Accounting

Estate planning for the Native Land Back Movement

Published

2 weeks ago

December 5, 2024

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 California, Minnesota, Oklahoma, Alaska and Maine.

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 Lathrop GPM‘s Private Client Services unit focusing on estate planning, trust and probate law. Although financial professionals of many types are familiar with the concept of a real estate transaction, leaving the assets to a beneficiary in a position to manage them entails an array of historical and legal complexities, Beck said.

“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.”

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, professor of law and the faculty director of the Indigenous Law Center at University of California College of the Law, San Francisco (formerly UC Hastings). Financial planners and others assisting landowners should keep in mind that the transfers require thinking about a donor-advised fund or another means of providing a further layer of resources to support the beneficiaries’ management of the land, she said.

“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 to any trustee to select tribal nations as the beneficiary and conduct careful research as to which ones previously lived on the land and have the capacity to supervise it, Beck said. The federal government formally recognizes 574 tribes, but every state has as many as several hundreds of other nations, bands, pueblos or villages. A Canadian website, Native-Land.ca, can aid in the search, but any given address or area will list up to a dozen or more tribes who once populated the land.

“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 the high-end art market where you have a very small group of agents, galleries and potential purchasers simply because of the price point.”

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.”

Accounting

M&A roundup: From Minnesota to Memphis

Published

49 minutes ago

December 18, 2024

Business Finance News

DSB Rock Island merges with fellow Minnesota firm Meuwissen, Flygare, Kadrlik and Associates; Smith + Howard adds Richmond-based consultancy Fahrenheit Advisors; Reynolds, Bone & Griesbeck adds fellow Memphis firm Scott and Pohlman; and GBQ expands its credit union practice with Lillie & Co.

Accounting

Major AI players back Basis with $34 million series A

Published

4 hours ago

December 18, 2024

Business Finance News

AI-specialized accounting platform company Basis has raised $34 million in Series A funding to bolster its autonomous AI agent product, with an investment round that was led by Keith Rabois from Khosla Ventures, alongside Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross, along with additional contributions from heavy hitters like Larry Summers, former US Secretary of Treasury, Jeff Dean, the chief scientist behind Google DeepMind, Noam Brown, the lead researcher for OpenAI’s o1 model, and Jack Altman, former CEO of Lattice and the brother of OpenAI head Sam Altman, and many others.

“We’re putting every dollar back into the platform and team – to invest in ML research, to continue to bring the most cutting-edge AI to accounting firms, and to open additional slots for firms,” said Matt Harpe, Basis co-founder, in an email.

Basis, which emerged from stealth last year with $3.8 million in funding, uses generative AI and language models built specifically for extremely high accounting performance to perform various workflows such as entering transactions and double-checking data accuracy. This is in contrast to things like chatbots which can only read data and produce text. The product also integrates with popular ledger systems like Intuit’s QuickBooks and Xero as well as AP systems such as Bill.com and file systems such as SharePoint or Box. It is already in use by firms such as Top 100 firm Wiss and Co., which partnered with Basis earlier this year. The product was compared to having a junior accountant, which Basis said allows human staff accountants to spend their time reviewing the AI agent’s work, rather than doing the work manually.

“This technology is a new paradigm for accounting. Learning to work with your computer, not just on it, might be an even bigger shift than going from paper to digital. Over the last year, as accountants have experienced what’s possible with the most cutting-edge AI, we’ve seen more and more firms decide that AI must become the top strategic priority. We’re excited to continue to equip firms with AI that actually works,” said Mitch Troyanovsky, Basis co-founder in an email.

Basis sells exclusively to accountants versus selling directly to businesses or building ‘new’ accounting firms, and is tailored specifically for use by expert accountants. Basis focuses on building agents that understand, and can operate on, accounting broadly instead of isolating only a specific task. This allows Basis to work across clients and workflows without losing context, and to quickly take on new workflows, said Basis. Accountants onboard Basis to engagements and assign it core workflows for one-time or ongoing execution

“Accounting is a massive industry, and Basis is clearly leading on the AI side. This is one of the few AI agents that’s already deployed and working. Matt and Mitch have put together the best NYC team in the applied AI space,” said Vinod Khosla, founder of Khosla Ventures, who also co-founded Sun Microsystems.

Accounting

Platform Accounting Group adds Illinois and Indiana firms

Published

4 hours ago

December 18, 2024

Business Finance News

Platform Accounting Group has added two more accounting firms, based in Indiana and Illinois, bringing the total firms that have joined the Utah-based company this year to 12.

Platform Accounting Group, founded in 2015, invests in and acquires small accounting firms, and announced it received an $85 million minority funding round to support its expansion in February.

Midwest Advisors, formerly known as Philip+Rae & Associates, is headquartered in Naperville, Illinois, and has provided fractional CFO roles, controllership and back-office accounting operations for more than 30 years. Additionally, the firm offers tax preparation, accounting and auditing, financial planning, estate planning, payroll services, small business consulting, bookkeeping, back-office accounting, small business consulting and more.

In operation for 30 years, Indianapolis-based Crossroads Advisors, formerly Peachin Schwartz + Weingardt, serves high-net-worth individuals, closely-held businesses and not-for-profit organizations. The firm supports clients throughout their life cycle, from the startup phase to mature businesses seeking an exit or succession strategy.

“Because of my experience and time there, I deeply value the tight-knit community and small-town feel of the Midwest,” said Reyes Florez, CEO of Platform Accounting Group, in a statement. “We are thrilled these firms, who like us, prioritize relationships and roots, are joining our group and will be able to invest even further in their clients and communities.”

Platform Accounting Group has nearly 1,000 employees across 12 states and expects to add a few more accounting firms in January, the company said.