Accounting
The rise of the remote accounting firm partner
When Daren Daiga’s husband had to move to another state for his job, it looked at first like her time with CapinCrouse was over.
Daiga had worked for the Indianapolis-based firm since 2013, eventually growing into a valued senior tax manager who specialized in tax-exempt organizations. She liked the firm, the firm liked her — but then her husband’s job necessitated a move to Dayton, Ohio.
In other circumstances, Daiga would have had to start looking for work at firms in the Dayton area, but CapinCrouse was loath to let an experienced manager go and Daiga herself wasn’t keen on changing employers either. Eventually, they came to an agreement that allowed her to work as a fully remote senior manager, which she did for five years before finally being promoted to partner in 2022.
“To lose a manager who knows the work and who knows the training and who knows [how to] train people and have a big impact, that would have been difficult. … I love where I worked, so I could not imagine working anywhere else and since they were able to accommodate remote workers, even fully remote workers, well before COVID … we were able to make that transition,” she said.
Daiga is a remote partner, a designation becoming more common in the wake of the pandemic lockdowns. Like remote workers in general, remote partners at accounting firms are not necessarily new, but in recent years their numbers have certainly grown. While still rare compared to their onsite counterparts, the remote partner is no longer a novel curiosity but a key part of a changing professional landscape that, increasingly, extends beyond a firm’s local geography. Experts believe they make up about 5% of the total share of accounting firm partners; if one counts those who started as on-site partners and then went remote, the estimate grows to about 10-15%.
These leaders can be found all over the country, at firms big and small, working in a variety of different practice areas and possessed of a wide range of motivations for why they chose the path of the remote partner. Some, like Andrew Pitt, a Buffalo, New York-based tax partner with Los Angeles-headquartered Top 100 Firm GHJ, wanted to change firms and had some very specific needs that, in the end, could only be met by one over 3,000 miles away.
“I knew exactly what I was looking for, so I was targeting this specific position … In looking for firms, [a recruiter and I] decided to look outside Buffalo because we didn’t think we could find what we were looking for there,” he said, noting, “It really was the culture and diversity of leadership I was looking for.”
Tabatha Broussard, a Baton Rouge-based partner at Oklahoma-based Top 100 firm HoganTaylor, was also looking for a specific kind of practice. Having already been a partner at another firm for seven years, the shift to remote work during the lockdowns opened her eyes to the career possibilities. But she didn’t want to work remotely for just anyone— she specifically wanted a firm that matched her own expertise with the energy industry, and found that HoganTaylor was what she needed.
“I wanted the opportunity to work in the field I enjoy, which is the energy industry, and HT’s energy practice is impressively developed, stacked with exceptionally smart professionals serving exciting clients, so it was kind of like ‘check that mark right there,”’ she said.
For Vivian Gant, a partner at Florida-based De La Hoz, Perez & Barbeito, the reasons were more personal: two small children. Unlike other remote partners, she is not especially far from the office, just a half-hour drive, but the way her schedule worked with her family, it was much easier to go fully remote.
“[Younger people] maybe think public accounting is just going in and getting burnt out for a few years so it looks good on your resume, then work for a private company until you die; that is not necessarily what it can be, you can still be a mom, you can still do different things,” she said.
And sometimes people become remote partners without intending it. Tom Corfin, who lives in New Hampshire, was working at a firm in the Northeast when it was acquired in 2018 by Atlanta-based Top 100 Firm Aprio. Having already worked remotely for almost a decade prior, he was well positioned to be a leader when Aprio — which had already been supportive of remote work — leaned even harder into the position during the COVID lockdown. He was officially made partner at the beginning of January 2023. “Once the pandemic hit, I didn’t have to learn to be remote … It took me probably two solid years of figuring out how to turn the switch off, how to adjust internally, how to be outside the office, the whole mentality — most people had to figure this out during and after COVID, where I was already six years ahead of the curve,” he said.
The day to day
The remote partners we spoke with reported that, in terms of their day-to-day work, there are not that many differences between themselves and their onsite counterparts. More of their meetings are online versus in-person but much of the work is the same. This is because even on-site accountants are increasingly serving clients remotely, and even if they’re not, there is still a large degree of asynchronous communication (e.g., asking for and getting specific documentation) that generally does not require physical presence. For instance, Kevin Loiselle, a tax partner with Aprio based in the San Francisco area, noted that the firm’s German clients are handled out of the Atlanta office, which works with them remotely anyway.
“I think from a client perspective, it’s a lot of the same … Our German practice partners are based out of Atlanta and work primarily with contacts in Germany, so [the lead partner] is kind of in the same boat as me. She deals with calls primarily with clients around and in Germany,” he said, adding that his own client base primarily comes from Australia and New Zealand.
Daiga, from CapinCrouse, also said her day as a remote partner does not significantly differ from the day of an on-site one. The main difference is that, as a remote partner at a smaller firm, she does not have some of the office management responsibilities that others do. In fact, she is more struck by the differences between tax partners and audit partners than by remote versus onsite ones.
“Compared to the 20-plus audit partners, we have three tax partners, so not quite as many across the firm and clients. Because tax jobs are smaller jobs, you have more jobs you handle as a partner. But also audit partners who are on site may have some office management responsibilities I don’t have. … Otherwise, I don’t know if there’s a whole lot of difference,” she said.
Similarly, Gant, the DBP partner in Miami, said the main difference between being remote and being on-site as a partner is that it is easier to print things at the office. “The big thing there: I can print things. But that’s really the only difference. But I bought myself a big professional printer recently, so now I have that. There were also free sodas and coffee [at the office], but otherwise it was pretty much the same. I can do anything from my house that I can do from my office,” she said.
Remote partners raised similar points regarding partner meetings. None of them reported feeling especially left out of key communications and decisions among the firm leaders. Many said that this was because the partners would mostly meet online anyway, due to being dispersed among several offices. So while remote partners aren’t sitting in the conference room for partner meetings, neither are the on-site ones typically. Kimberly Hastings, a Colorado-based remote partner for LA-based HCVT, noted that this is largely due to the investment firms made in communications and collaboration technology.
“Technology is an amazing thing, so even when we have monthly partner meetings for various groups — I’m on multiple committees for the firm and I’m our practice lead — a lot of these calls are already happening via Teams or Zoom because you have people in different offices. So I work with partners out in Orange County, Encino, West LA, Westlake Village and southern Pasadena, so even if we were all in the office, we’d still be on Teams calls anyway since we all have different offices,” she said.
Not everything is exactly the same, though: Remote partners say they need to be more on top of maintaining connections than people who are in an office, seeing each other every day. Danielle McGee, a Michigan-based partner for Los Angeles-based Katz Cassidy, said that, as a remote leader who is responsible for managing remote staff, she needs to be more intentional in keeping contact with people, as there aren’t those serendipitous hallway moments in the office.
“Since I came on as a remote partner, we’ve hired a bunch of remote employees and now we have them in Nebraska, Colorado, Seattle and Texas. I tend to do a little more intentional outreach to them because I know if you don’t, it’s easy for someone to not feel connected. I probably do that more than the folks in the office,” she said, though she didn’t want to imply those on-site aren’t doing this as well. “They’re doing more outreach with folks in the office or folks who are local in LA.”
Hastings, the HCVT partner, raised a similar point, saying that as a remote partner she needs to be more proactive in maintaining communications than someone on site, though she also said on site partners also have to maintain contact with people too, so it’s not dramatically different.
“I do find I’m more intentional about connecting with my team because there isn’t seeing someone in the break room or scheduling a lunch. I didn’t want to lose that, because it’s really an amazing team and I want us to keep that … . But I’d hesitate to say that’s different from other partners since my team is spread out so much, so even if I were sitting in my office in Encino, I would still not be in the office with most people on most days,” she said.
Loiselle, the San Francisco-based Aprio partner, also said he had to slightly modify how he fulfills his staff development and coaching responsibilities, since he can’t be in the office all the time, focusing more on several large sessions a year versus lots of smaller day-to-day interactions.
“There is definitely a difference in terms of staff training and development because, obviously, I’m not in the office on a day-to-day basis where someone can just swing by and say, ‘I’ve got a question about this.’ … I do end up going to Atlanta several times a year to lead technical training for wider groups of people who all get together at our headquarters; that is one of the major differences I would see,” he said.
The future
The remote partner has gone from being almost unheard-of to appearing in firms across the country and, overall, those who currently occupy these positions see themselves as part of a wider trend. While technological enablement is one reason, another commonly mentioned factor is the talent shortage. More firms are experiencing difficulty finding qualified candidates in their local geographies, and so are increasingly opening their minds to remote workers who can be leaders in their organization.
“Talent is getting harder and harder to find in the accounting profession and the pipeline is shrinking and our clients are demanding more and more,” said Randy Nail, HoganTaylor’s CEO. “So we’ve got some good old supply and demand economics going on: Accounting firms need to serve their clients, and to do that you have to be open to finding talent in different places and figuring out how to make it work within their culture. We’re already doing that and will continue doing that, and I think other firms will as well.”
McGee raised a similar point by noting the declining number of accounting graduates but also added that there’s an increasing number of retirements in the field as well that is driving the greater acceptance of remote partners.
“Firms need to be open-minded to having employees that are remote. I think our field as a whole has to have trust in our employees to begin with. They have access to Social Security numbers and all sorts of personally identifiable information for our clients, so if we can trust our employees with that, we ought to be able to trust them to get their work done,” she said.
Cohen & Co, a Top 50 Firm based in Cleveland, is acquiring Tassi and Company, based in the northwest suburbs of Chicago.
Tassi and Company provides accounting and consulting services tailored to the real estate industry. The deal is expected to close at the end of March and will enhance Cohen’s national real estate service offering and expand its presence in the Chicago market.Tasso was founded by Joe Tassi in 1990 and has approximately 35 employees. The firm serves real estate owners, developers, managers and investors. It offers outsourced fund and partnership accounting, property management and development accounting, construction draw accounting and tax services.
Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. Cohen has 88 partners and will be adding three people from Tassi — Joe Tassi, Terri Nietzel and Gretchen Sampson — as new partners.
Cohen & Co. ranked No. 43 on Accounting Today’s 2025 list of the Top 100 Firms, with 187.51 million in annual revenue and 781 employees.
“We are excited to welcome Tassi and Company to our firm,” says Cohen & Co CEO Chris Bellamy in a statement Thursday. “The real estate and construction industry is an important growth area and one that we’ve made a priority for investment. This transaction will provide additional expertise and scale for the benefit of our clients, as well as new career path opportunities for employees of both firms.”
“Cohen & Co shares our core cultural and entrepreneurial philosophies rooted in client service and taking care of our people,” said Tassi in a statement. “This is the natural next step for our firm as we plan for our future. We are impressed with Cohen & Co and are confident our clients and teammates will benefit from their leadership and strategic vision.”
The Tassi team will remain in their current Deer Park, Illinois, office space. Combined with Cohen & Co’s existing downtown Loop location, Chicago will becomes one of Cohen & Co’s largest geographic markets.
Calfee, Halter & Griswold LLP served as legal counsel to Cohen & Co. Creative Planning, LLC served as legal counsel to Tassi and Company.
Cohen & Co announced a strategic growth
In 2023, Cohen added
As Mahatma Gandhi famously said, “If you don’t ask, you don’t get it.” I bring this up because young accountants (and soon-to-be accounting graduates) are increasingly telling me they must take any assignment their firm gives them.
I understand not wanting to make “waves” when you’re just starting your career. But if you don’t have a clear vision of your future self as a CPA, then you’re never going to get there. And when you continually settle, you could be on the fast-track to burn out. Tri-Merit’s
In a perfect world, your company or firm should collaborate with you to align your work with your career goals. This is huge for recruiting and retaining top talent like you. Unfortunately, it doesn’t always work out that way. That means you need to take charge of controlling your career and for being your own advocate. That means getting clear about your passions.
Identifying your passions
I’ve had a lifelong love affair with entertainment, gaming and numbers. As a child I always claimed the role of banker when playing Monopoly. Growing up, I loved playing video games with my siblings too, whether it was Mario Kart battles or teaming up in co-op adventures. Outside, we spent hours playing football and basketball where competition and strategy were just as exciting. That drive for competition and the thrill of winning — whether in video games or sports — fueled my love for gaming.
Watching characters evolve and worlds unfold has always inspired me. It’s part of what drives my passion for connecting finance to these industries. In many ways, a financial statement is a big puzzle to solve.
I started my career at the Big Four firm where I had interned in college. I was thrilled to have a job at such a prestigious firm even though I knew my first stop — auditing for a large retail chain in Florida — was not where I wanted to spend my career. To lay the groundwork for a transfer to a more interesting area, I made sure I was always one of our group’s strongest performers and used my spare time to scour the firm’s website to identify the partners and managers in charge of the media and entertainment practice. I stayed up on current events in the entertainment industry and even took CPE courses to learn more about accounting issues and nuances of the media and entertainment business.
Once the retail audit in Florida was done, I reached out to my resource director and asked if she knew of any job openings in the media and entertainment practice. The firm had NBC as a client in Los Angeles and New York. It had just opened up a smaller audit for the Puerto Rico division that was headed up in Florida. I liked my chances. But the retail group needed someone year-round in my role. Since I was one of the strongest performers, they didn’t want me to go. So, I kept working hard but never stopped pushing for a transfer and was finally offered an audit assignment for NBC New York. Right before I accepted the transfer, an older colleague I was close with told me that if I really wanted a career as an entertainment industry accountant, then I would have to be in Los Angeles where all the action was. Plus, I didn’t want to go back to the cold weather after my time in Florida.
Instead of moving to New York, I kept looking for opportunities on the West Coast. Eventually, a recruiter told me about Siegried, a nationwide leadership and financial advisory firm with a growing presence in the Los Angeles entertainment market. I flew out for a weekend interview. I was hired soon thereafter as a 23-year-old senior accountant and moved to LA.
I quickly got exposure to entertainment industry leaders such as Caesars and Fox. The Fox assignment was especially rewarding as we had to create 16 new financial statements from scratch for different parts of the company that never had their own financial statements before.
From Siegfried, I moved on to Netflix and ITV America before starting my own firm,
5 keys to charting your ideal career path
1. Clarify your goals: Understand why you’re passionate about an industry and how it aligns with your skills and career aspirations. Even if you don’t know what your true passion in life is, that’s OK. What types of things do you find yourself doing when nobody is forcing you to do it? What energizes you? For example, if you like shopping, you could look into career opportunities in retail. If you love cooking and hosting dinner parties, you could consider the restaurant or hospitality industry. Try to get part-time jobs or internships in those industries, so you’ll get a feel for which parts of the industry you like and which parts you don’t like before making a full-time commitment there.
2. Do your research: Learn about your current (or prospective) firm’s involvement in your desired industry. The web and AI have made it incredibly easy to do research on targeted companies and industries. But you must also get out and talk to people in those industries and ask them what their experiences have been like. Also talk to the managers and their direct reports at your firm who are working in your targeted industry. They’re tasked with helping to develop talent and so they’ll appreciate knowing what you’re really interested in and think you might be good at. Lean into face-to-face interaction, even if that makes you uncomfortable at first.
3. Show your value: Highlight your performance and explain how your interests could benefit the firm, such as bringing fresh perspectives or expanding the client base. There’s always a need for fresh ideas and approaches in our profession. Accounting firms are prone to SALY (Same as Last Year) thinking. But you’re young. You can bring in a fresh take such as: “Hey, I understand how you guys do this. But I learned this: x, y and z. Do you think this would be interesting to you?” They might not agree, but it shows you have an interest in their business and that you’re taking the initiative to learn. That will help you stand out.
4. Have a thoughtful conversation: Schedule a meeting with the managers and resource directors at your firm to discuss your career development, share your interests and propose actionable steps, like taking on relevant projects or clients. They usually have control over your schedule and how your time is allocated at the firm. Make them your allies.
5. Be patient but persistent: The influencers you’re trying to reach are busy people and may not have the same sense of urgency as you do. This is one of the hardest lessons for young professionals to learn. Just because you sent someone a text or email doesn’t mean they’re going to drop everything to read it. You must keep reminding them who you are and what you’re seeking. You may need to follow up every week or two (put it in your calendar or reminder tool) to keep the heat on. Don’t worry about being too pushy —- they’ll let you know if you’re over-stepping. More often than not, they’ll appreciate the courteous, professional reminders.
No one knows you better than yourself and it’s on you — not your employer — to chart your most fulfilling career path. Be your own advocate. My journey from retail auditing to entertainment industry accounting wasn’t just luck — it was the result of careful planning, persistent networking and a clear vision of where I wanted to go. You can too.
Cutting IRS staffing in half over the next 10 months would mean less help and longer waits for many U.S. taxpayers and increase the risk that wealthy tax cheats escape paying what they owe.
It also would leave the Internal Revenue Service with its smallest workforce since at least the 1960s, according to
The Trump administration plans to cut the number of IRS employees in half by the end of the year, Bloomberg Tax reported Tuesday. But gutting the workforce so dramatically and so quickly could mean slower refunds and processing of returns for many Americans, taking the agency back to the difficulties it experienced before an infusion of tens of billions in new funding under the 2022 tax-and-climate law known as the Inflation Reduction Act, according to tax professionals.
“This strikes me as foolhardy, unless your intention is to bankrupt the US government by essentially making tax-paying optional,” said Kimberly Clausing, a tax law professor at the University of California at Los Angeles and a former Treasury Department official under President Joe Biden. “I think the approach they’re following so far seems to be taking a wrecking ball to the system without concern for the consequences.”
The planned job cuts in an IRS workforce that in January was roughly 100,000 would come across the agency. They would include attrition, layoffs, and two already-announced efforts: the firing of probationary employees, and Trump adviser Elon Musk’s “deferred resignation” plan, under which some employees have resigned in exchange for getting paid through this September.
About 12,000 employees have already left the agency under those two efforts.
“The IRS needs more people, not less,” said Lee Meyercord, a partner at Holland & Knight. Job cuts like these “will reverse the dramatic improvement in recent years in taxpayer service, collection, and enforcement.”
Tax cheats “will sleep better at night,” Clausing said, anticipating that audits of wealthy people would be more drawn-out, less efficient, and less probing when they happen at all.
Structure changes, uncertainty
Not everyone has the same view of the workforce changes.
Halving staff numbers “will force the IRS to rethink how it’s structured and how it operates,” said David Kautter, federal specialty tax leader at RSM US LLP and a former Treasury Department tax official during President Donald Trump’s first term. The administration still wants to collect taxes, but the huge cuts are an expression of the idea that the IRS “needs to change” and “do something different,” he said.
But large staffing cuts would mean longer waits for taxpayers to resolve disputes with the IRS, said Nikole Flax, a principal at PricewaterhouseCoopers and a former commissioner of the IRS’s Large Business & International division.
There would be “less opportunities for tax certainty” if dispute-resolution programs like appeals, fast-track settlement and advance pricing agreements become less accessible to taxpayers, she said.
Longer waits on dispute resolution would also cost companies money, in the form of continuing legal fees and interest that keeps accruing on their tax bills.
‘Distrust of the government’
Which areas will feel the greatest impact will depend on exactly where the job cuts ultimately are made, said Monte Jackel, principal at Jackel Tax Law and a former IRS official. Whether they’re from employees generally or focused on IRS divisions such as LB&I and the Office of Chief Counsel; whether they’re primarily in Washington or outside Washington.
“I don’t know how they’re going to prioritize it,” Jackel said.
The consequences of the job cuts could be long-lasting, said Janet Holtzblatt, senior fellow at the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center.
Next year’s filing season was already looking “shaky” anyway, she said, because IRS funding via the Inflation Reduction Act is supposed to dry up by the end of this year, and layoffs will only deepen the problems with IRS performance.
“In combination, it adds to the distrust of the government and it creates further vulnerabilities in the IRS’s ability to administer the tax code,” Holtzblatt said.
The threat of major job cuts has already decimated morale among IRS employees, said David Carrone, an IRS revenue agent and a chapter president for the National Treasury Employees Union in Arkansas and Louisiana.
“Your whole routine is gone. You’re waiting for that tap on your shoulder,” Carrone said. Employees continue to do their work, he said, but “the reality of the situation is everybody’s head is spinning.”
Kautter said the job cuts will spur the agency to adopt technology rapidly to carry out its work.
But improved IRS technology isn’t a substitute for the people needed to conduct complex audits of wealthy people’s complicated returns that are needed to force them to pay up, Carrone said.
“The computer can’t catch those.”
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