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The purpose of this report is to provide readers with an initial understanding of the specific business practices of Certified Public Accountants (CPAs), Enrolled Agents (EAs), & other tax professionals, especially as they pertain to their strategies for entering the financial planning & investment management business. CPAs, EAs, & other tax professionals have been flirting with the financial planning & investment management business for nearly two decades. They have been pushed by the declining economics of the tax business and the unfavorable press of the audit business, and pulled by the economic possibilities of serving the investment needs of their existing client bases. There are approximately 40,000 CPA firms and 460,000 CPAs. A small minority of these CPAs work at the twenty largest firms. The vast majority work as sole practitioners and at other small firms. Information on this market has been scarce and vendors continue to struggle with how to offer value-added services. What products & services do tax pros use? What broker/dealers and technology do they use? How do they market to their clients? What are their profit margins? This research provides an in-depth look at how tax pros manage their businesses and identifies key opportunities for vendors seeking to serve this market. A parallel report published by Tiburon addresses this market in a top-down way, outlining the size of the tax pros market. This report goes a step further and specifically utilizes detailed survey data from Tiburon’s 42-question tax pro benchmarking tool at www.TaxProBestPractices.Com to identify the product usage, business models, & best practices of leading tax pros. This is the second draft of Tiburon’s research on this topic.

Tiburon’s first draft of this report was published in 2003; that draft was Tiburon’s first attempt at analyzing the data from its tax pro benchmarking tool.

This is Tiburon’s second draft of this report; this draft aligns the report’s structure with that of other Tiburon research reports. It is based on data from 1,210 tax pros.

Written by Tiburon Managing Principal Chip Roame, Senior Research Manager Pablo Perez, & Research Associate Madhu Subramanian

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