Eide Bailly, a Top 25 Firm based in Fargo, North Dakota, is growing its presence in the Pacific Northwest by adding Traner Smith, based in Edmonds, Washington, effective June 2, 2025. 

Traner Smith’s team includes two partners and 16 staff members and specializes in tax compliance and advisory services. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. Eide Bailly ranked No. 19 on Accounting Today‘s 2025 list of the Top 100 Firms, with $704.98 million in annual revenue, approximately 387 partners and over 3,500 employees. 

Eide Bailly already has offices in Seattle, but hopes to grow further in the Pacific Northwest. “We’re pleased to welcome the talented team at Traner Smith to Eide Bailly,” said Eide Bailly managing partner and CEO Jeremy Hauk in a statement Monday. “Their expertise with high-net-worth individuals, real estate and privately held businesses aligns well with our strengths, and their client-centric approach is a perfect cultural fit. Having an office in Edmonds, Washington, is a great complement to our existing presence in Seattle. Together, we’re poised to deliver even greater value to families and businesses in the Seattle metro area.” 

“Joining Eide Bailly is a natural next step for us — it provides access to deeper technical resources in areas like state and local tax, national tax, succession planning and international tax while allowing us to continue the personalized service our clients value,” said Kevin Smith, a partner at Traner Smith, in a statement. 

“With this expanded support and platform, we’re excited to grow our reach, elevate what we do best, and help more clients than ever before,” said Shane Summer, another partner at Traner Smith, in a statement.

Eide Bailly has announced several other mergers in recent weeks. Earlier this month, it added Hamilton Tharp, a firm based in Solana Beach, California, and Roycon, a Salesforce consulting firm in Austin, Texas. In late April, it merged in Volpe Brown & Co., in North Canton, Ohio. Eide Bailly expanded to Ohio last year by merging in Apple Growth Partners. Last year, Eide Bailly also sold its wealth management practice to Sequoia Financial Group. The deal with Sequoia appears to be fueling the recent M&A activity. As part of the deal, Eide Bailly Advisors became part of Sequoia Financial, while Eide Bailly received an equity investment in Sequoia.

In 2023, Eide Bailly added Secore & Niedzialek PC in Phoenix, Raimondo Pettit Group in Southern California, Bessolo Haworth in California and Washington State, Spectrum Health Partners in Franklin, Tennessee, and King & Oliason in Seattle. In 2022, it merged in Seim Johnson in Omaha, Nebraska, and in 2021, PWB CPAs & Advisors in Minnesota. In 2020, it added Mukai, Greenlee & Co. in Phoenix, HMWC CPAs in Tustin, California, and Platinum Consulting in Fullerton.

Top 100 firm BMSS announced an investment in Knuula, an engagement letter and client documents software provider. The investment from BMSS came after successfully implementing Knuula over the past year to streamline its engagement letter process. It was after doing so that the firm’s leadership came to believe that Knuula could create complex client documents at an enormous scale, which was a huge need for the broader accounting industry. BMSS thought this presented a great opportunity to guide Knuula and help facilitate its growth. 

“We began working with Knuula in Spring 2024 to streamline our engagement letter process,” said Don Murphy, Managing Member of BMSS. “It quickly became clear that Knuula was not only a strong solution for us, but also an ideal partner in advancing industry-wide automation.”

While the specific terms of the deal were not disclosed, a spokesperson with Knuula said that, after this investment, BMSS and a collection of 21 of their partners now own 13% of the company. The investment represents not some passive revenue deal but an active collaboration between the two companies, with the spokesperson saying they will be working closely together on things like product development, new features, improvements, and networking.

The deal comes about a year after Knuula integrated with QuickFee, a receivables management platform for professional service providers, which allowed users to have engagement letters directly connecting to their QuickFee billing platform, tying the execution of the letter directly to the billing process. 

“We’ve long sought to partner with a firm focused on strategic innovation in the accounting space,” said Jamie Peebles, founder of Knuula. “To develop a perfect solution for large firms, it is ideal to have a partner that is willing to work closely together and iterate quickly. This requires constant feedback between our two teams. The IT team from BMSS worked with our development team constantly and helped us iterate rapidly. We also had consistent input from partners, manager, and administrative staff to help us make valuable changes to Knuula. BMSS was a perfect partner for us.”

The American Institute of CPAs is asking accountants to reach out to their congressional representatives and protest the proposed elimination of the ability of pass-through entities such as accounting firms to deduct state and local taxes.

The AICPA sent out a call to action on Friday urging CPAs to contact their members of Congress and voice their opposition to the “unfair targeting” of pass-through businesses in the tax reconciliation bill moving through Congress, such as those of accountants, dentists, doctors, lawyers and pharmacists, through the elimination of the Pass-through Entity Tax SALT deduction. 

“This would increase taxes on the partners/owners of many service-based businesses, such as accounting firms, discourage the creation and growth of such businesses, and further expand the disparity between C corporations and pass-through entities,” the AICPA warned.

On Sunday night, the bill advanced through a key House committee after several Republicans who had blocked the bill in the House Budget Committee on Friday agreed to let it proceed after winning promises of faster cuts in Medicaid health coverage. But the AICPA warned last week about several provisions in the bill, including the change in the SALT deduction rules, while praising others. 

The AICPA is concerned about language in the legislation, named after President Trump’s description, “One Big, Beautiful Bill,” that would eliminate the ability of certain pass-through entities, including accounting firms, to take advantage of the state and local tax deduction for pass-throughs. 

“This legislation would not only have an impact on the accounting profession, but also on many of their clients,” the AICPA pointed out. “Under this legislation, accounting firms will be worse off than they were after the application of the SALT cap under the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) and before the IRS-approved deductions were authorized. Specifically, the proposal newly subjects local entity level taxes to the individual SALT cap.”

The SALT cap for individual taxpayers has also been a bone of contention for Republican lawmakers in blue states like New York, New Jersey and California, who have been pushing for an expansion of the $10,000 limit in the TCJA. Under the current bill, the SALT cap would increase to $30,000, but some lawmakers would like to see it increase to $80,000 or higher. However, the cap would now be imposed on pass-through businesses under the bill.

“The proposed tax legislation unfairly subjects specified service trades or businesses (SSTBs), such as accountants, doctors, lawyers, dentists, veterinarians, etc., to the individual cap on state and local income tax deductions at the federal level, regardless of partners’/owners’ income level or the state in which they live,” said the AICPA.

“When comparing the tax treatment of state and local taxes for pass-through entities between the TCJA and this proposed bill, the sole change is the targeting of pass-through service providers, who were already substantially limited under the qualified business income (QBI) deduction for SSTBs,” the AICPA pointed out.

The TCJA excluded many firms from claiming the full 20% QBI deduction, which would increase to 23% under the bill.

The AICPA is encouraging accountants to call or email their senators and representatives by Wednesday, May 21, using this link to find and contact their members of Congress. It provided a sample email blurb to send to them:

“I urge you to oppose provisions included in the House Ways and Means Committee’s tax reform legislation that unfairly target the ability of service businesses structured as pass-through entities to deduct their state and local taxes (SALT) from their federal tax liability while providing no such limit to other businesses. This legislation effectively discriminates against particular pass-through businesses by indirectly raising taxes on those entities that are considered the backbone of the American economy. These provisions greatly widen the disparity in treatment between pass-through entities and other kinds of businesses, and I strongly urge you to oppose these provisions of the bill.”