MH CPA and Kenilworth Holdings have formed a joint venture called MH Kenilworth, an accounting firm focused on increasing client profitability.

MH CPA is based in Champaign, Illinois, and offers audit, tax, advisory and transaction services to 28 clients across the U.S. Kenilworth Holdings is headquartered in Chicago and operates an offshoring entity in India. Together, the joint venture will service firms with less than $10 million in revenue, offering offshoring, technology solutions, valuations, transfer pricing, M&A support, CFO services and business consulting, as well as audit, accounting and tax services.

“Companies become successful because they grow their revenue or lower their cost,” MH Kenilworth CEO Todd Shapiro, a former president and CEO of the Illinois CPA Society, told Accounting Today. “How are we [the profession] on a regular basis doing that? We don’t.”

“Show me a firm that became wildly successful because they had a clean audit, and I’ll show you a company that’s out of business,” he continued. “Now show me a company that’s become wildly successful because of your tax strategy, and again, I will show you a company that’s out of business.”

But what is the difference between this model and the firm being bought up by private equity?

“We don’t own them. They don’t own us,” Shapiro answered. “Typically, that’s not done — typically, there’s a connection between the two.”

The joint venture is mutually beneficial: Kenilworth gains a platform and an arsenal of contractable services, while MH CPA maintains its independence and grows deeper into or beyond its geographic footprint without spending its own funds. For example, if Kenilworth adds another firm, MH CPA would be the one to acquire it, Shapiro explained.

“Our firm has thrived by embracing innovation and forward-thinking strategies in the industry, and we look forward to bringing that same expertise and perspective to MH Kenilworth,” MH CPA CEO and managing partner Jeff Livesay said in a statement. “The joint venture offers an opportunity to enhance our capabilities through Kenilworth’s global talent resources and expanded services while strengthening and complementing MH CPA’s core competencies. We’re excited to build and expand the MH platform.”

“Staffing remains one of the most pressing issues facing accounting firms in the U.S. and globally,” John Wesley, a principal at Kenilworth Global Financial Advisors, said in a statement last week. “At Kenilworth Global Financial Advisors, we have built a successful model for providing high-quality, cost-effective staffing solutions and specialized services such as valuations, transfer pricing and technology solutions. Partnering with MH allows us to expand our U.S. presence while delivering greater value to firms across the country.”

Big Four firms EY and Deloitte, as well as accounting automation solutions provider Digits, all announced partnerships with technology company Nvidia, which has gone from a company known mainly for its video graphics cards to a major player in the AI space within just a few years. 

EY and Deloitte’s respective announcements both centered around the launch of their own agentic AI platforms built on Nvidia’s technology infrastructure, including its new Llama Nemotron family of open reasoning models, which is adapted from the Llama LLM initially developed by Meta but used widely since it leaked in 2023.

Nvidia said that, through training and refinement, Llama can more effectively perform multistep math, coding, reasoning and complex decision-making.

Deloitte’s Zora AI

Deloitte announced the release of its Zora AI by Deloitte platform Monday, which offers a suite of ready-to-deploy agents that are said to perceive, reason and act, autonomously executing complex business functions, serving as a way for clients to augment their workforce as well as boost their effectiveness. The three agents offered by the platform are Zora AI for Finance, Zora AI for Procurement and Zora AI for sales and marketing. 

Deloitte said the agents can source, extract and interpret real-time, multimodal data from structured and unstructured sources; run analytical and mathematical models to define related insights and trends; translate insights into easily consumed formats; provide scenario analysis and recommendations on business-critical decisions; and coordinate and perform a set of actions—in collaboration with other agents—to execute complex, nuanced workflows, from beginning to end, including transaction processing, anomaly detection and resolution, and self healing. 

“We are entering the autonomous enterprise era where agents can transform work and business models, ushering in entirely new ways of working,” said Deloitte US CEO Jason Girzadas in a statement. “Our vision with Zora AI is to assist our clients in their transition into this new era, where agents and employees interact to reinvent business processes and unlock new sources of business value, growth and innovation for their organizations.”

Deloitte itself is using Zora AI for Finance internally to streamline and automate its finance processes, including expense management. The expense management agents monitor expenses across payroll, facilities, sales and marketing, and employee time and expenses, enabling finance leaders to identify expense outliers, compare expenses against industry and competitor trends, and drill down into specific budgets. Deloitte estimates Zora AI will reduce its costs by 25% and increase its productivity by 40%. Deloitte plans to implement Zora AI for thousands of users by the end of 2025.

EY.ai Agentic Platform

EY also announced Monday the deployment of its own EY.ai Agentic Platform on the full Nvidia AI stack to respond to real-time events, adapt to regulatory changes and drive smarter financial and risk decisions across global operations. The EY.ai Agentic Platform will run across client clouds, on-premises, at the edge, and the Nvidia Cloud Provider ecosystem. Nvidia is holding a conference in San Jose this week.

The platform is, for now, primarily for internal use as part of EY’s “Client Zero” transformation, in which EY tests AI deployments to guide clients as an example of effective and responsible use of the technology. This initial deployment will integrate 150 AI agents supporting 80,000 EY professionals across data collection, document analysis and review, and income and indirect tax compliance. EY.ai risk agents will also work with risk professionals to deliver new AI-native services. The third-party risk management agent will enable clients to manage risk more comprehensively and increase productivity.

The platform overall supports EY’s Responsible AI Frameworks as well as Nvidia NeMo Guardrails and EY SafePrompt software to more effectively mitigate AI risk at the agent level. It also supports a framework for agent creation and orchestration, which will use Nvidia Blueprints, including AI-Q Blueprints, to operate across third-party agent platforms. These frameworks will, in turn, support a collection of “fit for purpose” models chosen and designed for agentic solutions, such as indirect tax, income tax compliance, financial crimes, regulatory compliance and financial reporting, and targeted sector solutions for finance, marketing, cyber resiliency and supply chain, all powered by client-specific reasoning models. The platform also has a Model Development Suite that lets users create custom, enterprise-ready AI reasoning models using NVIDIA AI Foundry.

“With the EY.ai Agentic Platform, we are moving fast to help the world’s largest organizations transform their enterprises and streamline increasingly complex compliance requirements, while enhancing productivity and operational excellence across our own businesses,” said EY global chair and CEO Janet Truncale. “In collaboration with NVIDIA, we’re harnessing the collective knowledge of 400,000 skilled professionals, and the broad spectrum of EY services, to help shape the future with confidence in a fast-moving, highly competitive global economy.”

Digits AGL on NVIDIA Triton

Finally, accounting automation and solutions provider Digits, on the same day, also announced that its own complete solution, centered around the recently-released Autonomous General Ledger, successfully developed and deployed vertical-specific large language models (LLMs), achieved using NVIDIA accelerated computing and NVIDIA Triton Inference Server, which is optimized for AI models.

Digits said that, through using this optimized inference server, they were able to increase the number of requests it can process (a metric generally referred to as “LLM throughput”) tenfold to create its verticalized application of Accounting AI. By “vertical,” Digits means the models, rather than having generalized training like ChatGPT or Claude, have been trained only on relevant, domain-specific information, which focuses outputs and reduces the possibility of inaccurate information. This reflects an overall move in the industry away from generic one-size-fits-all models, of which there are now many, toward specialized applications that deeply understand specific business domains. 

“You can think of LLMs as very generic,” said Digits CEO Jeff Seibert in an email. “They train on substantially the entire internet, and they have a broad base of horizontal knowledge, but they are not specialized in any specific field. We have combined the power of LLMs with over a dozen custom-trained models that specialize in double-entry accounting and the related workflows [specific to the accounting industry].”

When asked about the development process, he said Digits both fine-tuned publicly available LLMs to be more accurate for given tasks and spent five years training its own predictive models from the ground up on a proprietary data set of $825 billion worth of transactions. 

“You can think of Digits AGL as a symphony: we orchestrate over a dozen models together in production, most of which are completely unique and created from scratch in-house,” said Seibert. 

While Digits has been providing solutions since 2018, Seibert said this will be the first time the company is launching the full set of products, including the Automated General Ledger. 

“Previously, only pieces of Digits have been available (Reporting, Dashboards, Bill Pay and Invoicing), and this is the first time we are launching the full ledger — the AGL — to actually automate the bookkeeping,” he said. “After a year of intensive testing with hundreds of businesses via our full-service accounting offering, we’ve now launched it self-serve for small business owners and startup founders to automate their finances.”

Individuals and businesses in parts of West Virginia affected by severe storms, straight-line winds, flooding, landslides and mudslides that began on Feb. 15 now have until Nov. 3 to file various federal individual and business returns and make tax payments. 

The IRS will offer relief to any area designated by the Federal Emergency Management Agency; this currently includes Logan, McDowell, Mercer, Mingo, Wayne and Wyoming Counties.

Individuals and households that reside or have a business in these counties qualify for this filing and payment relief. The same relief will be available to any other counties added later to the disaster area. The current list of eligible localities is on the Tax relief in disaster situations page on IRS.gov. 

Michael Swensen/Photographer: Michael Swensen/Ge

The tax relief postpones various tax filing and payment deadlines that occurred from Feb. 15 through Nov. 3 this year. Affected individuals and businesses will have until this Nov. 3 to file returns and pay taxes originally due during this period.

The November deadline will now apply to: 

• Individual income tax returns and payments normally due on April 15, 2025.
• 2024 contributions to IRAs and health savings accounts for eligible taxpayers.
• Quarterly estimated tax payments normally due on April 15, June 16 and Sept. 15, 2025.
• Quarterly payroll and excise tax returns normally due on April 30, July 31 and Oct. 31, 2025.
• Calendar-year partnership and S corp returns normally due on March 17, 2025.
• Calendar-year corporation and fiduciary returns and payments normally due on April 15, 2025.
• Calendar-year tax-exempt organization returns normally due on May 15, 2025. 

Penalties for failing to make payroll and excise tax deposits due on or after Feb. 15, 2025, and before March 3, 2025, will also be abated if the deposits were made by March 3, 2025. 
The disaster assistance and emergency relief for individuals and businesses IRS page has details on other returns, payments and tax-related actions qualifying for relief during the postponement period.  

The IRS automatically provides filing and penalty relief to any taxpayer with an address of record in the disaster area. These taxpayers do not need to contact the agency to get this relief. 

If an affected taxpayer doesn’t have an address of record in the disaster area — because, for example, they moved to the disaster area after filing their return — they could receive a late filing or late payment penalty notice from the IRS for the postponement period. The taxpayer should call the IRS Special Services at (866) 562-5227 to update their address and request disaster tax relief. 

In addition, the service will work with any taxpayer who lives outside the disaster area but whose records necessary to meet a deadline occurring during the postponement period are in the affected area. Taxpayers qualifying for relief who live outside the disaster area need to contact the IRS Special Services toll-free number above. This also includes workers assisting the relief activities who are affiliated with a recognized government or philanthropic organization.

Disaster area tax preparers with clients outside the disaster area can choose to use the Bulk Requests from Practitioners for Disaster Relief option, described on IRS.gov. 

Individuals and businesses in a federally declared disaster area who suffered uninsured or unreimbursed disaster-related losses can choose to claim them on either the return for the year the loss occurred (in this instance, the 2025 return normally filed next year) or the return for the prior year (2024). Taxpayers have up to six months after the due date of their federal income tax return for the disaster year (without regard to any extension of time to file) to make the election. For individual taxpayers, this means Oct. 15, 2026.

The FEMA declaration number (4861-DR) should be written on any return claiming a loss.