Accounting
How to use opportunity zone tax credits in the ‘Heartland’
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 “
“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.”
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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
“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.”
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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
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,
“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,
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.”
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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 “
“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.”
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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
“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.”
Big Four firm KPMG announced the launch of its new multi-agent AI platform,
“The next phase of AI will be defined by platforms that scale,” said Steve Chase, US vice chair of AI and digital innovation. “Workbench is KPMG’s single, global AI platform—built on an interoperable architecture that supports agent-to-agent coordination and multi-model flexibility. It’s the foundation for how we’re scaling AI across our business and for our clients —with confidence, agility, and global impact.”
The platform sports a network of 50 AI assistants, or agents, that interact with each other across multiple sectors with nearly a thousand more currently in development. They’re meant to work as “digital teammates” alongside KPMG professionals. Working on Microsoft Azure infrastructure, Workbench is conceived of as a “one stop shop” platform that will serve up tools and agents to KPMG professionals within the systems they work in every day. Most will never directly interact with the platform itself, as the assistants will be retrieving solutions for them. To do so it uses interoperable, agent to agent communications to bring together capabilities from across the KPMG ecosystem of alliance partners (e.g. Oracle, Salesforce, ServiceNow, Workday) to best address the task at hand.
KPMG Workbench enables team members to automate complex, multi-step processes from client onboarding to regulatory reporting. Beyond internal use, private instances of KPMG Workbench will also be available to clients from across industries to help develop and manage their own digital workforce. KPMG said that clients can maintain full control of how their data is stored and processed and manage diverse risk and governance needs, helping them to meet local and global regulatory requirements. KPMG is also certified in ISO 42001, which concerns AI Management Systems.
While the precise definition can vary depending on who is asked, very broadly agentic AI could be described as software that is capable of at least some degree of autonomy to make decisions and interact with tools outside itself in order to achieve some sort of goal—whether booking a flight, sending a bill or buying a gift—without constant human guidance. Agents are not necessarily new, but the rise of generative AI has made them much easier to make and use, as doing so no longer requires specialized coding skills. Since they exploded onto the scene, the need for platforms that can coordinate between agents has become clear.
The news comes about a month after Deloitte
I first discovered accounting in my sophomore year of college and was immediately drawn to its zero-sum game: every trial balance must foot to zero, every debit matched by a credit; it was a perfect harmony of logic. But as I moved from the classroom to the conference room, I realized that behind each journal entry lies a human story far richer than any spreadsheet.
At EY, I spent years in the international tax practice, working on mergers and acquisitions, IP onshoring and cross‑border reorganizations, an environment where the answer almost always began with “it depends.” Every multistep plan we proposed carried consequences across jurisdictions, and our task was to bring every stakeholder along, weighing trade‑offs in tax savings, implementation costs and regulatory scrutiny. Gaining that buy‑in requires something more than technical expertise; it demands trust, built through empathy and open dialogue. And while we may lean on AI tools for speed and analysis, the trust we place in another person is fundamentally different and irreplaceable.
It is certain that AI will truly upend our way of working. When I started out in my career and had to understand what GILTI, BEAT and FDII meant and why I should care about them, I had a few paths to take: 1. Go ask my senior or manager and have them explain it to me; 2. Look it up on Google and get well and truly lost reading through the regs; or 3. Go read a BNA portfolio. Now with even the most basic AI large language model, I can ask for it to define the subject, give me an example and break it down for me as if I am a child.
The access you have today to information is comparable to when the internet first became available and with this brings the debate: ‘Will we need accountants in the future?” I understand why this question keeps getting brought up. Most people outside think we have a standardized workflow with pristine data for which we just log in at 9 and go home at 5 after working on our beloved spreadsheets. But ask anyone in the industry and they will tell you how they would love to have this kind of a lifestyle where each answer was clear and there was a definitive way forward.
As AI technology evolves, so too will the tools that have shaped our careers. Every day, new startups launch with the promise of revolutionizing how we work. Before long, I believe all the manual tasks we once performed will be fully automated. I look forward to the day when I can simply extract a trial balance from the system and generate a tax return that automatically applies book‑to‑tax adjustments, tracks every business change from the year, and delivers a complete, compliant filing. I’ll shed tears of joy the first time I never have to hand‑fill a Schedule Q again.
But that’s when my real work will begin. I will review each return not only to confirm that the numbers are entered correctly, but also to ensure they make sense in context. I’ll seek to understand the story the business is telling: Why did certain figures move? What does this reveal about the company’s strategy? And based on those insights, how can we design a proactive plan for the coming year? To answer these questions, I’ll draw on every lesson from my critical thinking courses and ask why.
AI shouldn’t be viewed as a career threat but as a powerful partner in our work. After all, our clients’ finances are deeply personal, tied to their dreams, anxieties and life milestones, and emotions inevitably come into play. With regulations and tax laws shifting daily, clients will look to us not just for compliance, but for someone who can translate figures into a meaningful narrative. You personally know how many questions you got asked over the last few months asking you to predict what is going to happen this year. That’s where human judgment is irreplaceable: knowing when to dig deeper, which details to emphasize, and how to guide clients through complexity with clarity and compassion.
In the age of AI, the professionals who will excel are those who invest as much in empathy, communication and critical thinking as they do in technical skills. They’ll build workflows that require every AI‑generated insight to pass through a human lens and welcome the moments when financials reveal a story of resilience or ambition. AI will continue to accelerate change, but behind every algorithmic recommendation and every line on a tax return, there must be a person ready to listen, interpret and guide. Because at its core, finance will always be personal.
Grant Thornton Advisors is adding Grant Thornton Switzerland/Lichtenstein and Grant Thornton in the Channel Islands to the multinational platform it launched earlier this year. Both transactions are expected to close later this year.
In January, Grant Thornton Advisors
The firm is
By adding firms in Switzerland, Liechtenstein and the Channel Islands, Grant Thornton is expanding its geographic footprint and increasing its total headcount to 13,5000 professionals across nearly 60 offices over the Americas, Europe and Middle East.
“We are very pleased to have our colleagues in the Channel Islands, Switzerland and Liechtenstein join our differentiated and expanding platform,” Jim Peko, CEO of Grant Thornton Advisors, said in a
Adam Budworth, managing partner of Grant Thornton Channel Islands, said in a statement: “This is an exciting opportunity to support our growth in the Channel Islands with access to new service offerings, technologies and investment capital. Joining the platform will only enhance the reputation of the Channel Islands on a bigger stage, while at the same time creating unique opportunities for our people.”
“I am delighted about this positive development and am convinced that it is the right step for our firm in the current turbulent market environment,” Erich Bucher, CEO of Grant Thornton Switzerland/Liechtenstein, said in a statement. “It opens up completely new perspectives for us and will enable us to push ahead with our growth strategy much more quickly.”
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