DMs me, but I think most advisors that have known me for the last couple of decades know that if they reach out, I respond, and I almost always do it within 24 hours.

Jason Wenks
You know, the culture here is that we care deeply and so if we’re in the wrong, you fix it as fast we can and we’re also going to try to respond as quickly as we can, you know, within whatever constraints might exist at that time. As far as you know, like how do you, how do you then prevent these things like, or if someone has ongoing things, how do you, how do you kind of speak to that today? You know, again, this is coming out after that. I would say what’s interesting is, I’m going to say like I’m immune to when things go wrong, but I think it’s like, if you, I’ll give you like a super exaggerated example, right? Like someone like Elon Musk will have a rocket launch go wrong in a $20, 30, $40 million rocket up, right? And he then celebrates this team like, great, now we can learn what caused that rocket to blow up. We can identify a solution to make sure it doesn’t happen again and we’ll test and test and test, right? And obviously not putting payload and not putting humans, like right, like they’re like, you know, nothing that’s actually going to cause, you know, some adverse, you know, some harm to human beings, right? I think, you know, every company that’s building and innovating and trying to invent new ways to do things that are demonstrably better, you for clients, for advisors, you know, and not just the experience, but the outcomes, the results they get. There’s no way to do that without some amount of testing, including when products are live. Like we’re going to have those. And so I knew signing up for building a custodian this was kind of insane. Like what person decides to build a custodian from scratch and also do it B2B. Like we’re the only one who’s ever done it. So it’s N of one, like it’s never ever been done before, just serving RIAs. So you’re gonna take this big market, you’re going to make it a much smaller market, right? So $120 trillion custody market, turn it into a $8 trillion custody market, and then do something novel that’s never been done before. But of course, there’s going to be things that don’t go right.

Jason Wenk
And so you build up a lot of scar tissue to that, like you just accept it, like this is what we signed up for. I’ve written the exact, wording, there was sort of like, think it might be fictitious, but this sort of, you know, fake poster of a, you know, explorer trying to recruit men for a journey, you know, I think across the Atlantic to discover, you know, new lands, Americas, et cetera. But, you know, the job wanted poster said something defective, like, you know, looking for men to go on a journey, like, you know, risk of failure and death is high, know, riches minimal, you know, something that’s fact like. But know, great deal of pride if we happen to accomplish the impossible, right, or something like that, right? That is basically building a company. Like you’re going to do something really hard, like most of us know this fail rate’s extremely high. And so anyway, it’s maybe not quite answering your question, but if I’m an advisor and I’m going, okay, it’s June, I dealt with this, do I have confidence it will happen again? How can I rest assured though, like my students got my back? Yeah, we knew this would be hard. We knew there’d be some amount of risk. We try to minimize it, especially when it impacts clients. That’s the one area that’s so sacred. Ironically, if there is an error, I think the risk of it happening again, is lower than if you’ve never seen the error in the first place. It’s like a security breach at an airport happens one time, that airport goes on lockdown, and nobody’s gonna get whatever device through TSA for the next two years. So I think people should be rooting for people to innovate. They should understand that there’s always some amount of risk. It will never impact a client in a negative way, meaning we’ll always make it right. And it also makes us better for the future state. So the likelihood of us continuing to have really, really high standards, knowing where there was errors, is much, much better, I think, than even places that are working on big monoliths, they’re doing something the same way for 50 years. Their ability to kind of manage change is not very good. Ours is quite high. So long ramble, but hopefully gives you all the context of the questions you’re asking.

Steven Jarvis, CPA
Yeah, I really appreciate that. I had to smile partway through because that poster that you’re referring to is actually on my wall behind my camera here. It says men wanted for hazardous journey, small wages, bitter cold, long months of complete darkness, constant danger, safe return, doubtful honor and recognition in an event of success. And it’s attributed to Ernest Shackleton who to try to take a group across Antarctica and in one respect failed miserably other than that. He brought most of those men back alive. And so it’s a pretty it’s a pretty incredible retelling that story. So that’s why I, so I definitely appreciate where you’re coming from on that. And I really like the comparison to, Elon Musk building rockets, because one of the things that stands out to me as, as you give that example that advisors really should take to heart is that part of the reason, Elon’s able to, to weather that storm and that people don’t think less of him for, for that, particular event is that he knew going in that some of these rockets would blow up and he told people going in, Hey, some of these rockets are going to blow up. And so you kind of commented on it there at the end as well of companies and people, individuals who teams, whoever this is, who will transparently acknowledge, hey, we’re going to learn and sometimes learning is going to be a little bit messy, but we’re going to be better for it. I’ll take that every time over someone who pretends at perfection because perfection doesn’t exist. And the people who pretend it does, those are the ones who concern me. And so when advisors are working with clients on investment, planning, estate planning, tax planning, whatever it might be, being able to articulate to a client, hey, here’s all the things we do to make sure that in the end you’re taking care of, there could be bumps along the way, especially on some of this tax reporting that again, even when the advisor does everything right and the custodian does everything right, sometimes the IRS hasn’t really set up the rules to make this easy for everyone. And this is putting you on the spot just a little bit because we didn’t talk about it ahead of time.

Steven Jarvis, CPA
But just within the last week or two, the IRS released a draft of the next version of the 1099R. They are proposing including distribution code to signify qualified charitable contributions and when this got forwarded to me, the initial kind of response from advisors was great the problem is solved, I said slow down guys this is probably a step in the right direction, but there’s still there’s this game of telephone that’s still going to go on because great now now the custodian has a distribution code that they can mark for this. But did you provide all the right information? Do they have all the right information that we’ve got to understand that adding one box doesn’t magically change all of our tax reporting issues.

Jason Wenk
Yeah, by the way, QCDs have been one of the most highly requested features. Ours is still supported today by forms. It’s one of the few things that we didn’t fully digitize. Largely for that reason because there wasn’t any way to code, okay, if you put something on the front end, basically you type it in, this is what it’s for, here’s where it’s going. There was no way to transfer that knowledge effectively to the tax reporting documents. So we use a downstream vendor that actually prints the statements, sends those out, handles tax reporting. I do think for firms like us, this is a huge win, right? Because we can actually take this and make the knowledge transfer fully seamless. It won’t require any human being essentially taking a document, rekeying that into manually a backend system that is kind of turned into IRS reporting and then documents to clients. So I’m pretty excited about it. I mean, think any innovation that allows for more transparent self-service, which basically means a client wants money to go directly to a church. They want us. it’s a retirement account or otherwise. And they can just have that keyed in, authorized by the client, it creates a full digital audit trail. And then everything is done. To me, that’s the best way to do it because even in a world where you fill out forms, there’s new codes for 1099Rs, there’s still a lot of risk of human error and no real way to prove when something goes right or wrong. Then mistakes happen, advisors begging a CPA to write a letter asking for an exception, can you please waive these penalties, et cetera, et cetera. Nobody wants to do that, right? This is a lot more avoidable if there’s actually an audit trail. So even in our case, when we had some issues in the 2024 reporting, we had a digital audit trail for virtually everything, right? So this will be the same for QCDs, which I’m pretty excited about because it is an area that is heavily used at Altruist. I presume it’s heavily used by all custodians but it’s a big use case here.

Steven Jarvis, CPA
Yeah, it’s like I said, it definitely feels like a huge step in the right direction. I appreciate the context on kind of what some of those limitations were on the back end. I know on the tax preparer side of things, I’m sure it’s just years of grinding out tax returns, but a lot of my CPA peers definitely are pretty cynical about the tax reporting that comes through. And so having that additional context is super helpful to know that, I mean, there are innovations that can keep pushing this forward. We’re not stuck where we’re at. We can’t expect better things come to the future. That’s always exciting to me. Jason, before we wrap up here, and I think we’ll definitely have to do this again sometime and just talk about some of the other exciting things that Altruist is doing. I really appreciate you being willing to just come on and talk about what went on this tax filing season. If you remove it from the situation that you found yourself in and just talk as somebody who’s been in this industry for a couple of decades, someone who’s led teams, has led innovation, what’s your recommendation to advisors, business owners, whoever it might be, when they come across errors? Because it’s when, not if. What’s that mentality? What are those steps that they should take when they need to be accountable for things that go wrong?

Jason Wenk
Sure, I mean think in the end, it’s a pretty simple set of rules and it’s probably applicable to virtually everything, but I think it starts with honesty is the best policy. It’s amazing how many people will try to almost create some strange story or narrative as to why something might have happened and assign blame and pass it on. You know, again, maybe there’s some truth to all of that, but I think like whenever you start to stretch the truth, like you start setting yourself up for a lot of problems. So look, let’s just use the example of it’s a, my client didn’t get their 1099 yet and it’s, you know, late in the January and I’m wondering how much longer I have to wait. You reach out to your custodian, they say, they’re gonna be in the second batch that goes out, whatever, first week of February. So you can mute your client. it’s gonna, those should be coming out in another week. Another week comes and goes, nothing happens, right? The client’s now a little frustrated. Hey, I never got that, I really like, you know, as you probably know, there’s some clients that they really want those tax returns done, like, they want them done right away. They don’t want to wait until April or even March. They want them done, you know, first week of February or something like that. And so, now the advisor goes back, asks, hey, what’s going on here? And like, as long as every party is honest, think like things could happen. It could be like our example of there was a second wave due to a holiday. We actually pushed it out. Our mistake was not communicating that. In our case, by the way, every time we had an issue, it wasn’t super hard for us to find because of the digital nature of what we do. We were able to query our entire kind of base of hundreds of thousands of clients and find every single client impacted and then know exactly who the advisor was, reach out to the advisor, give them a list. Hey, here’s exactly the challenge, here’s exactly who’s impacted. In these type of context, now you can be proactive. You’re not having to do this whole backpedaling reactive thing. You own the mistake. It’s okay to say, my custodian made a mistake. Here’s exactly the answer they gave me. I’ll hold them accountable. It’s part of my job is to choose and ensure that my custodians that I use for my clients are providing best execution, safety of assets, quality, and care. So I’m going to do my job and make this as painless as I possibly can. So I think starting there, general like honesty is best policy like things are going to happen to your point not if just when and when they do don’t try to create some you know narrative that’s just not sustainable and will eventually spin you into a place where you can’t keep track of like where you where you where you misspoke. I think that’s kind of one part. I think the other part too is kind of that proactive component. So, you know, it’s one thing for an error to happen and you’re just waiting for clients to reach out to you and react. It’s much better if you’re just proactive. Hey, we heard of an issue. Our custodian gave us a list of, you know, just a small number of impacted clients, but you have to be one of them. Here’s the consequence. You again, there’s no, I think reassuring people that there’s not going to actually be any negative dollar-based consequence, I think, is probably pretty key, when that’s accurate. And I think doing that then buys you a lot of goodwill for the events that clients do find something and they’re the first to report it. But I think that the productivity is a good part too. And I think the last part is hold people accountable. Whether it’s us or any other custodian, I think the same is true with tax preparers, some cases advisors might give everything that they needed to and get it to the actual CPA or accountant in time. And then it just sits there because they’ve got 12,000 other clients they’ve got to take care of at that time and that’s maybe the cause here. I think like, look, it’s part of the job. I don’t think you can expect to have a ton of success as an advisor if you’re entirely passive. I mean, certainly you can get away with that for some clients, but shame on advisors who that’s how they operate, meaning like least amount of work humanly possible, least amount of value humanly possible, just hope you have lazy complacent clients that are afraid of the kind of inertia of looking for and finding and moving money and so you can just kind of coast by lazily doing nothing, right? Like sadly, there are a lot of people that operate that way.

Jason Wenk
It’s not the right way to operate. so, you know, that third part, which is just holding people accountable, it is part of the job, you know, and, and of course, if somebody repeatedly as a repeat offender, they keep messing up over and over again, then look, they’ve, they’ve lost your trust. They don’t deserve to probably have your business anymore. You know, and this is, think like some simple rules. So that’d be my, my kind of three-part framework. Yeah. How do do it? If you, if you’re always coming from a place of sincere, desire to help people. It’s amazing how forgiving people are. I’ve been doing this for a long time, clients, serve advisors, build software and operate custodian. Obviously I’ve made tons of mistakes, but in earnest, I think everyone that I’ve ever worked with knows that my heart’s in the right place, I care deeply, I don’t mail it in, I work way more hours than a human should work because I care so much about delivering high quality outcomes to people. And for those reasons, get a lot of grace. If you’re lazy, then you deserve very little grace. If you’re greedy, you deserve very little grace. But I think when people know that you’re out there really trying to make a good impact, this is including as a practitioner or a financial planner, kind like your clients are unusually forgiving you know because they know you care. So I hope that helps.

Steven Jarvis, CPA
Absolutely, really appreciate that Jason just just to recap that because that was a great framework. Honestly is the best policy. I’m not sure how anybody could argue with that making sure that you’re being proactive I see that have an impact every single time In taxes in general whether a mistake is made or not that when you get ahead of it and you’re letting somebody know before they’ve discovered what they feel like is an error whether it is or not It changes the client experience and then that last piece is important too of holding people accountable that we want to work with people who are willing to take responsibility and improve but if that if it becomes a cycle it becomes something that’s not changing over time. You owe it to your clients to say, okay, it’s time to do the work to find a new partner in this area. So Jason, really appreciate your time. Really appreciate you being willing to come on and transparently talk about these things. We’ll definitely have to do this again and get into some more of the exciting things that Altruist has in store for the future. Just real quick, let people know how they can follow along with what you’re doing.

Jason Wenk
Yeah, mean, we do to find altruist.com is going to keep track of the company. And then, you know, I spend probably more time on LinkedIn than, you know, than Twitter these days, or Axis as it says now, but pretty easy to find there. Just JasonWink and, you know, at JasonWink on pretty much every social platform. But you won’t find me in many places. I’m not on TikTok. I’m not on YouTube. You know, I’m just kind of a monoline thinker these days, but awesome to be on. I really appreciate the work you do for the industry and given that chance to come on and chat with your listeners.

Steven Jarvis, CPA
Absolutely, and to everyone listening until next time good luck out there and remember to tip your serve,r not the IRS.