We Were Doing the Most Expensive Part of Tax for Free

By Solon Angel

We thought tax payments were the boring end of the workflow. Turns out we were doing the most expensive part of tax for free.

I sat on a call last week with a firm in the southeast. Mid-size, mostly older individual clients, the kind of book that took thirty years to build and will not survive being told to log into a government portal. The founder had been staring down September 30, the day the IRS stopped mailing paper refund checks, and doing the math on what happens when every payment his clients used to send by check needs to go digital. He was not worried about the technology. He was excited. He said the mandate was finally the reason to charge for something they had been giving away.

That sentence has been rattling around my head since.

Because when you actually look at what firms do around payment execution, the list is long and none of it shows up on a bill. One practice I talked to calculates the estimate, then sends the client an annotated screenshot of the IRS payment page with arrows on the boxes to click, then jumps on Zoom anyway because the client cannot get past step three. Another firm has 1,500 medical clients and spends ten to thirty minutes of every meeting walking someone through their bank portal. Even collecting a correct bank statement can eat a full session. This is not tax work. This is concierge work. It just gets invoiced as tax work, which is to say, not invoiced at all.

The mandate is going to make this worse before it gets better. The IRS phase-out has already left more than 830,000 taxpayers waiting months on refunds because bank information was missing or wrong, and every one of those people has a preparer who is now doing intake and validation of banking data at engagement time instead of on the return. Roughly 6.5 million filers used paper checks in the last season, most of them older or lower-income, most of them the exact clients who cannot self-serve on IRS Direct Pay.

Meanwhile the confirmation problem never went away. A regional firm on CCH Access told me they have learned the hard way that a payment may not have actually gone through, and they now spend real staff hours outside the tax software chasing clients to confirm the money left the bank. They called it a permanent tax on their time. That is the exact phrase. Permanent tax. On work they invoice at zero.

Now look at what the market is doing on the other side of the ledger. Individual tax-planning packages are pricing at three to eight thousand a year. Business-owner advisory is landing between five and fifteen. Comprehensive concierge advisory for multi-entity clients is running fifteen to thirty thousand a year, and CAS practices are growing at seventeen percent median annually. Every one of those tiers is asking the same question, which is what else can we own that is high-touch, recurring, and already expected. Payment execution is the most obvious answer nobody is writing down.

The southeast firm figured it out. They stopped framing the mandate as a support ticket surge and started framing it as pricing air-cover. Their clients are about to feel pain. Their competitors are about to eat it. They are going to charge for it. Not as a line item buried in a package. As a tier. Owned end to end, with confirmation, with cleanup, with the Zoom call priced in.

The reframe is not complicated. If you are already doing the work, price it. If you are not already doing the work, the mandate is about to make you do it anyway, so you might as well price it then. The window where this looks like a favor is closing. The window where it looks like a service is open right now.

I am not going to pretend this is the whole answer. But I have watched a lot of firms in the last month realize the same thing at roughly the same time, and it is the first shift in a while that feels like it changes the shape of the P&L instead of just the workflow. That is worth paying attention to.

Solon Angel is the Co-Founder and CEO of Remitian, the tax payment infrastructure platform for accounting firms, banks, and their clients.