Nia Bowers
Source: Carlotta Thompson
The tax preparation industry in the United States is built almost entirely around a single, fixed point on the calendar: the filing deadline. Millions of business owners engage with a tax professional exactly once a year, hand over a shoebox or spreadsheet of financial activity from the prior twelve months, and wait to find out what they owe. Tax Strategists of America (TSOA), founded by former IRS auditor Carlotta Thompson, is built around a different premise. That the highest-value tax decisions are made before a tax year closes, not while a return is being assembled after the fact.
The core distinction: preparation versus strategy
Tax Strategists of America‘s public materials draw a sharp line between two functions that many taxpayers assume are the same thing. Tax preparation is retrospective, a preparer takes financial activity that has already occurred and reports it accurately, in compliance with IRS filing rules and deadlines. Tax strategy, by contrast, is prospective, it involves decisions made in advance of a transaction or a tax year’s close: how a business entity should be structured, whether a real estate purchase is structured correctly to be tax beneficial and thus paired with a cost segregation study, whether a home office or a family payroll arrangement is properly documented before it’s relied on as a deduction.
The firm argues that these two functions pull in different directions organizationally. A compliance-focused team is, by necessity, oriented around IRS deadlines: the individual filing deadline in April, the extended deadline in October, and quarterly estimated payment dates. Additionally, the corporate and partnership returns are due in March with an extension deadline of September. A strategy-focused team, Tax Strategists of America argues, needs to be oriented around the opposite: the beginning of the tax year, when there’s still time to implement something before it’s too late to matter. Because of this, the firm has structured its own operations to separate strategy work from return preparation, a decision Carlotta has described publicly as a response to watching the two functions compete for the same limited attention inside a single team.
Who the firm targets
Tax Strategists of America’s marketing describes a client base concentrated among business owners, real estate investors, and self-employed professionals, with the firm suggesting that more advanced strategic work (cost segregation studies, entity restructuring, family office-style planning) tends to become cost-effective once a business is netting $100,000 or more in net income annually. This threshold framing is a common one across the tax strategy industry; the underlying logic is that some strategies carry meaningful implementation costs (a formal cost segregation study, for instance, is a paid engagement performed by a qualified third party) that only make financial sense once the resulting deduction is large enough to justify the expense.
Tax Strategists of America’s marketing describes a client base concentrated among business owners, real estate investors, and self-employed professionals, with the firm focusing its more advanced strategic work on business owners generating $100,000 or more in net income annually.
The strategies the firm discusses publicly
Several of the specific tools Tax Strategists of America discusses in its marketing and public interviews are well-established, IRS-recognized strategies used broadly across the tax and accounting industry, none of them are proprietary or unique to this firm, despite sometimes being marketed with proprietary-sounding names:
The cost segregation studies, which reclassify components of a real estate purchase to accelerate depreciation deductions into earlier years, rather than spreading them evenly over 27.5 or 39 years.
The Augusta Rule (IRC Section 280A(g)), which permits a taxpayer to rent their personal residence to their own business for up to 14 days a year without reporting that rental income, provided the arrangement reflects a genuine business purpose and a documented fair-market rate.
Family employment arrangements, in which a business owner pays your children for legitimate work performed in the business, subject to documentation and reasonable-compensation requirements.
Entity structuring and reasonable compensation analysis, particularly around S-corporation elections, where a shareholder-employee’s salary must be “reasonable” relative to services performed in order for the remaining profit distribution to avoid self-employment tax treatment.
The Qualified Business Income (QBI) deduction, a provision allowing many pass-through business owners to deduct up to 20% of qualified business income, subject to income-based limitations that vary significantly by industry and compensation structure.
A note on scrutiny and documentation
Several of these strategies, real estate professional status in particular, along with related-party payroll arrangements, are among the more heavily scrutinized areas in IRS examinations specifically because they are easy to claim and comparatively difficult to substantiate without contemporaneous records. This is consistent with Thompson’s own stated thesis, drawn from her time at the IRS: that documentation, not the underlying legitimacy of a strategy, is usually the deciding factor in whether a deduction survives an audit.