Accounting
Estate planning for the Native Land Back Movement
Philanthropically-inclined clients’ interest in the Land Back Movement is opening new realms of estate planning for financial advisors and tax professionals.
The Land Back Movement revolves around the mission of returning territorial assets seized from indigenous nations so that Native Americans reclaim ownership and stewardship of them. It is already playing out in various forms of land-transfer efforts in states such as
Individual estates’ bequests of land pose complicated planning questions begging the need for more collaboration among advisors, tax pros, attorneys and other professionals, experts said.
Land Back “should be on our radar” as, “at some level, a subset of charitable giving,” said Alma Soongi Beck, counsel with
“Clients will just raise it. We talk about where you want to leave your stuff. I’ve had clients say they want to give their house back to the local indigenous tribe,” she said in an interview. “There has been a huge, almost exponential, awareness-raising in the last five years, and what I expect in the next five years is, it’s going to keep growing.”
READ MORE:
Discussions of returning land to Native people often come up in environmental justice and sustainability circles. But that rhetoric is “sometimes utopian” and “often just jumps right over the legal issues,” according to Jo Carrillo,
“What I would like them to know is, if land is transferred, there should also be money transferred to maintain that land,” Carrillo said. “Land requires money to support owning it, and that’s a very important part of the gift.”
Furthermore, advisors and other professionals facilitating the transaction must avoid “creating unnecessary legal battles” with the discretion that they give
“The ‘why’ of Land Back is not hard for clients to wrap their minds around,” Beck said. “The harder question — even for those of us who have done some Land Back work — is the ‘who’ and the ‘how.'”
That speaks to the necessity for fiduciary planners and trustees to “know better what you’re doing than just being generous” and for donors “to get comfortable with the ‘how’ question,” Carrillo said. Those inherent dilemmas won’t solve themselves.
“We’re at the start of Land Back. In 10, 15 years, we’ll be at the litigation phase,” Carrillo said. “We have a very small group of experts. It’s almost like working in
READ MORE:
In that regard, Carrillo and Beck are seeking more connections in the wealth management and tax professional fields to move the conversations forward, they said. Beck participates in a study group of practitioners who meet every one to three months to discuss the most pressing estate-planning topics surrounding the Land Back Movement.
“Definitely talk about it with clients and raise it, but go slowly enough that you’re not creating more problems than you’re trying to solve,” she said. “What we can figure out in community will benefit the work that everyone does. Like Jo says, we’re in the early stages. We want to get ahead of the issues and not have to clean it up afterwards.”
Big Four firm PwC announced new agentic AI capacities, including a model that proactively identifies areas of value leakage and acts inside the tools teams already use to fix them itself.
The new solution,
The software, which is supported by PwC’s recently released
The system connects directly into ERP environments, continuously monitors key metrics, and acts inside the tools teams already use. For example, a supply chain agent might detect rising shipping costs and automatically reroute deliveries to reduce spend. Finance agents can spot and correct billing errors before they reach the customer. Clients typically see measurable efficiency gains in the first quarter, with continued improvements over time as the system learns and adapts.
“Too many transformations still rely on one-off pilots and stale data, stretching the gap from insight to impact and suffocating ROI,” said Saurabh Sarbaliya, PwC’s principal for enterprise strategy and value. “Agent Powered Performance flips the economics by distilling PwC’s industry transformation playbooks into AI agents that turn static insights into compounding gains, without rebooting each time.”
Agent Powered Performance is platform-agnostic and built on an open architecture so it can work across different LLMs based on client preferences and task-specific needs. It works with major enterprise platforms including Oracle, SAP, Workday and Guidewire.
Agent OS Model Context Protocol
PwC also
By integrating this standard, agent systems registered as MCP servers can be used by any authorized AI agent. This reduces redundant integration work and the overhead of writing custom logic for each new use case. By standardizing how agents invoke tools and handle responses, MCP also simplifies the interface between agents and enterprise systems, which will serve to reduce development time, lower testing complexity, and cut deployment risk. Finally, any interaction between an agent and an MCP server is authenticated, authorized and logged, and access policies are enforced at the protocol level, which means that compliance and control are native to the system—not layered on after the fact.
This means that agents are no longer siloed. Instead, they can operate as part of a coordinated, governed system that can grow as needs evolve, as MCP support provides the interface to external tools and systems. This enables organizations to move beyond isolated pilots toward integrated systems where agents don’t just reason, but act inside real business workflows. It marks a shift from experimentation to adoption, from isolated tools to scalable, governed intelligence.
Research Composer
Finally, a PwC spokesperson said the firm has also launched a new internal tool for its professionals called Research Composer, a patent-pending AI research agent embedded in the firm’s ChatPwC suite, designed to accelerate insight generation by combining web data with PwC-uploaded content.
Professionals will use the Research Composer to produce in-depth, citation-backed reports for either the firm or its clients. The solution is intended to enhance the quality of client work by equipping teams with research and strategic analysis capabilities.
The AI agent prompts users through a step-by-step research workflow, allowing them to shape how reports are packaged—tailoring the output to meet strategic needs. For example, a manager in advisory services might use Research Composer to evaluate white space opportunities across industries or geographies, drawing from internal reports and up-to-date market data.
Eide Bailly, a Top 25 Firm based in Fargo, North Dakota, is growing its presence in the Pacific Northwest by adding Traner Smith, based in Edmonds, Washington, effective June 2, 2025.
Traner Smith’s team includes two partners and 16 staff members and specializes in tax compliance and advisory services. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. Eide Bailly ranked No. 19 on
Eide Bailly already has offices in Seattle, but hopes to grow further in the Pacific Northwest. “We’re pleased to welcome the talented team at Traner Smith to Eide Bailly,” said Eide Bailly managing partner and CEO Jeremy Hauk in a statement Monday. “Their expertise with high-net-worth individuals, real estate and privately held businesses aligns well with our strengths, and their client-centric approach is a perfect cultural fit. Having an office in Edmonds, Washington, is a great complement to our existing presence in Seattle. Together, we’re poised to deliver even greater value to families and businesses in the Seattle metro area.”
“Joining Eide Bailly is a natural next step for us — it provides access to deeper technical resources in areas like state and local tax, national tax, succession planning and international tax while allowing us to continue the personalized service our clients value,” said Kevin Smith, a partner at Traner Smith, in a statement.
“With this expanded support and platform, we’re excited to grow our reach, elevate what we do best, and help more clients than ever before,” said Shane Summer, another partner at Traner Smith, in a statement.
Eide Bailly has announced several other mergers in recent weeks. Earlier this month, it added
In 2023, Eide Bailly added
Top 100 firm
“We began working with Knuula in Spring 2024 to streamline our engagement letter process,” said Don Murphy, Managing Member of BMSS. “It quickly became clear that Knuula was not only a strong solution for us, but also an ideal partner in advancing industry-wide automation.”
While the specific terms of the deal were not disclosed, a spokesperson with Knuula said that, after this investment, BMSS and a collection of 21 of their partners now own 13% of the company. The investment represents not some passive revenue deal but an active collaboration between the two companies, with the spokesperson saying they will be working closely together on things like product development, new features, improvements, and networking.
The deal comes about a year after Knuula integrated with QuickFee, a receivables management platform for professional service providers, which allowed users to have engagement letters directly connecting to their QuickFee billing platform, tying the execution of the letter directly to the billing process.
“We’ve long sought to partner with a firm focused on strategic innovation in the accounting space,” said Jamie Peebles, founder of Knuula. “To develop a perfect solution for large firms, it is ideal to have a partner that is willing to work closely together and iterate quickly. This requires constant feedback between our two teams. The IT team from BMSS worked with our development team constantly and helped us iterate rapidly. We also had consistent input from partners, manager, and administrative staff to help us make valuable changes to Knuula. BMSS was a perfect partner for us.”
Retail investors bought the most stocks for a morning ever on Monday after Moody’s downgrade
China-based Bc Babycare ramps up U.S. expansion despite trade war
PwC AI agent acts proactively to preserve value
New 2023 K-1 instructions stir the CAMT pot for partnerships and corporations
The Essential Practice of Bank and Credit Card Statement Reconciliation
Are American progressives making themselves sad?
-
Accounting1 week agoEssential Strategies for Maintaining Data Security in Modern Bookkeeping
-
Finance1 week agoAmerica failing its young investors, warns financial guru Ric Edelman
-
Economics1 week agoCPI inflation April 2025: Rate hits 2.3%
-
Finance1 week agoPowell may have a hard time avoiding Trump’s ‘Too Late’ label even as Fed chief does the right thing
-
Economics1 week agoTariff receipts topped $16 billion in April, a record that helped cut the budget deficit
-
Economics1 week agoChecks and Balance newsletter: The election of Pope Leo XIV goes beyond American politics
-
Personal Finance6 days agoHouse Republicans advance Trump’s tax bill. ‘SALT’ deduction in limbo
-
Economics5 days agoViolent crime is falling rapidly across America