Accounting
Practice Profile: Dreaming up a better tax season
Accounting firm ASE Group does not do taxes on April 15, and its employees don’t work Fridays.
That’s the vision founder Al-Nesha Jones conjured up when she asked herself: “What would tax season look like if we had our way?”
Flexibility was a foundational principle for Jones in establishing her New Jersey-based practice in 2016, after she felt rushed back to work at her corporate job following maternity leave.
tamara fleming photography
By the time the pandemic hit four years later, Jones and her fully remote team of four had already mastered the new working models that COVID would normalize, but that period also inspired her to expand the practice from pure tax preparation to full-service accounting.
“We were catering to client needs — whatever brought the money in,” Jones recalled. “We didn’t get serious about [expanding] until the pandemic, when we realized people wanted more. Providing tax prep work was not enough. In a short period, people became day traders, moved out of state … We needed to pivot in the way we operated. We now offer a full-service solution to clients — accounting, tax prep, advisory. It entirely changed how we feel about the profession, how busy season feels. All good changes came out of it.”
However, Jones acknowledged, there was one bad change: having to cut the clients that did not align with the pivot.
“We like to think of it as finding a place that’s a better fit for them,” she explained.
The firm currently serves about 150 clients — specifically individual small-business owners who live or work in New Jersey, New York or Pennsylvania and are sole proprietors or single-member LLCs — though ASE is “slowly working [its] way down to 100.”
Jones exercises empathy in letting these clients go, explaining that the firm has outgrown their more simple service requirements. “We give them plenty of time to evaluate their options,” she said. “When we are parting ways, we don’t say, ‘You can’t stay anymore,’ we give a one-on-one explanation that, ‘You’d be a one-off to us, and that’d be a disservice to you.”
Jones also gives departing clients references to other accountants that specialize in their industry, with the caveat that ASE gets no commission, and they should do their own due diligence.
“We felt better not just sending them out in the wild,” she said, adding that these conversations often happen right after tax season, “so they have six-plus months to seek another accountant. We also provide one hour of transitional services at no additional charge. We gather documents; we are happy to do that at no additional fee. The intent is to not make it any more difficult than it needs to be. I’m training
my own brain: This is better for everyone. We do what’s best for them, and better for us also. Better for both parties. We get the capacity back to serve the clients we’re best equipped to serve.”
What Jones has also found to be universally beneficial is her team’s four-day work week. While her staff is all women, Jones said that it just “sort of worked out that way” after the interviewing process yielded women (and mothers) as the best candidates.
“What I love about working with moms is they tend to get it done, with an any-means-necessary attitude,” Jones shared. “I don’t condone an environment where you burn yourselves out. Moms are creative in their solutions and pivot well. This team adjusts quickly to change.”
No-email Fridays
It was Jones’ own adjustment period, launching her firm with a newborn in tow after she “didn’t want to be rushed back to work sooner than ready” in her prior job, that inspired her team’s flexibility.
In April 2016, she started renting an office with a security deposit and a promise to the landlord that, although she didn’t currently have the first month’s rent, she soon would.
That June and July, she started paying for the office space in the building where ASE Group still resides, though she is the only one of her virtual team who comes in.
“In the first 20 months of running the business, I was bringing my daughter to work two to three times a week,” Jones shared. “I was on meetings with her, Zoom calls; I nursed during meetings. In hindsight it sounds crazy.”
Jones’ philosophy of balancing work and personal life persists in the way her firm supports colleagues who “all prioritize family,” whether that’s a sick child or caring for a parent, as long as staff is accountable and takes care of their work. Productivity is also expected in ASE’s shorter work weeks, which were born out of COVID.
“With so much going on, as a mom of three children, with remote learning, a husband working from home — it was a challenging time to take a small breather… I felt so unbalanced working five to six days a week,” she explained.
“I explored four-day work weeks during the summer to see how clients would adjust,” she continued. “They were the easiest. Then to see how we adjust. What efficiencies of a normal work day can get done in four days instead of five days. I absolutely work some Fridays because of travel and school schedules. But we schedule no meetings or calls on Fridays, with no exceptions.”
While employees can of course still get work done as necessary, instituting the no-email and no-calls rule is so staff “don’t create unnecessary expectations,” Jones explained. “Friday is all of our days off — no one sends messages to anybody. You get to enjoy your Friday off.”
Both this policy and ASE’s mandate to get clients’ tax preparation work done well before the Internal Revenue Service deadline requires planning and adjusting client messaging.
“We revamped the process and changed the way we communicate with clients,” Jones said. “We had to start from scratch and reverse-engineer how it would work. It started with what we wanted it to look like, not the systems or software, but blue-sky thinking, what tax season would look like if we had our way. What it would look like was: no surprises, talking to clients during the year. We talk to clients at least four times a year. We call 30 days before the estimated tax deadline.”
ASE Group works under internal deadlines. “We don’t care about the April 15 deadline for tax,” Jones said. “We only operate under our own deadlines, which tend to be at least two weeks before external deadlines. If, God forbid, we can’t meet internal deadlines, we can breathe easy with a buffer in place.”
ASE staff meet these self-imposed deadlines with more frequent client communication and weekly team calls internally.
Jones said it’s OK if two or three clients end up falling closer to the April or October deadlines, but “if half of clients go on extension or wait until October, there’s panic. It doesn’t have to be that way, and if the client likes to operate like that, it’s not a good fit.”
Advisory is the cure
Jones was not even sure the accounting profession was a fit for her until she participated in the Goldman Sachs 10,000 Small Businesses program and learned to conceptualize a new future for her career.
“I was thinking, ‘I’m not a good accountant, I can’t do this, it’s way too stressful,'” she explained. “It was realizing it’s not tax I hated, but the constant working toward deadlines, doing things last minute, all a surprise. But it’s not. It’s one of the easiest, most predictable industries. You can plan due dates. Operating with blue-sky thinking, I could step away from what I’m doing now, and it taught me what it could be like and how to make that a reality.”
ASE Group’s lower-stress tax seasons involve scheduled phone calls to check in on clients’ current financial needs and lean more into the advisory side of tax planning.
“What you need first, is advisory all throughout the year,” she said. “So that at the end of the year it’s not a pop quiz — what am I going to do on my taxes? It doesn’t have to be a surprise. I hate delivering bad news, and I also hate surprises. It’s like Groundhog Day, telling people [what to do on their taxes] … having the same conversations over and over again. People expected that they did all they needed all year, then dump it on their accountant. I’m not a magician. I felt so anxiety-ridden. The cure for that suffering is advisory.”
ASE’s regular client calls — scheduled six months out — also alleviate other common ailments, like financial anxiety and procrastination.
“It’s getting us in the position to help them reduce surprises,” Jones explained. “By the time tax season rolls around, it’s just filing season. Not strategizing season, not planning season. When a child has a test, like the SATs, they don’t show up on test day ready to study. When they show up to the test, they make sure they had a good night’s sleep, they ate breakfast, and they sharpened their pencils. All year is study season.”
The phone calls are mandatory, whether or not clients have updates. “Some clients don’t have anything new to tell you. Those clients don’t have to use all the time — if they get on the phone and tell me absolutely nothing … I’m happy to end the phone call early. The beauty is creating a routine, the consistency of it.”
Often, however, clients who think they have nothing new to report realize that they do when Jones and her colleagues engage them in more casual conversation leading to relevant life updates.
“Sometimes they struggle with financial anxiety, and don’t always want to tell you things aren’t great,” Jones shared. “The conversation is relaxed, and those conversations become more fluid and open.”
“We don’t want you to go on Google and Tiktok trying to be your own advisor,” she continued. “We ask that you allow us to prepare you for what creates an issue versus what doesn’t. We are talking in conversations about kids, family trips. In those conversations we have an agenda of listening to what they are saying … . If [for example] they are thinking of starting a new job, ‘We can help you complete a W-4.’ Something we can support you in.” AT
The Financial Accounting Standards Board met this week to discuss its projects on accounting for transfers of cryptocurrency assets and enhancing the disclosures around certain digital assets, such as stablecoins.
Processing Content
During Wednesday’s meeting, FASB’s board made certain tentative decisions, according to a
At a future meeting, the board plans to consider clarifying the derecognition guidance for crypto transfer arrangements to assess whether the control of a crypto asset has been transferred.
FASB also began deliberations on the
The board decided to provide illustrative examples in Topic 230, Statement of Cash Flows, to clarify whether certain digital assets such as stablecoins can meet the definition of cash equivalents. It also decided to include the following concepts in the illustrative examples:
- Interpretive explanations that link to the current cash equivalents definition;
- The amount and composition of reserve assets; and,
- The nature of qualifying on-demand, contractual cash redemption rights directly with the issuer.
FASB plans to clarify that an entity should consider compliance with relevant laws and regulations when it’s creating a policy concerning which assets that satisfy the Master Glossary definition of the term “cash equivalents“ will be treated as cash equivalents.
“I agree with the staff suggestion to look at examples,” said FASB vice chair Hillary Salo. “From my perspective, I think that is going to help level the playing field. People have been making reasonable judgments. I agree with that. And I think that this is really going to help show those goalposts or guardrails of what types of stablecoins would be in the scope of cash equivalents, and which ones would not be in the scope of cash equivalents. I certainly appreciate that approach, and I think it has the least potential impact of unintended consequences, because I do agree with my fellow board members that we shouldn’t be changing the definition of cash equivalents, and it’s a high bar to get into the cash equivalent definition.”
“I’m definitely supportive of not changing the definition of cash equivalents,” said FASB chair Richard Jones. “I believe that’s settled GAAP in a way, and we’re not really seeing a call to change it for broader issues. I am supportive of the example-based approach. The challenge with examples, though, is everybody’s going to want their exact pattern, but that’s not what we’re doing.”
The examples will explain the rationale for how digital assets such as stablecoins do or do not qualify as cash equivalents and give a roadmap for other types of digital assets with varying fact patterns to be able to apply.
“We really don’t want to be as a board facing a situation where something was a cash equivalent and then no longer is at a later date,” said Jones. “That’s not good for anyone, so keeping it as a high bar with certain rigid criteria, I think, is fine.”
Stablecoins are supposed to be pegged to fiat currencies such as U.S. dollars and thus provide more stability to investors. “In my view, while a stablecoin may meet the accounting definition established for cash equivalents, not every one of those stablecoins in the cash equivalent classification represents the same level of risk,” said FASB member Joyce Joseph.
She noted that the capital markets recognize the distinctions and have established a Stablecoin Stability Assessment Framework to evaluate a stablecoin’s ability to maintain its peg to a fiat currency. Such assessments look at the legal and regulatory framework associated with the stablecoin, and provide investors with information that could enable them to do forward-looking assessments about the stability of the stablecoin.
“However, for an investor to consider and utilize such information for a company analysis the financial statement disclosures would need to include information about the stablecoin itself,” Joseph added. “In outreach, the staff learned that investors supported classifying certain stablecoins as cash equivalents when transparent information is available about the entities at which the reserve assets are held. Therefore, in my view, taking all of this into consideration a relevant and informative company disclosure would include providing investors with the name of the stablecoin and the amount of the stablecoin that is classified as a cash equivalent, so investors can independently assess the liquidity risks more meaningfully and more comprehensively by utilizing broader information that is available in the capital markets and its emerging information.”
Such information could include the issuer, reserves, governance and management, she noted, so investors would get a more holistic look at the risks that holding the stablecoin would entail for a given company.
The board decided to require all entities to disclose the significant classes and related amounts of cash equivalents on an annual basis for each period that a statement of financial position is presented.
Entities should apply the amendments related to the classification of certain digital assets as cash equivalents on a modified prospective basis as of the beginning of the annual reporting period in the year of adoption.
FASB decided that entities should apply the amendments related to the disclosure of the significant classes and amounts of cash equivalents on a prospective basis as of the date of the most recent statement of financial position presented in the period of adoption.
The board will allow early adoption in both interim and annual reporting periods in which financial statements have not been issued or made available for issuance.
FASB also decided to permit entities to adopt the amendments to be illustrated in the examples related to the classification of certain digital assets as cash equivalents without the need to perform a preferability assessment as described in Topic 250, Accounting Changes and Error Corrections.
The board directed the staff to draft a proposed accounting standards update to be voted on by written ballot. The proposed update will have a 90-day comment period.
Senators introduced several pieces of tax-related legislation this week, including measures aimed at improving customer service at the Internal Revenue Service, cracking down on tax evasion and curbing the carried interest tax break, in addition to efforts in the House to repeal the Corporate Transparency Act.
Processing Content
Senators Bill Cassidy, R-Louisiana, and Mark Warner, D-Virginia, teamed up on introducing a bipartisan bill, the
The bill would establish a dashboard to inform taxpayers of backlogs and wait times; expand electronic access to information and refunds; expand callback technology and online accounts; and inform individuals facing economic hardship about collection alternatives.
“Taxpayers deserve a simple, stress-free experience when dealing with the IRS,” Cassidy said in a statement Wednesday. “This bill makes the process quicker and easier for taxpayers to get the information they need.”
He also mentioned the bill during a
“I’m happy to meet with the team … and do all I can to make it as good as you want it to be,” said Bisignano.
“My bill would equip the IRS with the legislative mandate to create an online dashboard so that taxpayers can monitor average call wait time and budget time accordingly,” said Cassidy. He noted that the bill would allow a callback for taxpayers that might need to wait longer than five minutes to speak to a representative, and establish a program to identify and support taxpayers struggling to make ends meet by providing information about alternative payment methods, such as installments, partial payments and offers in compromise.
“I know people are kind of desperate and don’t know where to turn for cash, so I think this could really ease anxiety,” he added. “This legislation is bipartisan and is likely to pass this Congress.”
Cassidy and Warner
“Taxpayers shouldn’t have to jump through hoops to get basic answers from the IRS — and in the last year, those challenges have only gotten worse,” Warner said in a statement. “I am glad to reintroduce this bipartisan legislation on Tax Day to ease some of this frustration by increasing clear communication and making IRS resources more readily available.”
Stop CHEATERS Act
Also on Tax Day, a group of Senate Democrats and an independent who usually caucuses with Democrats teamed up to introduce the Stop Corporations and High Earners from Avoiding Taxes and Enforce the Rules Strictly (Stop CHEATERS) Act.
Senate Finance Committee ranking member Ron Wyden, D-Oregon, joined with Senators Angus King, I-Maine, Elizabeth Warren, D-Massachusetts, Tim Kaine, D-Virginia, and Sheldon Whitehouse, D-Rhode Island. The bill would provide additional funding for the IRS to strengthen and expand tax collection services and systems and crack down on tax cheating by the wealthy.
“Wealthy tax cheats and scofflaw corporations are stealing billions and billions from the American people by refusing to pay what they legally owe, and far too many of them are getting a free pass because Republicans gutted the enforcement capacity of the IRS,” Wyden said in a statement. “A rich tax cheat who shelters mountains of cash among a web of shell companies and passthroughs is likelier to be struck by lightning than face an IRS audit, and Republicans want to keep it that way. This bill is about making sure the IRS has the resources it needs to go after wealthy tax cheats while improving customer service for the vast majority of American taxpayers who follow the law every year.”
Earlier this week. Wyden also
The Stop CHEATERS Act would provide the IRS with additional funding for tax enforcement focused upon high-income tax evasion, technology operations support, systems modernization, and taxpayer services like free tax-payer assistance.
“As Congress seeks ways to fund much-needed policy priorities and address our growing national debt, there is one common sense solution that should have unanimous bipartisan support: let’s enforce the tax laws already on the books,” said King in a statement. “Our legislation will make sure the IRS has the resources it needs to confront the gap between taxes owed and taxes paid – while ensuring that our tax enforcement professionals are focused on the high-income earners who account for the most tax evasion. This is a serious problem with an easy solution; let’s pass this legislation and make sure every American pays what they owe in taxes.”
Carried interest
Wyden, King and Whitehouse also teamed up on another bill Thursday to close the carried interest tax break for hedge fund managers that
Carried interest is a form of compensation received by a fund manager in exchange for investment management services, according to a
Under the bill, the
“Our tax code is rigged to favor ultra-wealthy investors who know how to game the system to dodge paying a fair share, and there is no better example of how it works in practice than the carried interest loophole,” Wyden said in a statement. “For several decades now we’ve had a tax system that rewards the accumulation of wealth by the rich while punishing middle-class wage earners, and the effect of that system has been the strangulation of prosperity and opportunity for everybody but the ultra-wealthy. There are a lot of problems to fix to restore fairness and common sense to our tax code, and closing the carried interest loophole is a great place to start.”
Repealing Corporate Transparency Act
The House Financial Services Committee is also planning to markup a bill next Tuesday that would fully repeal the Corporate Transparency Act, which has already been significantly
If enacted, the repeal would eliminate beneficial ownership reporting requirements, removing a transparency measure designed to help law enforcement and national security officials identify who is behind U.S. companies.
“This repeal would turn the United States back into one of the easiest places in the world to set up anonymous shell companies, something Congress worked for years to fix,” said Erica Hanichak, deputy director of the FACT Coalition, in a statement. “These entities are routinely used to facilitate corruption, financial crime, and abuse. Rolling back the CTA doesn’t just weaken transparency, it signals to bad actors around the world that the U.S. is once again open for illicit business.”
The Internal Revenue Service rarely penalizes taxpayers who have high balances in foreign bank accounts and fail to file the proper forms, according to a new report.
Processing Content
The
Taxpayers with specified foreign financial assets that meet a certain dollar threshold are also required to report the information to the IRS by filing Form 8938. Failure to file the form can result in penalties of up to $60,000. However, TIGTA’s previous reports have demonstrated that the IRS rarely enforces these penalties.
The IRS created an Offshore Private Banking Campaign initiative to address tax noncompliance related to taxpayers’ failure to file Form 8938 and information reporting associated with offshore banking accounts, but it’s had limited success.
Even though the initiative identified hundreds of individual taxpayers with significant foreign bank account deposits who failed to file Forms 8938, the campaign only resulted in relatively few taxpayer examinations and a small number of nonfiling penalties. The campaign identified 405 taxpayers with significant foreign account balances who appeared to be noncompliant with their FATCA reporting requirements.
The IRS used two ways to address the 405 noncompliant taxpayers: referral for examinations and the issuance of letters to them.
- 164 taxpayers (who had an average unreported foreign account balance of $1.3 billion) were referred for possible examination, but only 12 of the 164 were examined, with five having $39.7 million in additional tax and $80,000 in penalties assessed.
- 241 noncompliant taxpayers (who had an average unreported account balance of $377 million) received a combination of 225 educational letters (requiring no response from the taxpayers) and 16 soft letters (requiring taxpayers to respond). None of the 241 taxpayers were assessed the initial $10,000 FATCA nonfiling penalty.
“While taxpayers can hold offshore banking accounts for a number of legitimate reasons, some taxpayers have also used them to hide income and evade taxes,” said the report.
Significant assets and income are factors considered by the IRS when assessing whether taxpayers intentionally evaded their tax responsibilities, the report noted. Given the large size of the average unreported foreign account balances, these taxpayers probably have higher levels of sophistication and an awareness of their obligation to comply with the law.
TIGTA believes the IRS needs to establish specific performance measures to determine the effectiveness of the FATCA program. “If the IRS does not plan to enforce the FATCA provisions even where obvious noncompliance is identified, it should at least quantify the enforcement impact of its efforts,” said the report. “This will ensure that IRS decision makers have the information they need to determine if the FATCA program is worth the investment and improves taxpayer compliance.
TIGTA made three recommendations in the report, including revising Campaign 896 processes to include assessing FATCA failure to file penalties; assessing the viability of using Form 1099 data to identify Form 8938 nonfilers; and implementing additional performance measures to give decision makers comprehensive information about the effectiveness of the FATCA program. The IRS disagreed with two of TIGTA’s recommendations and partially agreed with the remaining recommendation. IRS officials didn’t agree to assess penalties in Campaign 896 or with implementing performance measures to assess the effectiveness of the FATCA program.
“From our perspective, TIGTA’s conclusions regarding IRS Campaign 896 are based, in part, on a misguided premise and overgeneralizations, including the treatment of ‘potential noncompliance’ as tantamount to ‘egregious noncompliance’ that warrants a monetary penalty without contemplating the variety of justifications that may exempt a taxpayer from having to file Form 8938,” wrote Mabeline Baldwin, acting commissioner of the IRS’s Large Business and International Division, in response to the report.
What that means for consumer loans
Checks and Balance newsletter: Of God and MAGA
Why software stocks, 2026’s market dogs, have joined the rally
Armanino adds Strategic Accounting Outsourced Solutions
New 2023 K-1 instructions stir the CAMT pot for partnerships and corporations
