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Cryptocurrency CPAs race to prepare clients for end of universal wallet accounting from IRS rule change

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Accountants in the cryptocurrency arena have been busy preparing their clients for what they characterize as a seismic shift in digital asset reporting before the safe harbor provision ends in January. 

IRS Revenue Procedure 2024-28, released in June, effectively ends the longstanding practice of “universal wallet” reporting, where people could account for their digital assets, especially cryptocurrency, as a combined pool. Under the new rules, which go into effect at the beginning of next year, people will now need to report their holdings on an account-by-account basis. Zach Gordon, founder of cryptocurrency accounting firm Red Five, called the change “monumental.” 

“You’re talking about going from the universal wallet concept–which is imperfect without a doubt but something we can handle today–to what is, in essence, specific IDs, where every wallet needs to be treated as its own universe for tax purposes. This is a huge change, and considering how a lot of these reporting infrastructures, even on the transactional level, were built out, it’s not ideal,” he said.

Crypto tax

To illustrate, according to Gordon, consider an entity that runs a trading algorithm with many microtransactions, hundreds or even thousands per day and possibly millions per year. Accountants will need to capture all of those transactions, trace their paths through specific wallets, and identify what is and is not taxable through it all, which theoretically can be a very time consuming process. 

The degree of ease or difficulty of helping a client through this, said Gordon, comes down largely to their overall due diligence or “wallet hygiene,” which could best be thought of as maintaining certain habits to security, privacy and effectiveness of one’s accounts. This could include tracking things like which wallets serve which purpose, which assets are held in those wallets, who has custody of them and who controls them. While these things are often on a public blockchain, and so technically auditable, it won’t always be easy. 

Pat Camuso, founder of digital asset-focused accounting firm Camuso CPA, noted that assisting clients through this change is basically a matter of tracking and tracing assets through identifying the relevant data and drilling down at the transaction level on an asset-by-asset basis. This allows them to track the flow of funds so as to, ultimately, map the client’s accounts, everything in them, and what assets are inbound and outbound. He said it’s kind of like being a forensic accountant. 

“It takes a lot of digging, a lot of piecing together, just a tangled mess of a puzzle every time. And now this revenue procedure requires that whole tangled mess to be accurate,” he said, noting that today most just try to determine gains or losses and move on. 

If someone has already been practicing proper wallet hygiene, these engagements won’t be that difficult to get through. Unfortunately, many do not. For instance, both Gordon and Camuso noted that it’s not just possible but common for people to literally forget about a wallet and lose track of just how many they have. 

“I was just looking at an account from before, we’ve been doing their accounting since 2017, and there was a painful reconciliation process that covered maybe 12-13 wallets they didn’t tell us about, and several exchanges as well,” he said. 

Because the new rules increase complexity, the engagements will become more complex, which means they will take longer and cost more. But given the difficulty of navigating the labyrinth of assets held by some clients, Camuso said there’s not much other choice. 

“[You’ll need to be] going asset by asset, down a whole list, and ensuring that everything is allocated right. You may have 25 lots of Ethereum and now we have to snapshot your wallets and allocate them appropriately to each wallet, so with that level of complication, yes, that will increase fees,” he said. As for ongoing maintenance, “it has always been that tangled mess and fees have always reflected that as a result, because there is no way around that.”

Gordon, from Red Five, noted that even just scoping these engagements out have become a little more challenging—while many CPAs are moving away from the billable hour, he said it can sometimes be a struggle to determine a fair estimate for this work. However, he said he is less concerned about the economics of the matter than he is about the timing, as there’s a lot to do and not much more time to do it. 

“It seems like everything takes way longer. There’s way more stuff to do and the deeper you get the more challenging it gets to come up with the right answer. It depends on the platform. There’s the large institutional ones, and they’re going to be okay, they will figure out a way to make sure we’re ramped up and ready to go, but there’s some of the newer [blockchains] out there, the newer platforms are working hard but these standards are very hard to maintain,” he said. 

Camuso added that many of the accounting solutions used for cryptocurrency have been coded with the universal wallet methodology in mind, and many of them have not yet adjusted to the new rules, with a few exceptions. 

Ledgible, a cryptocurrency solutions provider, is one. CEO Kell Canty noted that users have always been able to select either a universal wallet or account-by-account approach, meaning that the only real change that had to happen was disabling the former option. Making the shift, though, may not necessarily be as easy as clicking a button. Canty said that the difficulty and complexity of the operation depends entirely on the user, there is no one size fits all. Some have exhaustive books and records and rules on how they document and approach allocations, and so won’t have much difficulty; others are a little less fastidious, and so may have a more difficult time. 

Canty added that another major challenge is that there are a lot of people, some of whom may not be as sophisticated as others, who either know very little about the change or don’t even know about it at all. Something as big as this, he said, you’d think they’d be more aware, but many don’t really think much about taxes and how they’re calculated until around April or October. It’s been a tumultuous year and people’s attention is being pulled in a lot of direction, he said, and this is a very intricate and complex change, so those who aren’t professionals won’t necessarily know to look into the implications of this. 

“It will be an education process. Not just among our own users but universally for the [professionals] and platforms to educate what it will mean on a going forward basis and how the safe harbor only exists up until January 1,” he said. 

As for Ledgible itself, he said they’re gearing up for customer service because they think they will soon be getting a lot of requests from users who suddenly become aware of the change. He noted this is more complex for the average used, and what’s more they’ll have to learn about it in a compressed timeframe, which he said might cause more confusion. Ledgible is also planning for an information campaign to help users understand what is happening and why. 

“It’s a little difficult to get casual users interested in the intricacies of tax regulations, but we will try,” he said. 

Compounding the challenge is the fact that while the shift from universal wallet to account-by-account reporting is the most prominent new rule, it’s not the only one. Another big change is first-in-first-out now becoming the default methodology. For years, many cryptocurrency holders preferred a highest-in-first-out methodology, which tended to produce better tax outcomes. Switching to a FIFO default methodology could have tax consequences for those who have meticulously structured their assets the other way, said Gordon. But he added that this will be a difficult thing for the IRS to enforce and wondered whether it might later permit other methodologies like last-in-first-out. 

“If you’ve been around this industry long enough, you know that enforcing something like this is challenging because you’re dealing with a lot of unique transactions … For certain groups or individuals, LIFO might make more sense for those who are very detail oriented while specific identification might make more sense [in others],” he said. “FIFO being the law of the land is potentially a big deal and I can see there being pushback from those who are trying to file compliantly, and at the same time there are also potential tax consequences as well.” 

Camuso noted that this will also require users with multiple wallets to be more meticulous in how they structure their assets. 

“Now in 2025 they’re creating a scenario where you can’t just plug your transactions in and pick the highest cost and call it a day–you must manage funds appropriately and flow of funds must match capital gains calculations. … It is to eliminate this idea of cherry picking the highest cost basis,” he said.  

When asked about the best practices they’ve found in helping clients through this situation, both Camuso and Gordon had similar advice: maintaining accurate records, both on the part of the client and the firm. Camuso noted that making sure the calculations are accurate up to that point is really half the battle, if this is covered then the allocations will not be very complex. Meanwhile, Gordon said it’s vital to understand all the wallets involved, what transitions are related to each of them, and making sure records are updated regularly. Preparation, overall, is key. Of course, this might be a tall order in October. Stil, Camuso said it’s important to make clients aware of this and to impress upon them it’s much better to do this before the Jan. 1 deadline. 

“To the degree that someone does not follow up with me before Jan. 1, the big thing is that deadline. It’s not even Jan. 15, it’s Jan. 1. If someone is lackadaisical and overlooks that, it won’t be a good sign. Then there becomes the question of what we will do next year,” he said. 

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Accounting

Tax Fraud Blotter: Big plans

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What becomes of the broken-hearted; the earth moved; Kreative accounting; and other highlights of recent tax cases.

Providence, Rhode Island: Four Florida residents have been convicted and sentenced for what authorities called one of the largest schemes to defraud CARES Act programs.

The defendants defrauded various federally funded programs of more than $4.8 million, and each of the defendants pleaded guilty to charges of conspiracy to commit wire fraud and aggravated identity theft. The schemes involved obtaining and using stolen ID information to submit fraudulent applications to multiple state unemployment agencies, including the Rhode Island Department of Labor and Training, and to submit fraudulent Economic Injury Disaster Loans and Paycheck Protection Program loan applications. The defendants also submitted fraudulent applications in the names of other persons to federal and state agencies to obtain tax refunds, stimulus payments, and disaster relief funds and loans.

The scheme involved using the stolen information to open bank accounts to receive, deposit and transfer fraudulently obtained government benefits and payments and to obtain debit cards to withdraw the money.

Sentenced were Florida residents Tony Mertile, of Miramar, identified in court documents as the leader of the conspiracy, to six years in prison; Junior Mertile, of Pembroke Pines, sentenced to 54 months; Allen Bien-Aime, of Lehigh Acres, to four years; and James Legerme, of Sunrise, to four years. All four were also sentenced to three years of supervised release to follow their prison terms.

The government moved to forfeit a total of $4,857,191, or $1,214,294.75 apiece, proceeds of the conspiracy. The defendants have also forfeited hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of Rolex watches and assorted jewelry and more than $1.1 million in cash. Each defendant is also liable for $4,456,927.36 in restitution to defrauded agencies and financial intuitions.

Raleigh, North Carolina: Michon Griffin, 46, who engaged as a money mule (a.k.a. middleman) in an international romance scheme, has been sentenced to two years in prison and three years of supervised release after pleading guilty to conspiracy to commit money laundering and to making false statements on her 1040.

Between 2021 to 2023, Griffin received more than $2 million from the scheme that she deposited into fictitious bank accounts that she controlled. She converted the money to virtual currency and wired the funds to overseas accounts controlled by her co-conspirators in Nigeria.

Griffin received some $300,000 from the romance fraud, which she did not report as income on her 1040 for 2021.

She was also ordered to pay $109,119 in restitution to the IRS.

Las Vegas: Tax preparer Keisy Altagracia Sosa has pleaded guilty to preparing false income tax returns.

Sosa has operated the tax prep business National Tax Service, and from 2016 to 2021 prepared and filed false federal returns for clients. These returns included falsely claimed dependents, and fictitious Schedule A and Schedule C expenses such as sales taxes paid and unreimbursed employee expenses.

Sosa continued to prepare false returns even after the IRS notified her that her returns appeared inaccurate and informed her that she may not be meeting due diligence requirements. 

Sosa caused at least $550,000 in tax loss to the IRS.

Sentencing is June 11. She faces up to three years in prison, as well as a period of supervised release and monetary penalties. 

Hands-in-jail-Blotter

Elk Mound, Wisconsin: Business owner Deena M. Hintz, of Eau Claire, Wisconsin, has been sentenced to a year in prison for failure to pay employment taxes.

Hintz, who pleaded guilty in December, owned and operated Jade Excavation and Trucking for nearly 10 years and at times had up to 15 employees. From 2017 to 2021, Hintz deducted more than $400,000 in federal employment taxes from employees’ pay and, instead of paying those taxes to the government, kept the money.

She was also ordered to pay $482,185.46 in restitution.

Littleton, Colorado: Tax preparer Thuan Bui, 60, has been sentenced to three years in prison and a year of supervised release and ordered to pay a $50,000 fine after pleading guilty to one count of aiding or assisting in preparation of false documents.

From about 2016 to 2021, Bui operated a tax prep business under several names, lying to clients that he was a CPA. On hundreds of returns, Bui overstated or fabricated expenses on Schedules C.

Philadelphia: Resident Joseph LaForte has been sentenced to 15 and a half years in prison for defrauding investors, conspiring to defraud the IRS, filing false tax returns, employment tax fraud, wire fraud, obstruction and other charges.

LaForte defrauded investors using a fraudulent investment vehicle known as Par Funding. Along with conspirators, he caused a loss to investors of more than $288 million.

He and conspirators diverted some $20 million in taxable income from Par Funding to another entity controlled by LaForte and nominally owned by another, then filed returns that did not report this income; he also received more than $9 million in kickbacks from a customer of Par Funding and did not report this income to the IRS. He paid off-the-books, cash wages to some employees, failing to report these wages to the IRS and not paying employment taxes.

The federal tax loss exceeds $8 million. He also caused $1.6 million in state tax loss to the Pennsylvania Department of Revenue by falsely reporting that he and his wife were residents of Florida from 2013 through 2019 when they lived in Pennsylvania.

Hampton Roads, Virginia: Two area residents have pleaded guilty to their roles in a refund scheme involving pandemic relief credits.

Between October 2022 and May 2023, Kendra Michelle Eley of Norfolk, Virginia, filed eight 941s for Kreative Designs by Kendra LLC using the EIN assigned to another company, Kendra Cleans Maid Service. These forms covered four tax periods in 2020 and four in 2021. On each of the forms, Eley falsely reported wages paid and federal tax withholdings for 18 purported employees, knowing there were no such employees.

For the four forms filed for 2021, Eley claimed false sick and family leave credits and Employee Retention Credits, totaling some $975,000. In December 2022, the IRS issued two refund checks payable to the cleaning company totaling $649,050.

That same month, Eley and Rejohn Isaiah Whitehead, of Portsmouth, Virginia, opened a business checking account in the name of Kendra Cleans; signatories on the account were Eley and Whitehead. The two falsely represented the nature and extent of the business, including that it had 16 employees and that the average pay of each was $2,000. Eley funded the account by depositing one of the refund checks in the amount of $389,640. In January 2023, Eley wrote Whitehead two checks from the account totaling $60,000.

Whitehead’s sentencing is June 26 and Eley’s is July 9. They each face up to 10 years in prison.

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Accountants tackle tariff increases after ‘Liberation Day’

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President Trump’s imposition of steep tariffs on countries around the world is likely to drive demand for accounting experts and consultants to help companies adjust and forecast the ever-changing percentages and terms.

On April 2, which Trump dubbed “Liberation Day,” he announced a raft of reciprocal tariffs of varying percentages on trading partners across the globe and signed an executive order to put the import taxes into effect. Finance executives have been gaming out how to respond to the potential tariffs that Trump has been threatening to impose since before he was re-elected, far exceeding those he actually levied during his first term.

“A lot of CFOs are thinking they are going to pass along the tariffs to their customer base, and about another half are thinking we’re going to absorb it and be more creative in other ways we can save money inside our company,” said Tom Hood, executive vice president for business engagement and growth at the AICPA & CIMA. 

The AICPA & CIMA’s most recent quarterly economic outlook survey in early March polled a group of business executives who are also CPAs and found that 85% said tariffs were creating uncertainty in their business plans, while 14% of the business execs saw potential positive impacts for their business from the prospect of tariffs as increased cost of competing products would benefit them, and 59% saw potential negative impacts to their businesses from the prospect of tariffs. This in turn has led to a dimming outlook on the economy among the executives polled.

“CFOs in our community are telling us that, effectively, they’re looking at this a lot like what happened over COVID with a big disruption out of nowhere,” said Hood. “This one, they could see it coming. But the point is they had to immediately pivot into forecasting and projection with basically forward-looking financial analysis to help their companies, CEOs, etc., plan for what could be coming next. This is true for firms who are advising clients. They might be hired to do the planning in an outsourced way, if the company doesn’t have the finance talent inside to do that.”

The tariffs are not set in stone, and other countries are likely to continue to negotiate them with the U.S., as Canada and Mexico have been doing in recent months.

“The one thing that I think we can all count on is a certain amount of uncertainty in this process, at least for the next several months,” said Charles Clevenger, a principal at UHY Consulting who specializes in supply chain and procurement strategy. “It’s hard to tell if it’s going to go beyond that or not, but it certainly feels that way.”

Accountants will need to make sure their companies and clients stay compliant with whatever conditions are imposed by the U.S. and its trading partners. “This is a more complex tariff environment than most companies have experienced in the past, or that seems to be where we’re headed, and so ensuring compliance is really important,” said Clevenger.

Big Four firms are advising caution among their clients.

“Our point of view is we’re advising all of our clients to do a few things right out of the gate,” said Martin Fiore, EY Americas deputy vice chair of tax, during a webinar Thursday. “Model and analyze the trade flows. Look at your supply chain structures. Understand those and execute scenario planning on supply chain structures that could evolve in new environments. That is really important: the ability for companies to address the questions they’re getting from their C-suite, from their stakeholders, is critical. Every company is in a different spot according to the discussions we’ve had. We just are really emphasizing, with all the uncertainty, know your structure, know your position, have modeling put in place, so as we go through the next rounds of discussions over many months, you have an understanding of your structure.”

Scenario planning will be especially important amid all the unpredictability for companies large and small. “They’re going to be looking at all the different countries they might have supply chains in,” said Hood. “And then even the smaller midsized companies that might not be big, giant global companies, they might be supplying things to a big global company, and if they’re in part of that supply chain, they’ll be impacted through this whole cycle as well.”

Accountants will have to factor the extra tariffs and import taxes into their costs and help their clients decide whether to pass on the costs to customers, while also keeping an eye out for pricing among their competitors and suppliers.

“It’s just like accounting for any goods that you’re purchasing,” said Hood. “They often have tariffs and taxes built into them at different levels. I think the difference is these could be bigger and they could be more uncertain, because we’re not even sure they’re going to stick until you see the response by the other countries and the way this is absorbed through the market. I think we’re going through this period of deeper uncertainty. Even though they’re announced, we know that the administration has a tendency to negotiate, so I’m sure we’re going to see this thing evolve, probably in the next 30 days or whatever. The other thing our CFOs are reminding us of is that the stock market is not the economy.”

Amid the market fluctuations, companies and their accountants will need to watch closely as the rules and tariff rates fluctuate and ensure they are complying with the trading rules. “Do we have country of origin specified properly?” said Clevenger. “Are we completing the right paperwork? When there are questions, are we being responsive? Are we close to our broker? Are we monitoring our customs entries and all the basic things that we need to do? That’s more important now than it has been in the past because of this increase in complexity.”

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How to use opportunity zone tax credits in the ‘Heartland’

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A tax credit for investments in low-income areas could spur long-term job creation in overlooked parts of the country — with the right changes to its rules, according to a new book.

The capital gains deferral and exclusions available through the “opportunity zones” credit represent one of the few areas of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 that drew support from both Republicans and Democrats. The impact of the credit, though, has proven murky in terms of boosting jobs and economic growth in the roughly 7,800 Census tracts qualifying based on their rates of poverty or median family incomes. 

Altering the criteria to focus the investments on “less traditional real estate and more innovation infrastructure” and ensuring they reach more places outside of New York and California could “refine the where and the what” of the credit, said Nicholas Lalla, the author of “Reinventing the Heartland: How One City’s Inclusive Approach to Innovation and Growth Can Revive the American Dream” (Harper Horizon). A senior fellow at an economic think tank called Heartland Forward and the founder of Tulsa Innovation Labs, Lalla launched the book last month. For financial advisors and their clients, the key takeaway from the book stems from “taking a civic minded view of investment” in untapped markets across the country, he said in an interview.

“I don’t want to sound naive. I know that investors leveraging opportunity zones want to make money and reduce their tax liability, but I would encourage them to do a few additional things,” Lalla said. “There are communities that need investment, that need regional and national partners to support them, and their participation can pay dividends.”

READ MORE: Unlock opportunities for tax incentives in opportunity zones

A call to action

In the book, Lalla writes about how the Innovation Labs received $200 million in fundraising through public and private investments for projects like a startup unmanned aerial vehicle testing site in the Osage Nation called the Skyway36 Droneport and Technology Innovation Center. Such collaborations carry special relevance in an area like Tulsa, Oklahoma, which has a history marked by the wealth ramifications of the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921 and the government’s forced relocation of Native American tribes in the Trail of Tears, Lalla notes.

“This book is a call to action for the United States to address one of society’s defining challenges: expanding opportunity by harnessing the tech industry and ensuring gains spread across demographics and geographies,” he writes. “The middle matters, the center must hold, and Heartland cities need to reinvent themselves to thrive in the innovation age. That enormous project starts at the local level, through place-based economic development, which can make an impact far faster than changing the patterns of financial markets or corporate behavior. And inclusive growth in tech must start with the reinvention of Heartland cities. That requires cities — civic ecosystems, not merely municipal governments — to undertake two changes in parallel. The first is transitioning their legacy economies to tech-based ones, and the second is shifting from a growth mindset to an inclusive-growth mindset. To accomplish both admittedly ambitious endeavors, cities must challenge local economic development orthodoxy and readjust their entire civic ecosystems for this generational project.”

READ MORE: Relief granted to opportunity zone investors

Researching the shortcomings

And that’s where an “opportunity zones 2.0” program could play an important role in supporting local tech startups, turning midsized cities into innovation engines and collaborating with philanthropic organizations or the federal, state and local governments, according to Lalla. 

In the first three years of the credit alone, investors poured $48 billion in assets into the “qualified opportunity funds” that get the deferral and exclusions for certain capital gains, according to a 2023 study by the Treasury Department. However, those assets flowed disproportionately to large metropolitan areas: Almost 86% of the designated Census tracts were in cities, and 95% of the ones receiving investments were in a sizable metropolis. 

Other research suggested that opportunity-zone investments in metropolitan areas generated a 3% to 4.5% jump in employment, compared to a flat rate in rural places, according to an analysis by the nonpartisan, nonprofit Tax Foundation.

“It creates a strong incentive for taxpayers to make investments that will appreciate greatly in market value,” Tax Foundation President Emeritus Scott Hodge wrote in the analysis, “Opportunity Zones ‘Make a Good Return Greater,’ but Not for Poor Residents” shortly after the Treasury study. 

“This may be the fatal flaw in opportunity zones,” he wrote. “It explains why most of the investments have been in real estate — which tends to appreciate faster than other investments — and in Census tracts that were already improving before being designated as opportunity zones.”

So far, three other research studies have concluded that the investments made little to no impact on commercial development, no clear marks on housing prices, employment and business formation and a notable boost in multifamily and other residential property, according to a presentation last September at a Brookings Institution event by Naomi Feldman, an associate professor of economics at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem who has studied opportunity zones. 

The credit “deviates a lot from previous policies” that were much more prescriptive, Feldman said.

“It didn’t want the government to have a lot of oversay over what was going on, where the investment was going, the type of investments and things like that,” she said. “It offered uncapped tax incentives for private individual investors to invest unrealized capital gains. So this was the big innovation of OZs. It was taking the stock of unrealized capital gains that wealthy individuals, or even less wealthy individuals, had sitting, and they could roll it over into these funds that could then be invested in these opportunity zones. And there were a lot of tax breaks that came with that.”

READ MORE: 3 oil and gas investments that bring big tax savings

A ‘place-based’ strategy

The shifts that Lalla is calling for in the policy “could either be narrowing criteria for what qualifies as an opportunity zone or creating force multipliers that further incentivize investments in more places,” he said. In other words, investors may consider ideas for, say, semiconductor plants, workforce training facilities or data centers across the Midwest and in rural areas throughout the country rather than trying to build more luxury residential properties in New York and Los Angeles.

While President Donald Trump has certainly favored that type of economic development over his career in real estate, entertainment and politics, those properties could tap into other tax incentives. And a refreshed approach to opportunity zones could speak to the “real innovation and talent potential in midsized cities throughout the Heartland,” enabling a policy that experts like Lalla describe as “place-based,” he said. With any policies that mention the words “diversity, equity and inclusion” in the slightest under threat during the second Trump administration, that location-based lens to inclusion remains an area of bipartisan agreement, according to Lalla.

“We can’t have cities across the country isolated from tech and innovation,” he said. “When you take a geographic lens to economic inclusion, to economic mobility, to economic prosperity, you are including communities like Tulsa, Oklahoma. You’re including communities throughout Appalachia, throughout the Midwest that have been isolated over the past 20 years.”

READ MORE: Can ESG come back from the dead?

Hope for the future?

In the book, Lalla compares the similar goals of opportunity zones to those of earlier policies under President Joe Biden’s administration like the Inflation Reduction Act, the CHIPS and Science Act, the American Rescue Plan and the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act.

“Together, these bills provided hundreds of millions of dollars in grant money for a more diverse group of cities and regions to invest in innovation infrastructure and ecosystems,” Lalla writes. “Although it will take years for these investments to bear fruit, they mark an encouraging change in federal economic development policy. I am cautiously optimistic that the incoming Trump administration will continue this trend, which has disproportionately helped the Heartland. For example, Trump’s opportunity zone program in his first term, which offered tax incentives to invest in distressed parts of the country, should be adapted and scaled to support innovation ecosystems in the Heartland. For the first time in generations, the government is taking a place-based approach to economic development, intentionally seeking to fund projects in communities historically disconnected from the nation’s innovation system and in essential industries. They’re doing so through a decidedly regional approach.”

Advisors and clients thinking together about aligning investment portfolios to their principles and local economies can get involved with those efforts — regardless of their political views, Lalla said.

“This really is a bipartisan issue. Opportunity zones won wide bipartisan approval,” he said. “Heartland cities can flourish and can do so in a complicated political environment.”

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