Deep in the heart of busy season, probably the last thing on your mind is feeling empathy for your clients when they’ve been procrastinating and are so disorganized. But in an increasingly competitive business climate, if you’re not able to make a true connection with your clients, they could easily move to a more empathetic firm, even one lacking your experience and technical acumen.

The word “empathy” gets thrown around a lot these days, but quite simply empathy is the ability to see the world through someone else’s eyes, to walk in their shoes and to understand their emotions and connect with them on a deeper level — without judgement. When you do that, clients will feel like they are the most important person in your life. Don’t underestimate the power of empathy.

Taking it a step further, “financial empathy” is about understanding and recognizing the emotional impact that money issues have on someone’s life. It’s about understanding the story beneath the numbers. It’s about acknowledging that money problems can be incredibly stressful and anxiety-provoking for clients, which affects their overall sense of wellbeing. 

While financial empathy isn’t covered in most accounting curricula or CPE courses, high-performing CPAs are increasingly incorporating into their practices. Dr. Michael Thomas, a former auditor with a degree in accounting, now an author, TEDx speaker, and financial planning educator at the University of Georgia, told me on my podcast thatFinancial empathy incorporates the three elements of empathy: 1. Cognitive empathy;2. Affective empathy (i.e., emotional empathy); and,

3. Compassionate empathy. The goal, he said, is to move through understanding and emotional connection to reach a compassionate response.

Real-world example

David, a newly divorced business owner, was filing taxes alone for the first time as a single. His ex-wife had always handled their finances, leaving him overwhelmed by investment losses, business deductions, and estimated tax payments.

David’s conversation with his CPA began with: “I messed up, I should have known.” Using cognitive empathy, his accountant reassured him that many business owners face similar challenges, and he explained David’s tax situation in simple terms. With affective empathy (i.e., feeling the same emotion that another person is feeling), his CPA created a safe space for questions, validating David’s concerns without judgment. Through compassionate empathy, the CPA helped David create a tax plan that he fully understood. It was the first step in a holistic financial plan, giving the client peace of mind and a path toward financial stability.

By replacing shame with understanding, the CPA empowered David to take control of both his personal and business finances.

Benefits of being an empathetic CPA

• It helps you move clients away from financial shame toward vulnerability and openness.
• It enables clients to share complete information needed for effective financial planning.
• It builds lasting trust and long-term relationships.
• It creates mutual growth for both advisor and client.
• It allows money to serve as a conduit to a client’s authentic goals and joy.

Implementing financial empathy in your practice

• Financial empathy involves active listening beyond just hearing words —- understanding the interaction of communication and emotion.
• Financial empathy requires advisors, including CPAs, to self-regulate their own emotional responses while engaging with clients.
• Financial empathy slows down the process so you can hear clients’ needs more effectively.

“As advisors, we get so excited when we use our technical skills to solve a client’s problem, but clients don’t always see it that way” if it’s just numbers, formulas and regulations, Dr. Thomas noted. “Financial empathy is going through the process of understanding the emotional experience, so the client feels seen and feels heard,” he added. 

Thomas said that’s when the NURSE algorithm can be very impactful for accountants and other financial advisors: Name the thing. Understand it. Respect the experience. Support the individual. Explore solutions collaboratively with your client.

Let’s look at how the NURSE framework can help a business owner like David whom we met above:

• Name the thing. Acknowledge his feelings of overwhelm, uncertainty and difficulties of divorce. “David, it sounds like you are feeling overwhelmed and uncertain about your finances.”
• Understand it. Take the time to listen to your client’s concerns, their fear of making mistakes, confusion over investment losses, and anxiety about taxes, before offering solutions: “David, many people in your position feel the same way. Walk us through the situation and let us know what’s on your mind.”
• Respect the experience. Rather than focusing solely on technical fixes, recognize the emotional weight David feels about managing finances post-divorce. Often this is where advisors go immediately into problem-solving mode. Instead, take time to acknowledge your client’s feelings, before getting into the facts. “You’ve had a lot on your plate, David. Handling this alone for the first time is a big adjustment.”
• Support the individual. Create a safe, judgment-free space where your client feels comfortable asking questions, ensuring they fully understand their new tax obligations and how those obligations fit into their business operations: “David, you don’t need to have it all figured out today. That’s what we’re here for. We can break it down one step at a time.”
• Explore solutions collaboratively. Instead of simply prescribing a planning strategy, work with your client to develop a tax plan collaboratively — a plan they understand and feel confident implementing: “David, we’ve made great progress today, and now you have clear next steps for both your business and personal finances. This should give you a path toward greater peace of mind and financial confidence.”

By integrating financial empathy with structured guidance, David’s CPA helped him replace stress with confidence, ensuring he felt both clarity and control over his personal and business finances.

Still not convinced? Well, according to Dr. Thomas, there are four main risks for accountants and financial advisors who don’t develop their empathy skills and overall soft skills:

1. “Pseudo-empathetic response.” This is when advisors default to technical expertise when emotionally challenged.
2. Reverting to sympathy (“feeling bad that you feel bad”) rather than true empathy.
3. Forgetting that while you may be comfortable with numbers, clients may have an aversion to numbers and advanced math.
4. Rushing to solutions without understanding emotional context. That’s the evil Advice Monster at work.

As Dr. Thomas explained, all humans understand basic emotions like fear, even if contexts differ. Clients won’t share vulnerability unless they feel seen and heard. The empathy process can change you as much as the client. Technical solutions should not be delivered with emotional awareness.

Financial empathy isn’t about being overly emotional or sacrificing technical expertise; it’s about creating a framework for more effective client relationships. That’s why I originated the Advis-ROR methodology (Return on Relationships).  After all, isn’t that why you are your clients’ most trusted advisor?

CohnReznick is planning to expand after becoming the latest major firm to receive a private equity investment, through funds advised by Apax Partners.

The deal with Apax was announced late last month and will cause the New York-based Top 25 Firm to set up an alternative practice structure, splitting the attest and non-attest sides, as has become common with PE-related deals. Once the transaction closes, CohnReznick CEO David Kessler will be CEO of CohnReznick Advisory LLC, on the non-attest side, while assurance partner Kelly O’Callaghan will become CEO of CohnReznick LLP, the attest business. 

The amount of the investment was undisclosed. The funds advised by Apax, alongside with an independent co-investor, will collectively own a 51% stake in the non-attest business. 

“We’ve had discussions in the private equity arena for a couple of years now, and we made the decision over this past summer that this was the right path for us, and we ventured down the process,” Kessler told Accounting Today. “Apax was very aligned with our management strategy, and we feel it’s going to have an impact on our growth in the future, and we’re looking forward to partnering with them.”

He believes the deal will add more capabilities for the firm to expand geographically in its existing areas as well as new territory. “We’re very heavy in the Northeast and the Mid-Atlantic, and we want to expand in the Southeast, Midwest and West Coast,” said Kessler. “We have a good presence right now in the Southeast, in the Midwest and on the West Coast, but we think this is an opportunity to expand our footprint and then also to really bring in advisory firms that we feel are compatible to the industries and clients that we serve, so we’re looking at this as an opportunity to really accelerate our growth.”

Both Apax and CohnReznick representatives will be on the board of the advisory entity, but only CohnReznick partners will be on the board of the attest business. “All of our partners will be partners in the advisory entity, along with Apax funds, and only our attest partners will be partners in the attest entity,” said Kessler.

The firm had been approached by a number of PE suitors in recent years. “We’ve probably spoken with a dozen to two dozen private equity funds over the past three years,” said Kessler. “We’ve been trying to educate ourselves on the benefits in the alternative practice structure and the model and what it would be for our staff and our clients and our partners. We spent a lot of time with a lot of different private equity funds looking into what a potential partnership could look like.”

While he and other partners liked many of the PE firms they spoke with, he said one of the things that stood out about Apax was its culture. “We really liked how they took the time to understand us and our history and how we got to this point in our vision and our strategy growing in the future, and we felt like we were aligned on the growth strategy,” said Kessler. “And we liked the fact that they did their homework on us. I think we gained a mutual respect for each other.”

O’Callghan agrees. “Partnering with Apax, they really did believe in our growth strategy, our culture, which we think is very special and important, as well as our talent and the people that we have now,” she said.

The firm has approximately 350 partners and 5,000 global employees, including 4,000 people in the U.S., and approximately 1,000 in India and the Philippines. CohnReznick has been able to double in size in the last five years, largely organically, while also doing some strategic acquisitions in key locations, Kessler noted. He would like to enhance the pace of acquisitions and the technology used by the firm internally and for clients. Partnering with a PE fund will help accelerate the firm’s ability to advance the tech projects that are already in the works over the finish line. 

O’Callaghan predicts the deal will create greater opportunities for the firm’s people as well as create opportunities with a larger platform for their career advancement. She has been the service line leader for assurance of the firm’s largest region, the Northeast, and also the partner in charge of its relationship with the AICPA for years. She has worked at the firm for 25 years, and Kessler for 39 years.

“When I started, we had two offices, so we were able to grow from two offices to 29 and $1.1 billion in revenue, and we think this will be the next acceleration,” said Kessler.

The deal was valued at $2 billion, according to The Wall Street Journal, but Kessler would neither confirm nor deny that figure.

CohnReznick plans to use the extra funds to expand its audit and tax practice as well as HIPAA advisory, client accounting services, performance improvement and transaction advisory services, and more. 

“We’re looking to enhance all the existing areas that we’re in and always identifying new areas to grow into, but we’ll continue to evolve as we always have,” said Kessler. “But the advisory practices that we currently are involved with are seeing a lot of traction, and we plan to enhance those services.” 

One area where CohnReznick has been seeing growth is public and private partnerships to help build infrastructure like airports, train stations and highways. In 2022, the firm helped monitor redevelopment of New York’s JFK Airport.

“We’ve done some work with the airports,” said Kessler. “We’ve done some work with Union Station in Washington, D.C. train and California highways, so we have a good project finance group. We do a lot of work with financial modeling, and infrastructure is one of the areas that they focus on, as well as all real estate credit incentives.”

Emergency management may be another area with the rise in natural disasters. “I think there’s a lot of opportunity across every single state, and one of the areas we focus on is emergency management and doing project management of large financial distributions that states are responsible for,” said Kessler,

Audit and attest service expansion will probably depend on the uncertain regulatory environment. 

“Right now, I see us focused on our core assurance practice,” said O’Callaghan. “If there’s new opportunities that present themselves through the regulatory environment, then we would absolutely entertain those potential opportunities, but that’s really driven by regulators.”

The new Trump administration is likely to pursue fewer regulations on auditors and accountants, but the changes are hard to predict. 

“I think we’re still vetting out what those changes are going to be,” said O’Callaghan. “It’s been almost two months now with the new administration, so we’ll have to see. Things are moving quickly, but we’ll have to see where everything falls out at the end.”

They’re both hopeful about the prospects for the firm and the overall accounting profession. “We think this is an exciting time for our profession,” said Kessler. “We’ve been in this business for a long time, and our partners have been in this business for a long time. It’s just an exciting time for our profession when you have institutional capital, and particularly private equity funds that are smart and are investing in the profession. They’re investing in the growth and the quality of the profession, and it’s just exciting to be a part of it. It really feels like we’re at a precipice to advance how we serve our clients, and it’s just an exciting time to be a CPA.”

House Republicans announced a spending bill to keep government agencies open through Sept. 30, daring Democrats to vote against it and risk a disruptive March 15 shutdown.

The move tees up a dramatic confrontation on Capitol Hill next week and threatens to further fuel uncertainty for a federal workforce roiled by swift and aggressive cuts made by billionaire Elon Musk. 

Speaker Mike Johnson will attempt to hold the fractious Republican majority together and muscle the 99-page bill through the House on Tuesday, likely without help from Democrats. But the bill would still need the help of moderate Democrats in the Senate, where the legislation would stall without 60 votes. 

Neither party, however, has shown an appetite for a shutdown. If the bill fails in either chamber, Congress is likely to pass a temporary bill to buy additional time to forge a compromise that has eluded lawmakers since the fiscal year began in October.  

President Donald Trump called on Republican lawmakers to pass the bill next week, warning them to allow “NO DISSENT” in their ranks.  

“I am asking you all to give us a few months to get us through to September so we can continue to put the Country’s ‘financial house’ in order,” Trump said on his Truth Social network.

Democrats have tried to leverage the spending bill to put constraints on Musk and his so-called Department of Government Efficiency. Republicans, who hold the majority in both chambers, have resisted. The stopgap bill was crafted in consultation with the White House. 

The stopgap bill would allow the Trump administration “to continue the DOGE efforts finding all these extraordinary levels of savings, and waste, fraud and abuse,” Johnson told Fox News on Friday. “We’ll be able to incorporate that into the budgeting for FY 26 which will start almost immediately after we’re done next week.”

Representative Rosa DeLauro, the top Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee, said she opposed the bill because it would allow Musk to continue making cuts, overriding the will of Congress.

“By essentially closing the book on negotiations for full-year funding bills that help the middle class and protect our national security, my colleagues on the other side of the aisle have handed their power to an unelected billionaire,” she said in a statement.

The bill would slightly decrease overall discretionary spending through the end of the fiscal year on Sept. 30. The bill, Trump signaled in remarks earlier this week, paves the way for his more sweeping legislative priorities: a proposed $4.5 trillion tax cut over the next decade paired with $2 trillion in spending cuts aimed at entitlement programs.

“Conservatives will love this Bill because it sets us up to cut Taxes and Spending in reconciliation, all while effectively FREEZING Spending this year,” Trump said on Truth Social Wednesday as the bill was being drafted. “Let’s get this Bill done.”

South Carolina Republican Senator Lindsey Graham said on Fox News Sunday that while he didn’t want the government to shut down, the bill “is terrible on defense and the border. I want to commit what we’re going to have more money for border and defense before I vote for” it. 

The vote will test whether Johnson and Trump can wrangle GOP conservatives who have never voted for a stopgap funding measure. Conservative hard-liners have pledged to seek deep, permanent cuts to federal agencies in fiscal 2026 once Musk’s cost-cutting crusade is complete. 

The GOP cannot afford much opposition, given the narrow House majority. Already conservative Thomas Massie of Kentucky, who opposes stopgap bills without automatic spending cuts, has said he will vote against it. The bill contains new funding to boost immigration enforcement that the White House requested. 

The bill extends a host of expiring health programs from April 1 to Sept. 30, including Medicare coverage of telehealth consultations with doctors and funding for community health centers.

Republican leaders have already wooed defense hawks in the party worried about a freeze on Pentagon spending. They’re planning to use a separate GOP-only tax cut package to add $100 billion in military spending.  

The stopgap bill would boost defense spending by $6 billion while cutting non-defense spending by $13 billion relative to current levels, resulting in an overall spending cut, according to a House Republican leader’s aide. It contains no lawmaker pet projects known as earmarks. 

Part of the defense boost goes toward a pay increase for military troops authorized by Congress last year. 

The bill goes into detail on which weapons systems account should be newly funded. Top Senate Republican appropriator Susan Collins told reporters she doesn’t support giving the Pentagon a blank check to decide which contracts to initiate.

Armed Services Chairman Mike Rogers and other hawks also secured flexibility for the Pentagon in the bill to boost the military’s ability to make new weapons purchases, which would typically not be allowed under a continuing resolution. 

The bill would grant the Pentagon the ability to transfer money into new accounts. The flexibility could allow for spending on new Virginia-class submarines and ships built by General Dynamics Corp.’s Electric Boat and HII’s Newport News Shipbuilding.

Democrats are lining up to oppose the stopgap measure because it would freeze spending. The bill would also claw back $20.2 billion in spending for the Internal Revenue Service passed as part of President Joe Biden’s signature green-energy Inflation Reduction Act. Democrats say that is a poison pill that they cannot support because it would boost tax cheating by the wealthy. 

Democrats said a spending freeze effectively cuts crucial benefits.

House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries said in a letter the Republican measure “threatens to cut funding for health care, nutritional assistance and veterans benefits through the end of the current fiscal year. That is not acceptable.” 

The minority party prefers a short-term bill to avoid a shutdown at the end of next week in order to allow talks to continue on detailed appropriations bills allowing 1% growth to defense and non-defense spending. The stopgap bill is below 1% spending cap increases approved in a bipartisan 2023 bill. 

A House Republican aide said the bill has increases for veterans benefits, housing assistance and fully funds food assistance for women and children.