Welcome to the Financial Advisor Success Podcast, where you go behind the scenes with

financial planner, speaker, and consultant Michael Kitsis to hear stories of how leading

financial advisors navigated the inevitable challenges that arise on the path to success

and get insight from leading industry consultants about how to break through to the next

level in your advisory business. And now here's your host, Michael Kitsis. Welcome, everyone.

Welcome to the 459th episode of the Financial Advisor's Success podcast. My guest on today's

podcast is Stephen Jarvis. Stephen is the CEO of Retirement Tax Services, a tax education and preparation firm that

works with financial advisors nationwide.

What's unique about Stephen, though, is how his experience as a CPA, who has worked

alongside many financial advisors, has given him insight into how advisors can best play nice

with CPAs to ensure the best outcomes for their mutual clients.

In this episode, we talk in-depth about how Stephen finds that proactive communication,

to avoid surprises when tax filing season arrives, is one of the keys for financial advisors

to build trusting relationships with CPAs. Why Stephen thinks such communication is particularly

important when clients have 1099 R's to help the CPA understand the background of a particular distribution, for example, whether it was a Roth conversion or a qualified charitable distribution, and how Stephen has seen advisors build stronger CPA relationships and prevent tax return errors by providing a year-end tax summary

for each client that they can send to their CPA directly, outlining the different tax forms

that will be generated based on the advisor's work and the context behind them, including

information on closed accounts that the client might not have considered.

We also talk about how Stephen finds that making CPA's collaborative decision makers on key tax planning strategies alongside the financial advisor and their client can help build the mutual professional to professional relationship, how Stephen finds that advisors can further support CPAs by being mindful of their annual workflow, for example, by discussing a potential Roth conversion in the summer or early fall

rather than during the spring or at the very end of the year when the CPA is likely to be very

busy. And how Stephen notes that major tax legislation, such as the One Big Beautiful Bill Act,

not only impacts financial advisors, but also CPAs themselves, as they have to adjust to new IRS guidance and changes

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