{"id":14267,"date":"2024-11-11T19:21:40","date_gmt":"2024-11-11T19:21:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/taxops.com\/?p=14267"},"modified":"2025-09-09T16:05:41","modified_gmt":"2025-09-09T16:05:41","slug":"the-evolution-of-ipt-why-tax-education-is-so-important-with-chris-muntifering","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/taxops.com\/the-evolution-of-ipt-why-tax-education-is-so-important-with-chris-muntifering\/","title":{"rendered":"The Evolution of IPT: Why Tax Education is So Important with Chris Muntifering"},"content":{"rendered":"\n[et_pb_section fb_built=&#8221;1&#8243; _builder_version=&#8221;4.17.4&#8243; _module_preset=&#8221;default&#8221; background_color=&#8221;#003254&#8243; custom_padding=&#8221;7px||5px|||&#8221; global_colors_info=&#8221;{}&#8221;][et_pb_row column_structure=&#8221;3_5,2_5&#8243; make_equal=&#8221;on&#8221; custom_padding_last_edited=&#8221;on|desktop&#8221; padding_top_bottom_link_1=&#8221;false&#8221; padding_top_bottom_link_2=&#8221;false&#8221; 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_builder_version=&#8221;4.27.4&#8243; _module_preset=&#8221;default&#8221; global_colors_info=&#8221;{}&#8221;][\/et_pb_video][et_pb_code _builder_version=&#8221;4.27.4&#8243; _module_preset=&#8221;default&#8221; global_colors_info=&#8221;{}&#8221;]<div style=\"width: 100%; height: 200px; margin-bottom: 20px; border-radius: 6px; overflow:hidden;\"><iframe class=\"lazyload\" style=\"width: 100%; height: 200px;\" frameborder=\"no\" scrolling=\"no\" allow=\"clipboard-write\" seamless data-src=\"https:\/\/player.captivate.fm\/episode\/6283ac62-f603-41d3-bdbe-7dd1048c3d88\"><\/iframe><\/div>[\/et_pb_code][\/et_pb_column][et_pb_column type=&#8221;2_5&#8243; _builder_version=&#8221;4.16&#8243; background_color=&#8221;#A0CD46&#8243; custom_padding=&#8221;8vw|5%||5%&#8221; custom_padding_tablet=&#8221;8vw|10%||10%||true&#8221; custom_padding_phone=&#8221;&#8221; custom_padding_last_edited=&#8221;on|tablet&#8221; global_colors_info=&#8221;{}&#8221; padding_tablet=&#8221;8vw|10%||10%||true&#8221; padding_last_edited=&#8221;on|tablet&#8221; custom_padding__hover=&#8221;|||&#8221; padding_phone=&#8221;8vw|10%||10%||true&#8221;][et_pb_text _builder_version=&#8221;4.17.4&#8243; text_font=&#8221;||||||||&#8221; text_font_size=&#8221;15px&#8221; text_line_height=&#8221;1.4em&#8221; link_font=&#8221;||||on||||&#8221; link_text_color=&#8221;#ffffff&#8221; header_font=&#8221;||||||||&#8221; header_4_font=&#8221;Lato|700|||||||&#8221; header_4_text_color=&#8221;#1a1844&#8243; header_4_line_height=&#8221;1.8em&#8221; background_layout=&#8221;dark&#8221; locked=&#8221;off&#8221; global_colors_info=&#8221;{}&#8221;]<h4>Hosts &amp; Guests<\/h4>\n<p>Meredith Smith, State and Local Tax Senior Manager<\/p>\n<p>Judy Vorndran,\u00a0 Partner, State and Local Tax Senior<\/p>\n<p><span data-contrast=\"auto\" xml:lang=\"EN-US\" lang=\"EN-US\" class=\"TextRun SCXW70031686 BCX0\"><span class=\"NormalTextRun SCXW70031686 BCX0\" data-ccp-parastyle=\"Script\" data-ccp-parastyle-defn=\"{&quot;ObjectId&quot;:&quot;ac08c005-c11f-45d6-91c8-4720e22ee077|28&quot;,&quot;ClassId&quot;:1073872969,&quot;Properties&quot;:[469775450,&quot;Script&quot;,201340122,&quot;2&quot;,134233614,&quot;true&quot;,469778129,&quot;Script&quot;,335572020,&quot;1&quot;,268442635,&quot;28&quot;,335559739,&quot;360&quot;,469777841,&quot;Times New Roman&quot;,469777842,&quot;Times New Roman&quot;,469777843,&quot;Times New Roman&quot;,469777844,&quot;Times New Roman&quot;,469769226,&quot;Times New Roman&quot;]}\">Chris Muntifering, Executive Director, Institute for Professionals in Taxation<\/span><\/span><\/p>[\/et_pb_text][\/et_pb_column][\/et_pb_row][\/et_pb_section][et_pb_section fb_built=&#8221;1&#8243; 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hover_transition_delay__hover=&#8221;0ms&#8221; hover_transition_delay__hover_enabled=&#8221;0ms&#8221; hover_transition_speed_curve__hover=&#8221;ease&#8221; hover_transition_speed_curve__hover_enabled=&#8221;ease&#8221; background_color_gradient_stops__hover=&#8221;#2b87da 0%|#29c4a9 100%&#8221;][et_pb_column type=&#8221;4_4&#8243; _builder_version=&#8221;4.16&#8243; custom_padding=&#8221;|||&#8221; global_colors_info=&#8221;{}&#8221; custom_padding__hover=&#8221;|||&#8221;][et_pb_text _builder_version=&#8221;4.16&#8243; text_font=&#8221;||||||||&#8221; header_font=&#8221;||||||||&#8221; header_2_font=&#8221;Lato|700|||||||&#8221; header_2_text_color=&#8221;#003254&#8243; header_2_font_size=&#8221;52px&#8221; header_2_line_height=&#8221;1.2em&#8221; background_layout=&#8221;dark&#8221; header_2_font_size_tablet=&#8221;&#8221; header_2_font_size_phone=&#8221;36px&#8221; header_2_font_size_last_edited=&#8221;on|phone&#8221; locked=&#8221;off&#8221; global_colors_info=&#8221;{}&#8221;]<h2><strong>What You Will Discover:<\/strong><\/h2>[\/et_pb_text][et_pb_divider color=&#8221;#A0CD46&#8243; divider_weight=&#8221;5px&#8221; _builder_version=&#8221;4.16&#8243; max_width=&#8221;120px&#8221; locked=&#8221;off&#8221; global_colors_info=&#8221;{}&#8221;][\/et_pb_divider][et_pb_text _builder_version=&#8221;4.27.4&#8243; _module_preset=&#8221;default&#8221; ul_text_color=&#8221;#003254&#8243; ul_font_size=&#8221;16px&#8221; global_colors_info=&#8221;{}&#8221;]<p><span>In this episode of the SALTovation podcast, Chris Muntifering, Executive Director at the Institute for Professionals in Taxation. Chris shares his journey from a finance graduate to a seasoned tax professional, emphasizing how he fell into property tax and eventually became a key player in IPT. Chris discusses the importance of education in tax management, with IPT providing resources for professionals at all levels, from basic to advanced training across various tax disciplines. 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header_2_font_size=&#8221;52px&#8221; header_2_line_height=&#8221;1.2em&#8221; background_layout=&#8221;dark&#8221; header_2_font_size_tablet=&#8221;&#8221; header_2_font_size_phone=&#8221;36px&#8221; header_2_font_size_last_edited=&#8221;on|phone&#8221; locked=&#8221;off&#8221; global_colors_info=&#8221;{}&#8221;]<h2><strong>Topics Discussed in this Episode:<\/strong><\/h2>[\/et_pb_text][et_pb_divider color=&#8221;#A0CD46&#8243; divider_weight=&#8221;5px&#8221; _builder_version=&#8221;4.16&#8243; max_width=&#8221;120px&#8221; locked=&#8221;off&#8221; global_colors_info=&#8221;{}&#8221;][\/et_pb_divider][et_pb_text _builder_version=&#8221;4.27.4&#8243; _module_preset=&#8221;default&#8221; ul_text_color=&#8221;#003254&#8243; ul_font_size=&#8221;16px&#8221; global_colors_info=&#8221;{}&#8221;]<ul>\n<li>Chris&#8217;s journey into tax began unexpectedly, showcasing how many professionals enter the field.<\/li>\n<li>The Institute for Professionals in Taxation (IPT) focuses on education across multiple tax disciplines.<\/li>\n<li>IPT&#8217;s mission emphasizes providing broad-based education, catering to various levels of tax professionals.<\/li>\n<li>Networking and relationships are vital for tax professionals, as they provide essential resources and support.<\/li>\n<li>Chris highlights the importance of adapting tax knowledge in an evolving business landscape.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>[\/et_pb_text][\/et_pb_column][\/et_pb_row][et_pb_row _builder_version=&#8221;4.17.4&#8243; 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locked=&#8221;off&#8221; global_colors_info=&#8221;{}&#8221;]<h2><strong>Relevant Links:<\/strong><\/h2>[\/et_pb_text][et_pb_divider color=&#8221;#A0CD46&#8243; divider_weight=&#8221;5px&#8221; _builder_version=&#8221;4.16&#8243; max_width=&#8221;120px&#8221; locked=&#8221;off&#8221; global_colors_info=&#8221;{}&#8221;][\/et_pb_divider][et_pb_text _builder_version=&#8221;4.17.4&#8243; _module_preset=&#8221;default&#8221; ul_text_color=&#8221;#003254&#8243; ul_font_size=&#8221;16px&#8221; custom_padding=&#8221;||0px|||&#8221; global_colors_info=&#8221;{}&#8221;]<span style=\"font-size: large;\">Subscribe on your favorite podcast app <a href=\"https:\/\/truthwork.slack.com\/archives\/D03426YPV5Z\/p1689255898860749\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">here<\/a>.<\/span>\n\n<span style=\"font-size: large;\">Follow us on <a href=\"https:\/\/www.linkedin.com\/company\/201050\/admin\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">LinkedIn<\/a> and <a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/channel\/UCMB1ZQNGXM_F777SIEl8Vjw\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">YouTube<\/a>.<\/span>\n\n<span style=\"font-size: large;\"><a href=\"https:\/\/taxops.com\/contact\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Talk to a Tax Advocate Today!<\/a><\/span>[\/et_pb_text][\/et_pb_column][\/et_pb_row][et_pb_row _builder_version=&#8221;4.17.4&#8243; 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header_2_font_size_last_edited=&#8221;on|phone&#8221; locked=&#8221;off&#8221; global_colors_info=&#8221;{}&#8221;]<h2>Transcript<\/h2>[\/et_pb_text][et_pb_divider color=&#8221;#A0CD46&#8243; divider_weight=&#8221;5px&#8221; _builder_version=&#8221;4.16&#8243; max_width=&#8221;120px&#8221; locked=&#8221;off&#8221; global_colors_info=&#8221;{}&#8221;][\/et_pb_divider][et_pb_text _builder_version=&#8221;4.17.4&#8243; text_text_color=&#8221;#000000&#8243; text_font_size=&#8221;15px&#8221; text_line_height=&#8221;2em&#8221; link_font=&#8221;||||||||&#8221; link_text_color=&#8221;#fe4943&#8243; background_layout=&#8221;dark&#8221; max_width=&#8221;800px&#8221; global_colors_info=&#8221;{}&#8221;]<p><b><span data-contrast=\"none\">Meredith Smith:<\/span><\/b><span data-contrast=\"auto\"> Chris, thank you so much for joining us today on this cultivation podcast. It&#8217;s great to have you here.\u00a0<\/span><span data-ccp-props=\"{&quot;335559739&quot;:0}\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span data-ccp-props=\"{&quot;335559739&quot;:0}\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b><span data-contrast=\"none\">Chris Muntifering:<\/span><\/b><span data-contrast=\"auto\"> Thank you. I appreciate you having me on.\u00a0<\/span><span data-ccp-props=\"{&quot;335559739&quot;:360}\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b><span data-contrast=\"none\">Meredith Smith:<\/span><\/b><span data-contrast=\"auto\"> And so, you&#8217;ve had an extensive career in tax that eventually led you to IPT. Can you share with us what drew you into the tax field initially and then how you ended up at IPT?\u00a0<\/span><span data-ccp-props=\"{&quot;335559739&quot;:360}\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b><span data-contrast=\"none\">Chris Muntifering:<\/span><\/b><span data-contrast=\"auto\"> Yeah, I&#8217;d love to. I&#8217;ll try to give you the abbreviated version because, uh, it&#8217;s quite lengthy, but I think everybody can relate to that. So, I originally was in property tax, that&#8217;s how I got started. And like a lot of folks in property tax, you don&#8217;t Leave college saying, I&#8217;m going to go into property tax. You kind of fall into it. And then a lot of people in property tax stay in property tax. I think, I think a lot of folks say, no, I&#8217;m going to give it a whirl, see what&#8217;s like, and then I&#8217;m going to get out of it, but they don&#8217;t, they stay with it.<\/span><span data-ccp-props=\"{&quot;335559739&quot;:360}\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span data-contrast=\"auto\">So, when I graduated from college, I had a degree in finance and minors and economics and real estate, and I was going to set the world on fire being a real estate developer. I wanted to get into real estate development. Two big problems at the time, double digit inflation and double-digit interest rates.<\/span><span data-ccp-props=\"{&quot;335559739&quot;:360}\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span data-contrast=\"auto\">So, the real estate development market was just dead. There was nothing happening there. And so, a good friend of mine said, you know, if you really want to do something real estate related, you have to get an appraisal, because that would give you a good background and valuation of property. So, I thought, that&#8217;s, that sounds good.<\/span><span data-ccp-props=\"{&quot;335559739&quot;:360}\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span data-contrast=\"auto\">Problem was I didn&#8217;t have any educational experience in appraisal, but I was able to find, um, what&#8217;s like a, an analyst position. They called it appraiser, but it was an analyst position with a firm, a law firm in Minneapolis. That part of their practice was property tax appeals. And I&#8217;m like, you know, I didn&#8217;t know anything about property tax appeals.<\/span><span data-ccp-props=\"{&quot;335559739&quot;:360}\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span data-contrast=\"auto\">I was like most people, I just figured, well, you just pay your property taxes. And so, I went there thinking, well, I&#8217;ll just do this for a couple of years and get a little more experience, move on to something else. Well, a couple of years landed in five years. And then I went to do some consulting for the national firm for three years and then decided that I got, I was, got married and kids were coming along and decided I needed something a little more stable.<\/span><span data-ccp-props=\"{&quot;335559739&quot;:360}\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span data-contrast=\"auto\">And so, I landed a job with a food manufacturer in Minneapolis and corporate tax management. So, and I can say it was a Pillsbury company, which was owned by, um, it&#8217;s now called Diageo. And so, they own Pillsbury, and they own Burger King, and they own Pearl Vision. So, they had a lot of companies. It gave me a lot of exposures to property tax across the, from, you know, manufacturing to retail to, uh, restaurants.<\/span><span data-ccp-props=\"{&quot;335559739&quot;:360}\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span data-contrast=\"auto\">So, it was a really good exposure. It was a good transition for me. And I just stayed with that. Until, well, until Pillsbury was acquired by Jenner Mills and then I made the transfer to Jenner Mills. And so throughout that, I was probably about 20 to 25 years in the corporate tax management side of things.<\/span><span data-ccp-props=\"{&quot;335559739&quot;:360}\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span data-contrast=\"auto\">And along the way, you know, I came across IPT. So, when I went to Pillsbury, I&#8217;d only done real estate appeals. I hadn&#8217;t done any personal property. And now I needed to get educated in the personal property. So, I took IPT, took the course, just loved the course, loved the organization. Some of the instructors at that time were about my age, and we became good friends.<\/span><span data-ccp-props=\"{&quot;335559739&quot;:360}\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span data-contrast=\"auto\">We&#8217;re still good friends to this day. And, um, I just started doing more and more with IPT. Um, I was on committees, I was on schools, and then I, uh, was on the board for a number of years. And then I became, I was an officer, was elected officer, second vice president, and first vice president, and I was contracted to be president.<\/span><span data-ccp-props=\"{&quot;335559739&quot;:360}\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span data-contrast=\"auto\">Along the way, my job at General Mills got eliminated. And about six months later, the executive director at IPT said he was going to step down. So, it was an opportunity. I thought, well, why not? Give it a whirl. I mean, at the time, I was 50 some years old. Nobody was going to hire a corporate property tax manager at that point.<\/span><span data-ccp-props=\"{&quot;335559739&quot;:360}\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span data-contrast=\"auto\">So, this IPT seemed, while I was, well versed in the organization, I&#8217;d been very active with it. And so, I applied. I went through the selection process. Interviewed with the selection committee and interviewed with the board, which is a little funny because I was on the board at the time \u2013 I interviewed with the very people who are my colleagues.<\/span><span data-ccp-props=\"{&quot;335559739&quot;:360}\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span data-contrast=\"auto\">They selected me and I&#8217;m very grateful. I&#8217;m very honored that they did that. So, in a very short, in a nutshell version, that&#8217;s how I got involved with IPT. And that&#8217;s where I am today.\u00a0<\/span><span data-ccp-props=\"{&quot;335559739&quot;:360}\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b><span data-contrast=\"none\">Judy Vorndran:<\/span><\/b><span data-contrast=\"auto\"> Interesting. Yeah. Because I go back to when, who is it that was original IPT? Executive director Billy. Is it Billy?<\/span><span data-ccp-props=\"{&quot;335559739&quot;:360}\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b><span data-contrast=\"none\">Chris Muntifering:<\/span><\/b><span data-contrast=\"auto\"> Yeah, Billy Cook. Well, Billy wasn&#8217;t the first, but he wasn&#8217;t. Okay. But he was the longest. He, you know, yeah, two years in that position. Yeah.\u00a0<\/span><span data-ccp-props=\"{&quot;335559739&quot;:360}\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b><span data-contrast=\"none\">Judy Vorndran:<\/span><\/b><span data-contrast=\"auto\"> So that&#8217;s probably when I started with IPT was Billy was still in charge.\u00a0<\/span><span data-ccp-props=\"{&quot;335559739&quot;:360}\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b><span data-contrast=\"none\">Chris Muntifering:<\/span><\/b><span data-contrast=\"auto\"> Right, right. And then, and then Cass Vickers came along, you know, Cass. He was very short tenure three years and then yeah,\u00a0<\/span><span data-ccp-props=\"{&quot;335559739&quot;:360}\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b><span data-contrast=\"none\">Judy Vorndran:<\/span><\/b><span data-contrast=\"auto\"> that was a disappointment because he I thought he was phenomenal, but he had a life pivot, right? So, I think that&#8217;s why he decided to step down. Yeah.\u00a0<\/span><span data-ccp-props=\"{&quot;335559739&quot;:360}\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b><span data-contrast=\"none\">Chris Muntifering:<\/span><\/b><span data-contrast=\"auto\"> Yeah, I enjoyed working with Cass when I was on the board, and it was it was really nice to follow him in that role. And I was like, well, maybe there&#8217;s a greater intervention here. That&#8217;s, that&#8217;s guiding my path.\u00a0<\/span><span data-ccp-props=\"{&quot;335559739&quot;:360}\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b><span data-contrast=\"none\">Judy Vorndran:<\/span><\/b><span data-contrast=\"auto\"> Well, how interesting that your job will be eliminated though. I mean, it&#8217;s so important. Why would they not think they needed you? That surprises me.\u00a0<\/span><span data-ccp-props=\"{&quot;335559739&quot;:360}\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b><span data-contrast=\"none\">Chris Muntifering:<\/span><\/b><span data-contrast=\"auto\"> Yeah. You know, at the time there was this massive job cuts across the board and they don&#8217;t care about, you know, what role you&#8217;re in. And it always surprises me. Not just the company that I was at, but other companies that make cuts in tax departments because I know those folks are providing some of the greatest value.\u00a0<\/span><span data-ccp-props=\"{&quot;335559739&quot;:360}\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b><span data-contrast=\"none\">Judy Vorndran:<\/span><\/b><span data-contrast=\"auto\"> Yes. Could not agree more. The money. That&#8217;s why I&#8217;ve never gone into industry, frankly, because I&#8217;m a money maker, right? I&#8217;m an advocate and I am going to save you money by being knowledgeable about all the issues and I&#8217;m going to pay for my salary. Way more than you pays me, but there&#8217;s something about that where we&#8217;re not valued in industry. We are, and then we aren&#8217;t. And it&#8217;s like, that&#8217;s just, that&#8217;s part of your bottom line &#8211; tax. Get rid of it.\u00a0<\/span><span data-ccp-props=\"{&quot;335559739&quot;:360}\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b><span data-contrast=\"none\">Chris Muntifering:<\/span><\/b><span data-contrast=\"auto\"> And specifically with property tax, it&#8217;s sort of how it was soared because yes, sometimes they just leave you alone thinking, I don&#8217;t know what you do, but you correct. And sometimes it&#8217;s like, I don&#8217;t know what you do. I&#8217;m going to get rid of you and that&#8217;s the end of it.\u00a0<\/span><span data-ccp-props=\"{&quot;335559739&quot;:360}\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b><span data-contrast=\"none\">Judy Vorndran:<\/span><\/b><span data-contrast=\"auto\"> We sort of operate in an island, which is, I think part of what we&#8217;ve attracted in our team is people who care about this passionately, and we work with each other, so we&#8217;re kind of allies. cause in industry people is like, what tax? You&#8217;re like, it&#8217;s important. But yet it&#8217;s sort of like nobody thinks about it. And only large companies can have people like you, but that is just walking away from money to not have you be a part of the team anymore. And your institutional knowledge? About the assets. Wow. Yeah.<\/span><span data-ccp-props=\"{&quot;335559739&quot;:360}\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span data-contrast=\"auto\">Interesting. Yeah. It&#8217;s an interesting culture in America. We&#8217;re anti-tax, but let&#8217;s not keep the tax people around.\u00a0<\/span><span data-ccp-props=\"{&quot;335559739&quot;:360}\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b><span data-contrast=\"none\">Meredith Smith:<\/span><\/b><span data-contrast=\"auto\"> Well, or I&#8217;ve seen the contrary, right? Where tax, we typically work in arrears. Right. So, we&#8217;re, recording around the fall tax extended deadline, doing stuff for generally calendar year 2023, 10 months out, but doing things simultaneously, right.<\/span><span data-ccp-props=\"{&quot;335559739&quot;:360}\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span data-contrast=\"auto\">Audits are three years ago. And so, I&#8217;ve had friends who&#8217;ve company who have been in internal tax, but once everyone else was released, tax was the last one standing because they had open audits. They had open litigation and they&#8217;re like, we can&#8217;t get rid of these people. We have to continue to pay them because institutional knowledge. And case is eight years old. Right. But you know, it&#8217;s only in the courts now. So, it&#8217;s, it&#8217;s interesting, the dichotomy of, of how that can be kind of perceived. But also, Chris love that, it&#8217;s those relationships, right? When you went to Pillsbury, it&#8217;s like, I need a network, I need resources, I need help.<\/span><span data-ccp-props=\"{&quot;335559739&quot;:360}\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span data-contrast=\"auto\">And that&#8217;s kind of what kept you right, creating the friendships and kind of what brought you to where you are today. And as we talk to people kind of across accounting and taxes, that&#8217;s always been kind of the underlying theme of the relationships and really what keeps us going and keeps us going and being good at what we do.<\/span><span data-ccp-props=\"{&quot;335559739&quot;:360}\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span data-contrast=\"auto\">So, that&#8217;s great to hear what brought you to your current position. And so, with that, I guess for our listeners, what does IPT stand for? Because we&#8217;ve just been talking acronyms, I don&#8217;t think we&#8217;ve actually said it, but how is IPT structured and what is the mission of the organization?<\/span><span data-ccp-props=\"{&quot;335559739&quot;:360}\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b><span data-contrast=\"none\">Chris Muntifering:<\/span><\/b><span data-contrast=\"auto\"> So, the easy answer is IPT stands for Institute for Professionals in Taxation. It originally started out as the Institute of Property Taxation.\u00a0<\/span><span data-ccp-props=\"{&quot;335559739&quot;:360}\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b><span data-contrast=\"none\">Judy Vorndran:<\/span><\/b><span data-contrast=\"auto\"> That&#8217;s what I thought. Yes, that&#8217;s the impetus of it was property taxes. Yes.\u00a0<\/span><span data-ccp-props=\"{&quot;335559739&quot;:360}\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b><span data-contrast=\"none\">Chris Muntifering:<\/span><\/b><span data-contrast=\"auto\"> And as the organization grew and brought in sales and use tax and the state income tax, obviously the name Institute for Property Taxation didn&#8217;t fit across the board. It didn&#8217;t fully represent the membership. So, trying to keep with the IPT in Sydney change it to Institute for Professionals in Taxation.\u00a0<\/span><span data-ccp-props=\"{&quot;335559739&quot;:360}\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b><span data-contrast=\"none\">Judy Vorndran:<\/span><\/b><span data-contrast=\"auto\"> Interesting. I knew that. I mean, I go back away. It&#8217;s not as bad as the organization, but Bob Atkinson was my boss at Deloitte and he&#8217;s the one who said I should get involved. And that was 20, 30, maybe close to 30 years ago. So, a long time ago. And he said, I&#8217;m a lawyer and a CPA. So, he said, you could go to the ABA IPT and get duly certified. And this is what you should do. And he was a president of the organization at one point. And he was a sales tax guy, but I think he was property tax too because he was Sears &amp; Roebuck. He worked at Sears with a lot of stores and now no longer a relevant entity, but I love the Sears catalog. That was Amazon in the day, right? Black and white catalog. You didn&#8217;t even have sticky notes. You just circled it. You&#8217;re like, I want this.\u00a0<\/span><span data-ccp-props=\"{&quot;335559739&quot;:360}\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b><span data-contrast=\"none\">Chris Muntifering:<\/span><\/b><span data-contrast=\"auto\"> Yeah. Kind of funny. When the Christmas catalog didn&#8217;t look, that was it.\u00a0<\/span><span data-ccp-props=\"{&quot;335559739&quot;:360}\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b><span data-contrast=\"none\">Meredith Smith:<\/span><\/b><span data-contrast=\"auto\"> Yeah. I did that too. And now Amazon sends a Christmas catalog. Amazon sends a holiday catalog. It showed up last week. So, you have plenty of purchasing time, two months ahead of time. But as we digress, what is the mission and kind of the founding principles of why IPT exists?\u00a0<\/span><span data-ccp-props=\"{&quot;335559739&quot;:360}\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b><span data-contrast=\"none\">Chris Muntifering:<\/span><\/b><span data-contrast=\"auto\"> Let me answer the second part of your question that you had originally, how are we structured? IPT is structured as a 501c3. So, we&#8217;re a not-for-profit organization committed to education. All right. That differentiates us from some of the other folks.\u00a0<\/span><span data-ccp-props=\"{&quot;335559739&quot;:360}\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b><span data-contrast=\"none\">Judy Vorndran:<\/span><\/b><span data-contrast=\"auto\"> Like a C6 or something, which is an advocacy group or a lobbying group or something or professional organization.<\/span><span data-ccp-props=\"{&quot;335559739&quot;:360}\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b><span data-contrast=\"none\">Chris Muntifering:<\/span><\/b><span data-contrast=\"auto\"> Exactly. So as a C3, we can only do education. So, in order to maintain that tax income status, we can only do education. We can&#8217;t do advocacy. We can&#8217;t do lobbying.\u00a0<\/span><span data-ccp-props=\"{&quot;335559739&quot;:360}\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b><span data-contrast=\"none\">Judy Vorndran:<\/span><\/b><span data-contrast=\"auto\"> Ah. So, I didn&#8217;t realize that. I didn&#8217;t know that.\u00a0<\/span><span data-ccp-props=\"{&quot;335559739&quot;:360}\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b><span data-contrast=\"none\">Chris Muntifering:<\/span><\/b><span data-contrast=\"auto\"> So, our mission, Meredith, is that we provide broad based education across the four disciplines in IBT. So, its property tax, it&#8217;s sales and use tax, its state income tax, and its credits and incentives. By being broad based, we provide education from the very basic introductory level to advanced schools, to our symposiums and then our annual conference across all four disciplines.\u00a0<\/span><span data-ccp-props=\"{&quot;335559739&quot;:360}\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b><span data-contrast=\"none\">Judy Vorndran:<\/span><\/b><span data-contrast=\"auto\"> Credit system says property tax, income taxes, sales tax, but we still have that. We&#8217;ve had a little bit of that, but not that concentrated? Because I&#8217;ve been to some bad things over the years.\u00a0<\/span><span data-ccp-props=\"{&quot;335559739&quot;:360}\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b><span data-contrast=\"none\">Chris Muntifering:<\/span><\/b><span data-contrast=\"auto\"> Well, as a matter of fact, we&#8217;ve had a VAT symposium for a number of years. It&#8217;s typically followed our sales tax symposium because it just made sense. It still does make sense that you follow up your sales tax with the VAT because people are there for sales tax. They can go right to the VAT. This year we&#8217;ve provided a VAT school. It was the first time we provided a school and overwhelmingly, it was well received, I should say.\u00a0<\/span><span data-ccp-props=\"{&quot;335559739&quot;:360}\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b><span data-contrast=\"none\">Judy Vorndran:<\/span><\/b><span data-contrast=\"auto\"> I thought about sending someone to that. We are getting those issues because with internet, there are no walls, there are no borders. Like people can sell anywhere to anyone. We just talked to a potential client from the UK selling across Europe and of course selling to the American market. What do we do? Right. We got VAT issues of a UK entity. We have treaty, we have crazy stuff, right. And we want to collect us health tax. Like, how do you do that?<\/span><span data-ccp-props=\"{&quot;335559739&quot;:360}\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span data-contrast=\"auto\">The boundaries of business have been eroded. Which opens us the VAT issue for people in the transaction world because we have a transaction. How do we manage it? So that&#8217;s very interesting. I&#8217;ve seen us morphing. I just didn&#8217;t know how intentionally that was How big a leg of the stool that&#8217;s going to become\u00a0<\/span><span data-ccp-props=\"{&quot;335559739&quot;:360}\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b><span data-contrast=\"none\">Chris Muntifering: <\/span><\/b><span data-contrast=\"auto\">So, we&#8217;ll offer the VAT school again. In our organization, I could see that being our fifth discipline someday.\u00a0<\/span><span data-ccp-props=\"{&quot;335559739&quot;:360}\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b><span data-contrast=\"none\">Judy Vorndran:<\/span><\/b><span data-contrast=\"auto\"> How do you decide that will officially become so? I mean, how did this morph? Because I feel like it&#8217;s been trickling until we have the school.\u00a0<\/span><span data-ccp-props=\"{&quot;335559739&quot;:360}\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b><span data-contrast=\"none\">Chris Muntifering:<\/span><\/b><span data-contrast=\"auto\"> Yeah. You know, it&#8217;s going to establish itself as something that&#8217;s consistent year in and year out. I think it will establish that self. I say give it a couple of years with the school and the symposium. And then I think it makes more sense to create a separate discipline within that. Okay. These are things that never happen overnight, of course. They have to evolve.<\/span><span data-ccp-props=\"{&quot;335559739&quot;:360}\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b><span data-contrast=\"none\">Judy Vorndran:<\/span><\/b><span data-contrast=\"auto\"> Yeah, and you have to see what the constituency is. But it&#8217;s so imperative for the younger generation to empower them with information as we&#8217;re morphing off into the legacy of our careers. How are we going to get the younger generation engaged? Like you said, people don&#8217;t even think about this.<\/span><span data-ccp-props=\"{&quot;335559739&quot;:360}\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span data-contrast=\"auto\">I have a law degree, a master&#8217;s of tax. Never took a state and local class. I fell into this career myself and it interested me. Everyone we talked to in multistate tax &#8212; I could give you the list &#8212; like nobody started out being a state local person\u00a0<\/span><span data-ccp-props=\"{&quot;335559739&quot;:360}\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b><span data-contrast=\"none\">Meredith Smith:<\/span><\/b><span data-contrast=\"auto\"> Weird that&#8217;s right. You did I&#8217;m okay, but some of that it was also opportunity, right? I knew I knew I was going to be an accountant in high school. I took the accounting class in high school, declared it as my major in undergrad, and then the opportunity came up, right? My grandfather was a CPA. My brother worked in state and local tax. I&#8217;m a salt Nepo baby. My brother threw my name in the ring for an internship when I was a junior in college and I was like, I want to work. I don&#8217;t care were. I don&#8217;t want to do audit. I want to do tax. Don&#8217;t care where, don&#8217;t care how. And he&#8217;s like, well, this is what we need. And so that was almost 20 summers ago, 20 summers ago.<\/span><span data-ccp-props=\"{&quot;335559739&quot;:360}\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b><span data-contrast=\"none\">Judy Vorndran:<\/span><\/b><span data-contrast=\"auto\"> And your kind of unusual, I feel like, with people like Chris. It&#8217;s like, I feel like we all fell into it. And then this is actually kind of a cool area. Cause I started out as general federal tax practitioner. And I thought, why am I doing this? I want to ski. I live in Colorado. I don&#8217;t want to work every weekend and I&#8217;ll be darn if I want to work Labor Day. I fundamentally have a problem with that, but I&#8217;d rather be busy on the 20th of every month. What am I thinking with a monthly requirement? But I don&#8217;t know, the web was weaved and there you go. I&#8217;m caught in it.\u00a0<\/span><span data-ccp-props=\"{&quot;335559739&quot;:360}\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b><span data-contrast=\"none\">Meredith Smith:<\/span><\/b><span data-contrast=\"auto\"> And so, we&#8217;ve thrown out some of the kind of like various educational tracks. So, the symposium, the school, the annual conference, how does IPT educate? What kind of programs do they offer and what are the differences between the symposium, the school, the annual conference? Can you talk through some of the kind of just gatherings that occur?\u00a0<\/span><span data-ccp-props=\"{&quot;335559739&quot;:360}\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b><span data-contrast=\"none\">Chris Muntifering:<\/span><\/b><span data-contrast=\"auto\"> So, the schools are established to provide tax management, skills to its attendees. So, if you&#8217;re brand new, and we see that a lot with property tax and sales tax, people are just thrown into it saying, okay, now you&#8217;re going to do property tax, property tax and sales tax. And they don&#8217;t have any experience. So, our basic schools, our entry level schools provide them with that very broad-based education, if you will. And then we have advanced schools that capitalize on top of the teachings of the prior schools. So that&#8217;s sort of your tax management base, if you will, in terms of education.<\/span><span data-ccp-props=\"{&quot;335559739&quot;:360}\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span data-contrast=\"auto\">And then the symposiums, they&#8217;re all discipline specific, right? Sales tax only has sales tax topics; property tax only has property tax topics. And each of those five disciplines, and I throw a VAT in there because that&#8217;s a separate, symposium. Those are specific to those disciplines. So that&#8217;s where you&#8217;re going to get sort of your advanced education if you will.<\/span><span data-ccp-props=\"{&quot;335559739&quot;:360}\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span data-contrast=\"auto\">And then our annual conference is the one that brings all those disciplines together. So, if you&#8217;re somebody that, let&#8217;s say, you primarily do property tax, but you dabble a little bit in sales tax, you do some state income tax or credits, you can go to the conference. You can pick up your basic property tax education, but you can also go to these breakout sessions in sales tax and credits incentives.<\/span><span data-ccp-props=\"{&quot;335559739&quot;:360}\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span data-contrast=\"auto\">And it gives you an opportunity to cover everything. That&#8217;s generally how we&#8217;re structured with our programs. We also do the, as Judy knows, we do the ABA\/IPT conference. So, we partner with ABA on that and those are legal seminars. That&#8217;s a day and a half session in each of three disciplines, state income tax, sales, and then property. That\u2019s more legal base, but it&#8217;s not exclusive to attorneys. We do have a lot of people who are not attorneys that attend those sessions because they&#8217;re very informative.\u00a0<\/span><span data-ccp-props=\"{&quot;335559739&quot;:360}\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b><span data-contrast=\"none\">Judy Vorndran:<\/span><\/b><span data-contrast=\"auto\"> Yeah, it&#8217; covers what\u2019s happening across the country and the cases that are going to impact taxpayers. It&#8217;s such a big deal. Like what&#8217;s coming down the pipeline? What industry will be hit next? I remember going hearing from the guy from Alabama and the lawyer, I think he represented Overstock, talking about the Wayfair decision stare decisis. I remember sitting there at that luncheon thinking, I think the Wayfair thing is going to win. In other words, the South Dakota is going to win. And they did because the internet has changed the way business is going. And we&#8217;ve got to that tax is not getting in the coffers of state governments too many trillions of dollars.<\/span><span data-ccp-props=\"{&quot;335559739&quot;:360}\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span data-contrast=\"auto\">And that&#8217;s what happened. So, I remember thinking, oh, this is amazing. We have these people sitting at the table, we get to talk to them. Also, it&#8217;s interesting that those companies took those cases forward. 800,000 people live in South Dakota. It&#8217;s just not that important as a market, I&#8217;m sure, but making the standard for the rest of us to maybe follow suit. So yeah, it was really interesting what we bring to the table in terms of the people litigating the cases. I think it&#8217;s huge. That network is so important to know how that sausage is getting made across our states.\u00a0<\/span><span data-ccp-props=\"{&quot;335559739&quot;:360}\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b><span data-contrast=\"none\">Chris Muntifering:<\/span><\/b><span data-contrast=\"auto\"> Right. And you touched on a very good point that at these programs, you have the opportunity to actually meet these people. Right? You&#8217;re not just an attendee there. You can go up to that person after they&#8217;re all done and have a conversation with them. And they&#8217;re always willing to get engaged with the members. So, it&#8217;s a great opportunity for not just general networking, but also to meet these decision makers.\u00a0<\/span><span data-ccp-props=\"{&quot;335559739&quot;:360}\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b><span data-contrast=\"none\">Judy Vorndran:<\/span><\/b><span data-contrast=\"auto\"> Well, when I left the big four, I spent 14 years at Deloitte and PwC. When I left and went to a regional firm and I was the salt desk, I needed a network. I could not do it without IPT. You are a godsend to me as a program that doesn&#8217;t have a Washington National desk, doesn&#8217;t have a Michigan desk. I called my IPT brethren, and they helped me. It&#8217;s a wonderful network of humans that are connected in their industries amongst their states with a wild breadth of knowledge. So, you could go, I think I read this law right, but can you confirm that I&#8217;m thinking right? They answer the phone. I have had help from an IPT member ever in my entire career of almost 30 years. It&#8217;s been a phenomenal organization in my humble opinion.\u00a0<\/span><span data-ccp-props=\"{&quot;335559739&quot;:360}\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b><span data-contrast=\"none\">Chris Muntifering:<\/span><\/b><span data-contrast=\"auto\"> Yeah. Well, the access to the membership information is, is so wonderful. It is more than the price of admission as they say, so you&#8217;re absolutely right.\u00a0<\/span><span data-ccp-props=\"{&quot;335559739&quot;:360}\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b><span data-contrast=\"none\">Judy Vorndran:<\/span><\/b><span data-contrast=\"auto\"> I\u2019ve just been in the list. I find somebody in this state and call them and see what they think. Because we&#8217;re not so sure what the department of revenue is going to do. We don&#8217;t want to call the department, right? This is a questionable thing. What do you all think? So, I have always been found every time I&#8217;ve gone, it&#8217;s been invaluable. The people that I&#8217;ve taught, the community, it&#8217;s been a wonderful community in America. The younger generation needs to get involved too.\u00a0<\/span><span data-ccp-props=\"{&quot;335559739&quot;:360}\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b><span data-contrast=\"none\">Meredith Smith:<\/span><\/b><span data-contrast=\"auto\"> Right. I couldn&#8217;t agree more. When I left Big Four, that was one of my biggest concerns. I left that trapping and I was like, well, I&#8217;m the first internal state and local tax resource. I know I&#8217;m smart, but I can&#8217;t know everything. And so that was one of the biggest hurdles I had to overcome was like, oh my God, this person&#8217;s hiring a state and local income tax person for a small firm. They&#8217;re going to expect me to know everything, and again, as smart as I can be, I&#8217;m not litigating, I&#8217;m not challenging rules in New York, and so, going back to that connectivity, this is just another means to do it. Bring the people together who think alike and who struggle alike. Right?\u00a0<\/span><span data-ccp-props=\"{&quot;335559739&quot;:360}\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b><span data-contrast=\"none\">Judy Vorndran:<\/span><\/b><span data-contrast=\"auto\"> Well, different industries are dealt with differently, right? Like transportation is different than food service than hotels. I mean, there is a wide swath of industry in America. How do we deal with that? How do we tax it? We need to come together with other people. Cause of course we have the supremacy clause and our United States competition constitution that allows a lot of Kings. We left 1776, so we wouldn&#8217;t have a king and now we have like 50 kings plus a bunch of different subordinates that run their own fiefdoms like the locals.\u00a0<\/span><span data-ccp-props=\"{&quot;335559739&quot;:360}\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b><span data-contrast=\"none\">Meredith Smith:<\/span><\/b><span data-contrast=\"auto\"> I know you had kind of mentioned and we&#8217;ve kind of talked about this that as a 501 c3, IPT\u2019s role is not to lobby. So, any IRS examiner out there, that is not what they do. We are affirmatively stating that but you know, you&#8217;ve, how do you determine, or do you determine just to either get involved in a case or again, not lobby, but kind of throw out your knowledge base or kind of the weight behind what the, what the institution needs?<\/span><span data-ccp-props=\"{&quot;335559739&quot;:360}\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b><span data-contrast=\"none\">Chris Muntifering:<\/span><\/b><span data-contrast=\"auto\"> So, uh, the best example of that would be the amicus brief request that would come through. We do have a process for that. By being a friend of the court per se, we&#8217;re not really taking a position in terms of advocating for a law change or a case or whatever the case or whatever it may be, but we could kind of throw our weight behind that saying we support the taxpayer in whatever case it may be. So, the way the process works for us. The reason is that we have a legal committee, right? And the legal committee takes on those requests that come in and there&#8217;s a whole day of requirements before they&#8217;ll actually take a look at it. And they&#8217;ll make a recommendation to the board of governors about whether it should get behind or not.<\/span><span data-ccp-props=\"{&quot;335559739&quot;:360}\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span data-contrast=\"auto\">And there&#8217;s some things, like there&#8217;s a 45-day minimum rule that they have. Obviously, they just need time to look at it. We may pass on a case because somebody who&#8217;s asked for requests didn&#8217;t give the legal committee enough time to evaluate the case. It&#8217;s not that we were opposed to it, we just didn&#8217;t have time to evaluate it.<\/span><span data-ccp-props=\"{&quot;335559739&quot;:360}\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span data-contrast=\"auto\">And then the legal committee will make a decision whether that&#8217;s in the best interest of the organization as a whole. It may be in the best interest of the requester, but it may not be in the best interest of other IPT members. So, you know, on its face it may sound like it&#8217;s a good, good thing to get behind, but it&#8217;s not.<\/span><span data-ccp-props=\"{&quot;335559739&quot;:360}\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span data-contrast=\"auto\">If it&#8217;s not to the benefit of the majority of the members, they&#8217;re not going to do it. So, there&#8217;s a lot of things that go into the process. It&#8217;s not a slam dunk per se.\u00a0<\/span><span data-ccp-props=\"{&quot;335559739&quot;:360}\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b><span data-contrast=\"none\">Judy Vorndran:<\/span><\/b><span data-contrast=\"auto\"> And then when they do it, it&#8217;s a volunteer effort to draft that. Correct? Correct.\u00a0<\/span><span data-ccp-props=\"{&quot;335559739&quot;:360}\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b><span data-contrast=\"none\">Chris Muntifering:<\/span><\/b><span data-contrast=\"auto\"> Yeah. Because they have the resources and often, they come to the table with something prepared. That&#8217;s about as far as we get into the, the advocacy, if you will, and it&#8217;s not really a role at all. We&#8217;re just supporting our members in that regard.\u00a0<\/span><span data-ccp-props=\"{&quot;335559739&quot;:360}\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b><span data-contrast=\"none\">Meredith Smith:<\/span><\/b><span data-contrast=\"auto\"> Well, what about other state tax organizations out there. So how would you say that IPT is different than some of those organizations. COST, for example, the Council of State Taxation, does IPT view them as a competitor? Are we all just trying to put out, information and resources and build community around state and local tax?<\/span><span data-ccp-props=\"{&quot;335559739&quot;:360}\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b><span data-contrast=\"none\">Chris Muntifering:<\/span><\/b><span data-contrast=\"auto\"> No, we don&#8217;t consider IPT to be a competitor of COST and I hope they would do the same. At the end of the day, we both have the same objectives, and we want to make sure that there&#8217;s fair and uniform tax administration across the board and how you go about it or maybe two different tracks and maybe have a different track than IPT has. We&#8217;re focused on education, and they do education as well, of course, but they&#8217;re also advocates.<\/span><span data-ccp-props=\"{&quot;335559739&quot;:360}\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span data-contrast=\"auto\">So that&#8217;s fine. But at the end of the day, you have to understand there&#8217;s just this one pool, this one bag of money that is going to get spent. And we hope that while you spend your money with us, they hope that they spend the money with them. So, it&#8217;s really what you choose.\u00a0<\/span><span data-ccp-props=\"{&quot;335559739&quot;:360}\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span data-contrast=\"auto\">Kind of reminds me when I was a kid, you know, growing up in a very humble home is that we had one cereal. I like to go back to cereal because I worked for a cereal company. My mother would open up the cupboard and say, okay, this is what you&#8217;re having. This is your cereal. We didn&#8217;t have a choice. That&#8217;s it. And it&#8217;s kind of that way now, so, we know our members, typically, they may be told, you can go to one program this year. That&#8217;s it. Right? You decide which one you&#8217;re going to. And so, obviously we hope they go to our program, but we know that there&#8217;s value in other organizations as well. They have to pick what&#8217;s best for them. But we try to create programs that will satisfy them to the best of their expectations.\u00a0<\/span><span data-ccp-props=\"{&quot;335559739&quot;:360}\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b><span data-contrast=\"none\">Judy Vorndran:<\/span><\/b><span data-contrast=\"auto\"> We take the feedback each time and try to evolve and modify our content to meet the needs of the community. I know like the annual meeting probably has the largest attendee, would you say, group of attendees, or no?<\/span><span data-ccp-props=\"{&quot;335559739&quot;:360}\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b><span data-contrast=\"none\">Chris Muntifering:<\/span><\/b><span data-contrast=\"auto\"> No, sales tax symposium is the largest.\u00a0<\/span><span data-ccp-props=\"{&quot;335559739&quot;:360}\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b><span data-contrast=\"none\">Judy Vorndran:<\/span><\/b><span data-contrast=\"auto\"> Wow. Okay. I feel like years ago I went to it in Huntington Beach, and I feel like there were thousands of people there. Was there ever that many or is that just a missed memory on my part?\u00a0<\/span><span data-ccp-props=\"{&quot;335559739&quot;:360}\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b><span data-contrast=\"none\">Chris Muntifering:<\/span><\/b><span data-contrast=\"auto\"> Well, it might be a missed memory on your part, but I think there seems like there&#8217;s a lot of people there because it&#8217;s not just the registrants that are there. If they bring their families, you had spouses and you had kids and it&#8217;s really busy and it&#8217;s full. It all seems like a lot of IPT people.\u00a0<\/span><span data-ccp-props=\"{&quot;335559739&quot;:360}\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b><span data-contrast=\"none\">Judy Vorndran:<\/span><\/b><span data-contrast=\"auto\"> I can just remember going to things like, wow, there are a lot of people here. With COVID and things like that, some things tapered off and it&#8217;s now nice to see people back. I remember being in Austin a few years ago, if that was 2021, 2022, I&#8217;m not sure. And it was when the Delta strain was coming out and we&#8217;re all there and like. But it was lovely to see people again.\u00a0<\/span><span data-ccp-props=\"{&quot;335559739&quot;:360}\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b><span data-contrast=\"none\">Meredith Smith:<\/span><\/b><span data-contrast=\"auto\"> We have had Jordan on. We&#8217;ve had the very first podcast recorded, and I&#8217;ve listened to it and it&#8217;s like someone who&#8217;s speaking to it and has we&#8217;ve done since what, 80 something episodes. I don&#8217;t want to go back and witness that. That was heart of COVID sitting on the floor of my kid&#8217;s room while they were allowed to be in daycare. No, thank you.\u00a0<\/span><span data-ccp-props=\"{&quot;335559739&quot;:360}\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b><span data-contrast=\"none\">Judy Vorndran:<\/span><\/b><span data-contrast=\"auto\"> So, what was the cereal you had in your house?\u00a0<\/span><span data-ccp-props=\"{&quot;335559739&quot;:360}\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b><span data-contrast=\"none\">Chris Muntifering:<\/span><\/b><span data-contrast=\"auto\"> Probably what was it? Whatever was on sale that week.\u00a0<\/span><span data-ccp-props=\"{&quot;335559739&quot;:360}\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b><span data-contrast=\"none\">Judy Vorndran:<\/span><\/b><span data-contrast=\"auto\"> Okay. Okay. Cause we had Cheerios. So not Honey Nut, Cheerios. I don&#8217;t think Honey Nut existed. And I always wanted Captain Crunch and Fruit Loops. So, it might&#8217;ve been a competition, right?\u00a0<\/span><span data-ccp-props=\"{&quot;335559739&quot;:360}\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b><span data-contrast=\"none\">Chris Muntifering:<\/span><\/b><span data-contrast=\"auto\"> Generally, no sugared cereal. So, because those are more expensive.<\/span><span data-ccp-props=\"{&quot;335559739&quot;:360}\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b><span data-contrast=\"none\">Judy Vorndran:<\/span><\/b><span data-contrast=\"auto\"> Yep, and my mom wouldn&#8217;t buy them, only on a rare occasion with a lot of begging.<\/span><span data-ccp-props=\"{&quot;335559739&quot;:360}\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b><span data-contrast=\"none\">Meredith Smith:<\/span><\/b><span data-contrast=\"auto\"> And we want to talk about the CMI, right? So, the Certified Member of the Institute designation is kind of a hallmark of IPT. Can you walk us through about how the CMI program kind of came to be, why it&#8217;s important, and why the test is so hard?\u00a0<\/span><span data-ccp-props=\"{&quot;335559739&quot;:360}\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b><span data-contrast=\"none\">Judy Vorndran:<\/span><\/b><span data-contrast=\"auto\"> It&#8217;s got some street cred, I&#8217;ll tell you that, as someone who&#8217;s a lawyer and a CPA, it&#8217;s a good test. I was impressed.\u00a0<\/span><span data-ccp-props=\"{&quot;335559739&quot;:360}\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b><span data-contrast=\"none\">Chris Muntifering:<\/span><\/b><span data-contrast=\"auto\"> Yeah. So, the CMI actually started when IPT started, the Institute for Professional Taxation. So, at that time, property tax folks on the corporate side tended to go to IAO, the International Association of Assessment Officers Annual Conference. You&#8217;d have the assessors there and then you&#8217;d have all the property tax people. And so, when they decided that the corporate property tax people really need to have their own organization, they created IPT. But they also recognized that IAO has very good designations. We need to have one that kind of reflects who we are.<\/span><span data-ccp-props=\"{&quot;335559739&quot;:360}\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span data-contrast=\"auto\">And, and so that&#8217;s how the CMI and property tax certifications came to be. The founding fathers said it basically has to reflect education and it has to reflect experience and has to reflect the accomplishment of testing. And so, once it got established within property tax and then as IPT expanded into the other disciplines, it just made sense to have designations in those disciplines as well.<\/span><span data-ccp-props=\"{&quot;335559739&quot;:360}\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span data-contrast=\"auto\">And today those designations are recognized across the board as something, I don&#8217;t want to offend anybody, CPAs, but, you know, it&#8217;s kind of on that same level, if you will. The CMI\/CCIP, because the CCIP is the equivalent in the credits and instead it carries the same weight as the CMI.<\/span><span data-ccp-props=\"{&quot;335559739&quot;:360}\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span data-contrast=\"auto\">We say that it&#8217;s a little bit different from the CPA exam, that we require experience. You have to have five years of experience before you can take the exam. CPAs do not. I give my daughter a hard time. My daughter&#8217;s a CPA before you&#8217;ve had the experience.<\/span><span data-ccp-props=\"{&quot;335559739&quot;:360}\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b><span data-contrast=\"none\">Chris Muntifering:<\/span><\/b><span data-contrast=\"auto\"> As a lawyer you can take the bar exam.\u00a0<\/span><span data-ccp-props=\"{&quot;335559739&quot;:360}\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b><span data-contrast=\"none\">Judy Vorndran:<\/span><\/b><span data-contrast=\"auto\"> Oh, and you don&#8217;t even know how to be a lawyer.<\/span><span data-ccp-props=\"{&quot;335559739&quot;:360}\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b><span data-contrast=\"none\">Chris Muntifering:<\/span><\/b><span data-contrast=\"auto\"> Yeah, so the CMI could distinguish this from other designations and that we do require the experience\u00a0<\/span><span data-ccp-props=\"{&quot;335559739&quot;:360}\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b><span data-contrast=\"none\">Judy Vorndran:<\/span><\/b><span data-contrast=\"auto\"> Interesting. Well, I felt like it was at Deloitte where I was still senior. I left when I was a manager at Deloitte. And I remember there was a decision because we kept hiring a lot of people, nontraditional hires right to get good experience in sooner, not grow them from the beginning up. And that was the pivot when state local became more of a national practice. That was the way it was a PwC. And then Deloitte was doing the same when I joined them. That was like a national practice locally housed. And we had a lot of nontraditional hires, and they weren&#8217;t CPAs, but they were subject matter experts. And so where are you going to get them in the slate? And then of course, hiring attorneys, if you&#8217;re not a CPA firm, where do you give them a place for advancement?<\/span><span data-ccp-props=\"{&quot;335559739&quot;:360}\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span data-contrast=\"auto\">So, the CMI was a recognized way to get people to elevate. So, there was a requirement in order to have the upper designation at one point to have to take the CMI. So, we definitely put that constraint on employees to elevate them, motivate them to get credentialed in their way. And it gave them an opportunity without being a CPA to advance in the organization.<\/span><span data-ccp-props=\"{&quot;335559739&quot;:360}\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span data-contrast=\"auto\">So, I know they came up with like the director title, the principal title versus partner, and it allowed people that are subject matter experts to stay within the organization. So, I know it gave some credit to Deloitte anyway, because it was a constraint for a long time and a path to upper advancement, honestly, rather than being a non-CPA.\u00a0<\/span><span data-ccp-props=\"{&quot;335559739&quot;:360}\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b><span data-contrast=\"none\">Chris Muntifering:<\/span><\/b><span data-contrast=\"auto\"> Right. So, I think most of the firms do require, not require, but they will allow the CMI. I can&#8217;t speak for them directly because I&#8217;ve never been in direct contact with them in telling this. Yeah. I don&#8217;t even know.\u00a0<\/span><span data-ccp-props=\"{&quot;335559739&quot;:360}\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b><span data-contrast=\"none\">Judy Vorndran:<\/span><\/b><span data-contrast=\"auto\"> I&#8217;ve been gone for a long time, but I know that used to be an issue. It was like, it was a bone of contention. I remember when I came in, because I was not a CPA, even though I could have sat, I didn&#8217;t, I was a lawyer, but it was like, I&#8217;m in a CPA organization. I need to become a CPA.<\/span><span data-ccp-props=\"{&quot;335559739&quot;:360}\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span data-contrast=\"auto\">Like I can&#8217;t just be a lawyer. Then we hired a bunch of lawyers, which changed the character of the big four or big eight or whatever we were at the time. Like then, they wanted lawyers, but at the time they didn&#8217;t really want lawyers. Like, you know, as they evolved as an organization, they&#8217;re like, we need these people with these subject matter competencies.<\/span><span data-ccp-props=\"{&quot;335559739&quot;:360}\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span data-contrast=\"auto\">And so, they didn&#8217;t always have a direct path in accounting to tax as you didn&#8217;t either your finance, real estate, that&#8217;s not tax. That&#8217;s why I know we cared about that when I was at Deloitte. I don&#8217;t know how much they still do, but I know that was, it&#8217;s important. I know the exam is amazingly difficult and it has value.<\/span><span data-ccp-props=\"{&quot;335559739&quot;:360}\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b><span data-contrast=\"none\">Chris Muntifering:<\/span><\/b><span data-contrast=\"auto\"> Right. I know when I got my CMI and I was in the corporate tax department, I did get recognized for doing that just in the same way that others did when they got their CPAs. So yeah, it&#8217;s not just the advocacy firms, but also corporations are recognized in the CMI as well. Yeah, and it is a tough test.<\/span><span data-ccp-props=\"{&quot;335559739&quot;:360}\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span data-contrast=\"auto\">There&#8217;s well, there&#8217;s two components to it, right? There&#8217;s a written component. It&#8217;s a tough exam in each of the disciplines. It&#8217;s hard and I can&#8217;t share the pass rate because we just not allowed to do that but for the written exam, it&#8217;s a five-hour exam and most people take the full five hours.<\/span><span data-ccp-props=\"{&quot;335559739&quot;:360}\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b><span data-contrast=\"none\">Judy Vorndran:<\/span><\/b><span data-contrast=\"auto\"> I was shocked at how hard it was. I&#8217;m like, Oh my gosh. And what I learned because I did not pass the written test, so I have to retake it. I passed the oral, so I haven&#8217;t gotten it myself because I don&#8217;t remember the cases and the standards. It&#8217;s like when I came to the conclusion, I was like, man, I got a lot of respect for this exam.<\/span><span data-ccp-props=\"{&quot;335559739&quot;:360}\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span data-contrast=\"auto\">I got the opportunity to take it. I think it was great to do that for my own personal understanding, but it really does give you the tenants which these rules are based upon. And if you don&#8217;t understand the history, you don&#8217;t understand how the laws got from here to there. And I think that&#8217;s super important.<\/span><span data-ccp-props=\"{&quot;335559739&quot;:360}\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span data-contrast=\"auto\">So, I think that legitimizes it in my mind. And I would value that with an employee hire. If they weren&#8217;t a traditional CPA, I would say you got something because you did a CMI that has some value to me. So, it taught me as someone who was like, well, I don&#8217;t need these extra things, how valuable that knowledge was.<\/span><span data-ccp-props=\"{&quot;335559739&quot;:360}\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span data-contrast=\"auto\">So, kudos to the organization for having that. It really is a big deal. And I think it teaches people important stuff, honestly, that helps them build their career. I think it&#8217;s a really valuable exercise to go through.\u00a0<\/span><span data-ccp-props=\"{&quot;335559739&quot;:360}\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b><span data-contrast=\"none\">Chris Muntifering:<\/span><\/b><span data-contrast=\"auto\"> And I think there is a misunderstanding and people that want to take the exam to think, well, I&#8217;ll take the schools and that should be enough. Well, the schools are not prep courses. That&#8217;s kind of the basis of the CMI. You have to do more than be book smart. You&#8217;ve got to have some experience behind you and hopefully you have credible experience. That&#8217;s going to help you with that exam.\u00a0<\/span><span data-ccp-props=\"{&quot;335559739&quot;:360}\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b><span data-contrast=\"none\">Judy Vorndran:<\/span><\/b><span data-contrast=\"auto\"> Yeah, well, the verbal was easy for me because I&#8217;ve been practicing a long time. But I don&#8217;t remember some of this, and it really taught me a little slap on the wrist to say, you should learn your history.<\/span><span data-ccp-props=\"{&quot;335559739&quot;:360}\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b><span data-contrast=\"none\">Chris Muntifering:<\/span><\/b><span data-contrast=\"auto\"> I would never say that the oral is easier.\u00a0<\/span><span data-ccp-props=\"{&quot;335559739&quot;:360}\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b><span data-contrast=\"none\">Judy Vorndran:<\/span><\/b><span data-contrast=\"auto\"> Oh, I didn&#8217;t think it was easy. It&#8217;s just the practical, it&#8217;s practical. It&#8217;s where the experience really weighs in of understanding. If you don&#8217;t have experience, you&#8217;re not going to be able to do the written or the oral at all. No way. Cause it&#8217;s a fact pattern. That&#8217;s very convoluted. And you&#8217;re like, how do I solve this problem? It was difficult. Agreed.\u00a0<\/span><span data-ccp-props=\"{&quot;335559739&quot;:360}\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b><span data-contrast=\"none\">Chris Muntifering:<\/span><\/b><span data-contrast=\"auto\"> Yeah. Yeah. And it&#8217;s just not taking that fact pattern, but you have to present that fact pattern to the committee. So that&#8217;s, I think that often gets lost on the applicants. I know the content and I know the fact pattern, but wait, there&#8217;s this third component is you have to present your position to this panel of committee members.\u00a0<\/span><span data-ccp-props=\"{&quot;335559739&quot;:360}\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b><span data-contrast=\"none\">Judy Vorndran:<\/span><\/b><span data-contrast=\"auto\"> I thought it was phenomenal.<\/span><span data-ccp-props=\"{&quot;335559739&quot;:360}\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b><span data-contrast=\"none\">Meredith Smith:<\/span><\/b><span data-contrast=\"auto\"> As a practitioner, as internal person, you&#8217;re just not going to sit at a desk and be like, okay, I know the answer. That&#8217;s it. You never do. Like, right? Like that research has to go somewhere. You have to communicate it in some form or fashion. So, I think when you talk about the CMI that you have to have five years of experience to even take the thing, that is a large component of what our job is, you know, communicating our results. Good, bad or ugly, right?\u00a0<\/span><span data-ccp-props=\"{&quot;335559739&quot;:360}\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b><span data-contrast=\"none\">Judy Vorndran:<\/span><\/b><span data-contrast=\"auto\"> Yep.\u00a0<\/span><span data-ccp-props=\"{&quot;335559739&quot;:360}\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b><span data-contrast=\"none\">Meredith Smith:<\/span><\/b><span data-contrast=\"auto\"> And so, I think that&#8217;s admirable that the test acknowledges that skill set and that is part of how you&#8217;re judged on that credential.\u00a0<\/span><span data-ccp-props=\"{&quot;335559739&quot;:360}\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b><span data-contrast=\"none\">Judy Vorndran:<\/span><\/b><span data-contrast=\"auto\"> Yeah. it&#8217;s really good. Really, really, really good.\u00a0<\/span><span data-ccp-props=\"{&quot;335559739&quot;:360}\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b><span data-contrast=\"none\">Meredith Smith:<\/span><\/b><span data-contrast=\"auto\"> And so, Chris, as we wrap up, is there something about IPT that you want our listeners to know that we maybe haven&#8217;t touched on, other than to make sure that you remember to join?<\/span><span data-ccp-props=\"{&quot;335559739&quot;:360}\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b><span data-contrast=\"none\">Chris Muntifering:<\/span><\/b><span data-contrast=\"auto\"> We\u2019ve just recently engaged in a rebranding of the organization. So, if you go to the website, you&#8217;ll see it&#8217;s much different than it was before. And people don&#8217;t realize this until you tell them. If you look at the logo, the logo has changed. The old logo had the scale of justice. Those are gone. So, it&#8217;s been rebranded. And part of this has been that we recognize that our membership basis is changing. So, the younger folks are coming up and we tell them this is going to be your organization someday. This is not the people who are leading the organization today. So, there&#8217;s a big initiative now to get younger folks involved in the organization. And there&#8217;s multiple ways of doing that. You can serve on committees. There&#8217;s always some room for a committee member somewhere.<\/span><span data-ccp-props=\"{&quot;335559739&quot;:360}\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span data-contrast=\"auto\">The corporate people, we don&#8217;t know they have challenges and travel, but we&#8217;re always looking for corporate papers. We need that perspective. We do. If you&#8217;re a corporate speaker, your registration fee is waived. So that&#8217;s a big chunk of money that&#8217;s going to benefit you, right? I mean, get involved in the organization. That&#8217;s our biggest push right now. Because obviously we&#8217;re all aging, we&#8217;re getting older, we&#8217;re getting grayer.\u00a0<\/span><span data-ccp-props=\"{&quot;335559739&quot;:360}\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b><span data-contrast=\"none\">Judy Vorndran:<\/span><\/b><span data-contrast=\"auto\"> I color my hair. I&#8217;m still 27 in my head. But my gray doesn&#8217;t really show. I have very little gray.<\/span><span data-ccp-props=\"{&quot;335559739&quot;:360}\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b><span data-contrast=\"none\">Chris Muntifering:<\/span><\/b><span data-contrast=\"auto\"> So, we really want younger folks to get involved in the organization. We have a subcommittee now; it&#8217;s called the Emerging Leaders. And it sort of was young professionals, but it doesn&#8217;t have to be young professionals. It has to be anybody who&#8217;s new to the organization. No one wants to have an impact on where the future of the organization is. So, I mean, you could be 50 years old and become a new member of IPT and want to be an emerging leader.\u00a0<\/span><span data-ccp-props=\"{&quot;335559739&quot;:360}\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b><span data-contrast=\"none\">Meredith Smith:<\/span><\/b><span data-contrast=\"auto\"> All right, Chris. Well, thank you so much. We do really appreciate the organization.<\/span><span data-ccp-props=\"{&quot;335559739&quot;:360}\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span data-contrast=\"auto\">We are participants. We are members. We are teachers. We are speakers. We enjoy that time to get together. And so, thank you for your work with IPT. And this has been Saltivation. Till next time.<\/span><span data-ccp-props=\"{&quot;335559739&quot;:360}\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p>]<\/p>[\/et_pb_text][\/et_pb_column][\/et_pb_row][\/et_pb_section][et_pb_section fb_built=&#8221;1&#8243; admin_label=&#8221;Comments&#8221; _builder_version=&#8221;4.16&#8243; background_color=&#8221;#FFFFFF&#8221; background_image=&#8221;https:\/\/taxops.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/05\/podcast-01.png&#8221; parallax=&#8221;on&#8221; global_colors_info=&#8221;{}&#8221; background_size__hover=&#8221;cover&#8221; background_size__hover_enabled=&#8221;cover&#8221;][et_pb_row _builder_version=&#8221;4.16&#8243; locked=&#8221;off&#8221; global_colors_info=&#8221;{}&#8221;][et_pb_column type=&#8221;4_4&#8243; _builder_version=&#8221;4.16&#8243; custom_padding=&#8221;|||&#8221; global_colors_info=&#8221;{}&#8221; custom_padding__hover=&#8221;|||&#8221;][et_pb_text _builder_version=&#8221;4.16&#8243; text_font=&#8221;||||||||&#8221; header_font=&#8221;||||||||&#8221; header_2_font=&#8221;Lato|700|||||||&#8221; header_2_text_color=&#8221;#003254&#8243; header_2_font_size=&#8221;52px&#8221; header_2_line_height=&#8221;1.2em&#8221; background_layout=&#8221;dark&#8221; header_2_font_size_tablet=&#8221;&#8221; header_2_font_size_phone=&#8221;36px&#8221; header_2_font_size_last_edited=&#8221;on|phone&#8221; locked=&#8221;off&#8221; global_colors_info=&#8221;{}&#8221;]<h2>Related Episodes<\/h2>[\/et_pb_text][et_pb_divider color=&#8221;#A0CD46&#8243; divider_weight=&#8221;5px&#8221; _builder_version=&#8221;4.16&#8243; max_width=&#8221;120px&#8221; locked=&#8221;off&#8221; global_colors_info=&#8221;{}&#8221;][\/et_pb_divider][\/et_pb_column][\/et_pb_row][et_pb_row column_structure=&#8221;1_2,1_2&#8243; _builder_version=&#8221;4.16&#8243; _module_preset=&#8221;default&#8221; global_colors_info=&#8221;{}&#8221;][et_pb_column type=&#8221;1_2&#8243; _builder_version=&#8221;4.16&#8243; _module_preset=&#8221;default&#8221; global_colors_info=&#8221;{}&#8221;][et_pb_button button_url=&#8221;https:\/\/podcasts.apple.com\/us\/podcast\/saltovation-making-sense-of-state-and-local-tax\/id1517450565&#8243; button_text=&#8221;Subscribe on Apple Podcasts&#8221; button_alignment=&#8221;left&#8221; button_alignment_tablet=&#8221;left&#8221; button_alignment_phone=&#8221;&#8221; button_alignment_last_edited=&#8221;on|tablet&#8221; _builder_version=&#8221;4.16&#8243; _module_preset=&#8221;default&#8221; custom_button=&#8221;on&#8221; button_text_size=&#8221;14px&#8221; button_text_color=&#8221;#003254&#8243; button_bg_color=&#8221;#A0CD46&#8243; button_border_width=&#8221;2px&#8221; button_border_color=&#8221;rgba(255,255,255,0.1)&#8221; button_border_radius=&#8221;0px&#8221; button_letter_spacing=&#8221;2px&#8221; button_font=&#8221;Lato|700||on|||||&#8221; button_icon=&#8221;&#xe09e;||divi||400&#8243; button_on_hover=&#8221;off&#8221; background_layout=&#8221;dark&#8221; custom_padding=&#8221;14px|30px|14px|30px|true|true&#8221; locked=&#8221;off&#8221; global_colors_info=&#8221;{}&#8221; custom_padding__hover_enabled=&#8221;on|hover&#8221; custom_padding__hover=&#8221;|40px|||true|false&#8221;][\/et_pb_button][\/et_pb_column][et_pb_column type=&#8221;1_2&#8243; _builder_version=&#8221;4.16&#8243; _module_preset=&#8221;default&#8221; global_colors_info=&#8221;{}&#8221;][et_pb_button button_url=&#8221;https:\/\/open.spotify.com\/show\/7M0RZGgWG8A2Vd4okyR2yc?si=umxHEOq4SbCRp4nLy7LBgA&#8221; button_text=&#8221;Subscribe on Apple Podcasts&#8221; button_alignment=&#8221;left&#8221; button_alignment_tablet=&#8221;left&#8221; button_alignment_phone=&#8221;&#8221; button_alignment_last_edited=&#8221;on|tablet&#8221; _builder_version=&#8221;4.16&#8243; _module_preset=&#8221;default&#8221; custom_button=&#8221;on&#8221; button_text_size=&#8221;14px&#8221; button_text_color=&#8221;#003254&#8243; button_bg_color=&#8221;#A0CD46&#8243; button_border_width=&#8221;2px&#8221; button_border_color=&#8221;rgba(255,255,255,0.1)&#8221; button_border_radius=&#8221;0px&#8221; button_letter_spacing=&#8221;2px&#8221; button_font=&#8221;Lato|700||on|||||&#8221; button_icon=&#8221;&#xe0b5;||divi||400&#8243; button_on_hover=&#8221;off&#8221; background_layout=&#8221;dark&#8221; custom_padding=&#8221;14px|30px|14px|30px|true|true&#8221; locked=&#8221;off&#8221; global_colors_info=&#8221;{}&#8221; custom_padding__hover_enabled=&#8221;on|hover&#8221; custom_padding__hover=&#8221;|40px|||true|false&#8221;][\/et_pb_button][\/et_pb_column][\/et_pb_row][\/et_pb_section]\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In this episode of the SALTovation podcast, Chris Muntifering, Executive Director at the Institute for Professionals in Taxation. Chris shares his journey from a finance graduate to a seasoned tax professional, emphasizing how he fell into property tax and eventually became a key player in IPT. Chris discusses the importance of education in tax management, with IPT providing resources for professionals at all levels, from basic to advanced training across various tax disciplines. Listen this week as we explore the importance of community, mentorship, and continuous learning in the field of taxation.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":14272,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"on","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"2880","spt_transcript":"Meredith Smith: Let's make sure we're recording. That would be bad. All right. Kim, thank you so much for joining us today on the Saltivation Podcast. It's great to have you here. \r\nKim Blascoe: Well, I'm very excited to be joining you as well. So hopefully we have some really good conversation on different things that we're doing in the industry.\r\nMeredith Smith: Yes. And on that note, so can you give us, um, kind of what your professional background is? \r\nKim Blascoe: Sure. So I'm a CPA by trade. I still am licensed. I practiced for a little over 30 years before I joined CPA.com last year in June. Originally I had a tax and accounting practice, which basically at that point in time had SALT and payroll as part of the service offerings that we did.\r\nAnd then in December of 2010, I was actually merging with an Illinois regional firm when the Whipley opportunity came back around for them. So, I tailcoat merged into Whitley, and at that point, I actually took over the national accounting practice that Whitley had. Now, at that point in time, Whitley was a large regional Wisconsin regional firm. So, we were the first Illinois merger, and we had two offices in Minnesota and two offices in India. And when I actually left Whitley, we were a top 20 firm. So many, many, many mergers later. Uh, I got a lot of experience in adding other accounting practices to the one that I was working with. \r\n[00:03:12] Meredith Smith: Yeah. So then why choose to leave public accounting for CPA. com? What was that drive? \r\n[00:03:19] Kim Blascoe: I'd spent 30 years in practice, like I mentioned, and I loved mentoring younger associates or people that were early on in their careers.\r\nIt was one of the best things that I did. And also I loved working with clients, but I really felt like I wanted to do something more and I had all this experience with, you know, everything I had done. Like I said, you know, with Whipley was a regional firm. And when I joined, I had my own small firm. They were a medium sized firm.\r\nIf you want to look at that way. And when I left, they were a very, very large firm. So I had done the gamut of understanding the opportunities and the challenges of being in different size firms. And I just felt like I really had more to share. So, um, the cpa. com opportunity. Came up and I kind of thought that my background was perfect for the opportunity.\r\nAnd I just jumped at the chance to make a change, which was kind of scary because for 30 years, I'd been doing, you know, really predominantly the same thing, although in in different size environments. But I just kind of switched my mentoring, even though I'd still do mentoring on an individual basis. But I switched my mentoring over to firms.\r\nI look at it just as a different mentoring challenge and an opportunity that I've been given, you know, a little bit later on in my career. \r\n[00:04:32] Judy Vorndran: Interesting. That makes a lot of sense though, at a certain point in my, I'm at that. Getting close to retirement age and kids are almost launched and I'm like, what am I doing?\r\nI have a firm. So, you know, trying to support the younger generation on our team to have a future at our firm and wherever that lies. Yeah, super interesting. And obviously encourage the younger generation to pursue these careers because they're really great.\r\n[00:05:01] Kim Blascoe: Yeah, and I think, you know, when you say, you know, people wanting to become partners, I think 1 of the things that we really work with, um, when we talk to firms as having a career path, especially inside of the cast practice, but even inside of assault practice, you know, salt didn't exist when I came into the practice.\r\nRight? And we did most of those services inside of cast. It kind of more and same with our payroll group. They were all part of CAS originally. And then when I, by the time I left, those were all separate service lines and had matured and added advisory to all of them as well. So, it was no longer a compliance based business.\r\nIt was now a compliance and advisory based business. So, you know, we've seen a lot of changes happen over the years inside of practices. And I think the importance of that is, is all the service offerings that have been added really need to have career paths so that individuals feel like they can, if their desire is to become partner and not everybody's desire is, but if the desire is to become partner, that we give them those opportunities in these other areas of service.\r\n[00:06:03] Judy Vorndran: Right. It's a real great opportunity, I think, to be entrepreneurial, which is why I stayed in public accounting, despite multiple offers to go into industry. I thought, well, once I figure out the problem, because clearly you have 1 that I want, what am I going to do? It's become wrote and no, not the same, but just similar.\r\nAnd so I'm like, I really love the diversity of lots and lots of clients and lots of issues and trying to figure it all out. Yeah. And it's a giant puzzle. \r\n[00:06:26] Kim Blascoe: Yeah, I never did the private side either. And maybe that was part of it. I always thought I'd get bored working with just like 1 company versus the opportunity to work with many companies.  \r\n[00:06:35] Judy Vorndran: yeah. And you're always on the curve. You're always learning. There's always something new to learn in this and all of it. You know, new accounting practices, international, national, new rules, new laws, all the good things. So it's a constantly learning profession, which. \r\n[00:06:49] Kim Blascoe: I'm not going to lie to you, though. I always tell everybody if I had to practice in the salt space, you would probably have to stab my eyeballs. So I'm always so incredibly thankful that there are people that love that space. \r\nJudy Vorndran: I mean, like, why is it though, do you think people hate it so much? I mean, it's just such a negative. \r\n[00:07:09] Kim Blascoe: I think for me, it's like, it's so like standard driven.\r\nLike there's so many rules and regulations that you need to understand. I was always just incredibly happy. Like Jessica Macklin at Whipley is who I always worked with. We were kind of in the same region and actually I'm going to do a session with her at DCPA on the crossover between Salt and Kaz. I saw that on that schedule.\r\nOkay. Okay. So I'm excited about that because I think now it's, it's an opportunity out there that is still very, very, it's a very underutilized practice. Right. So, you know, it's just not experienced.\r\n[00:07:44] Judy Vorndran: I'm an attorney and a CPA, which is probably why I practice in the area because. I think it's incredibly creative to look at the rules and see how they apply, right?\r\nBecause it's not black and white, especially with software and information services and tech and biotech. And there's just so many nuances to business. It's not like everybody sells a thing, right? And that's taxable. So sales tax is very nuanced. Income tax dates are very nuanced. So the creativity aspect of like, what's your position?\r\nWho are you in this state allows for some reattribution of income and also some, you know, obviously some compliance services that you need to manage the expectations of each of those governments to manage your business risk. But, um, yeah, I think that's really interesting though, because so many people do really hate our area.\r\nAnd I really wish that we didn't have that negative spin because it creates like bad energy around it. I mean, all of us on the team, like we dig on it. Like we don't look at it as negative. We look at it like, oh, it's a really cool puzzle. We're going to have to go figure out how to do it. And then we have, you know, because business has one sort of rule.\r\nAnd so, we just have to apply those rules by state. It's not that hard if you know the business, but we get to dive into the business transactionally, which a lot of providers don't. They roll it up. They do what? What is the gross revenue? They don't look at the nuances. We look at the transactions. So, I think it's really interesting as you look how Business makes money.\r\n[00:09:05] Kim Blascoe: And I think a lot of people go, we need all sorts to make the world go around. That's always incredibly happy that people like to actually, even in the payroll space, the payroll space, the payroll tax return space in the sales tax space, but I also think are in salt all the way around, I think the other thing on the SALT side of the house is that, you know, a lot of businesses don't even realize that there's a lot more to salt than a lot of them.\r\nThink of it as sales tax. Right. And even then. They don't know the rules from state to state and the pandemic has so changed the dynamics of how businesses work that a lot of businesses have become national and they don't know what the rules are. Sometimes they think, well, I'm not selling a product.\r\nOkay, but you're sending somebody into that state for a product that you shipped, right? You know, so, like, what are all the rules on that? Where do you have to file? Where do I need to get registered as a business? You know, most people just skate right past all of that. And, you know, I always look at it as, is ignorance bliss, but is it really ignorance? I think it's more of like, they don't even know what they don't know. Right. Right. \r\n[00:10:03] Judy Vorndran: And it's fear. There's a lot of fear of like overwhelm and stress, which I find very interesting because they figured out, I mean, I have clients that have sold 46, 000 products. Right. I'm like, you know, how to like, A plumbing company knows how to tell you this is all the things you buy in order to replumb your kitchen.\r\nHow did you do that? You can absolutely do tax. Absolutely, because if you could figure that problem out, it's very similar. Logical, you know, add the things. But there is this thing out there of complexity, and I think tech has tried to solve some of it, but they lack the knowledge of the tax background.\r\nThey have the tech, but without the tax acumen. So, we've got this marriage happening in, In a software automation, that's not allowing both sides to be the way it needs to be to advocate on behalf of clients, which I know is why CPA dot com years ago chose Vertex as its chosen provider. I don't think that's so much the case anymore. I'm not sure. Cause they were like the preeminent. They've been around the longest and all that good stuff. So yeah, but there are a lot of providers out there now. \r\n[00:11:04] Kim Blascoe: There are. And there are a lot of choices. It's just like all the rest of the technology too. And it's like fairly overwhelming sometimes how many options you have out there, but the importance of those options, I think, especially in the salt spaces, it is an area that, that, that you have to have some expertise and you have to spend some time digging into it.\r\nAnd businesses don't do that on their own. Right. And I think the other thing, you know, the other thing that maybe has some bad connotations around it on the salt side is it's another tax, right? You're telling your clients that. Oh, now you might have to do sales tax, or you might have to do income tax in multiple states.\r\nAnd they're just like, taxed out, right? They're just tax, tax, tax. Everybody always wants money from me. And so it's not always even a pleasant conversation. It's not an area where you can work with client. I mean, you have to work through the value side of it. Right. And, and even like the compliance side of it and like ease of mind that you're doing the right thing, or at least you've been told like what, you know, that right thing is.\r\nI, prior to me leaving Whipley, I actually did a wealth and asset management build out and CAS was one of the service offerings that we did. And when you think about what that wealth and asset management industry does, they have clients everywhere all the way across the United States, right? And they're flying to all of these places.\r\nAnd I used to have, I used to bring Jessica into my conversations all the time and say, talk to them about nexus, talk to them about their, what their state filing requirements are. They may not have a sales tax, but they may also have a sales tax, some state stacks on service, right? You know? So it's like they need to understand. And then from there, they can make the decision about where they want to file and where they don't want to file. \r\n[00:12:37] Judy Vorndran: want to \r\n[00:12:37] Kim Blascoe: file. \r\n[00:12:37] Judy Vorndran: Well, it's funny being at the big four because I was national. So I really cared about the big states, Illinois, New York, California, Texas, Florida, 10, you know, 10 percent of the U. S. nation. I cared less about South Dakota, North Dakota, but then I worked for Eide Bailey and they were sited in North Dakota, South Dakota.\r\nSo, that was our biggest offices and the build out sprung for there. So I had, I had, Went to, you know, I went to hearings in those states. I flew into Pierre, South Dakota to do a hearing on behalf of a taxpayer. I mean, there are big taxpayers in South Dakota, North Dakota. You would have never known, you know, and also as you get to see America, you see there's a lot happening in our country that a lot of people that the CPA community doesn't understand, which is why I think SALT is so important for the CPA to build that tech stack or that competency so that the CPA firms can be successful.\r\nAnd then they're not. Blame for not telling them because there is this thing I feel like maybe mentioned that before my husband, you know, I'm a lawyer and a CPA and I, my specialty is state and local, but not income anymore from a federal perspective. Right? Even though I have a master's of tax, I've rolled away from being a federal tax practitioner.\r\nI'm state and local. So I can't even do my own personal income tax return. And I think a lot of people think, why, why not? Like, cause I don't know, keep up with the personal deductions and so forth. And my husband says to me, who is a securities lawyer and litigator, he says, I don't understand why CPA say they can do all these things when they can't, they can't do accounting services and compilations and audits and tax returns and, and, and financial accounting and income tax.\r\nAnd there's a lot of things in the CPA world that you could do for a living, and you could silo it and get that great, good competency. You don't have to be a generalist, even you running your own practice that was audit and tax. I can't even imagine. How hard that must have been. \r\n[00:14:18] Kim Blascoe: Well, you know, back then though, most practices were generalist practices. They were about the practices that we merged in at Whipley. Most of those practices were generalist practices. Now I would say, probably maybe 10 years ago, five at for sure at the minimum, that started to change inside of practices. And we started doing exactly what you were saying is like maybe moving towards a focus.\r\nSo a practice focus and an industry focus that became very relevant inside firms. And I think even in the smaller firms, they started thinking about what are we good at and what are we not good at, right? Let's focus on that. And now you see cast practices that are really what we call to as BPO business process outsourcing practices that only focus on CAS. They don't do anything else or they have cast and they have tax and they don't do anything beyond that. There's not a test type of services. So I, I think we're seeing that that transition happen within terms and I, but I will also tell you, there are a lot of firms that are still working on getting rid of the generalist concept.\r\nOh, yeah. It's a hard push to get people. \r\n[00:17:14] Kim Blascoe: I think we look at the CAS side of the practice as an opportunity for individuals that went through accounting curriculums or maybe economics or business majors or something like that, that really thought their only option was to go into private, to go to work for a company because they didn't want to do the commitment of the tax season hours or the audit season hours.\r\nAnd so cast gives them an opportunity and potentially Salt would as well, but it gives them an opportunity to stay into or enter into public practice or come back to public practice because there is now this, you know, these consulting opportunities that didn't exist originally. And they looked at it as all compliance based, and it was a drug of ours.\r\nAnd so we feel like we're transforming that whole. You know, space from the advisory aspect of it, so that there are opportunities for individuals that really aren't compliance based because a lot of practices that a lot of cast practices look at the financial statement as a byproduct of the service offerings that they're doing.\r\nSo, if we have that mentality, and we're thinking cast practices are. You know, focused on the advisory piece that do the transactional and accounting controller type of functions so that they have good data in order to do the CFO and the trusted advisor. You know, that's all really important for firms. And firms are still very much struggling to try to get there. \r\n[00:18:35] Judy Vorndran: Well, yeah, and the data thing, too, we actually hired someone who didn't get a CPA, but is a CPA kind of by training and decided to become a data wrangler, basically, which is not what is he's got some extra studying and understanding all data management.\r\nSo, we can assimilate data with lots of different repositories to get good filing information because people roll things up at the transaction level data is so important. And so that has been an interesting pivot for our team to think that way, because we're really good with Excel and, making spreadsheets and all that. But is there other things that we can do to ingest to create, what do you call it, some kind of a process that's not like us moving it into a spreadsheet and wrangling it.\r\n[00:19:14] Kim Blascoe: Yeah, and I think with all the technology changes that are happening now, one of the things that that we are very focused on in the whole discussion around and what does that mean to practices public accounting firm and cast practices is looking at the processes that you're doing manually, looking at the things that you're still doing in those Excel spreadsheets and saying, this is what kind of technology can help replace this so that I can move on to the advisory piece?\r\nRight? So we're trying to automate as much as we can on that back end. So that the value that we're bringing to clients is the conversations we're having with them and the knowledge that we can share with them. And the, uh. Um, the opportunity to help them grow their, their businesses and, you know, maybe potentially meet their goals, right?\r\nSo that's all, that's our goal is their goal, right? So figuring out how do we work with firms so that we can help or practice businesses so that we can help them, you know, meet their goals and their growth. So I'm not sure how much we got to raid. \r\n[00:20:08] Judy Vorndran: Meredith, \r\n[00:20:09] Kim Blascoe: but you take the rest of it. \r\n[00:20:12] Meredith Smith: So Kim, speaking with that, what is the mission of cpa.com? \r\n[00:20:18] Kim Blascoe: So CPA.com, um, actually started as the technical arm of the CPA. And so we really started with a whole concept of, um, helping firms and practices grow in the digit in a digital transformation space. So, very focused on technology, what has been added over probably the last. Few years is we now have a full professional services practice, which is the cast side of the house is what I lead.\r\nWe also have an audit side of the house, which is the technology that was built. So, you know, working with on the CAS side, working with firms to help transform their practices. Right? So working with them on potentially what's their, you know, what's their vision and mission? What service offerings are they going to have?\r\nWhat clients do they want to work with who's going to do the work? You know, what does that work look like? What processes are there? What technology are we throwing at it? How are we going to price it? You know, how are we going to assess clients coming in? So that we know that we're scoping that work appropriately.\r\nAnd ultimately, how are we going to market all of that? So that people know what we're selling right from a, from a firm perspective. So we're very focused on that side of it. We have a lot of, um, education and training that we focus on. We have coaching and consulting programs that we do. So we've changed a lot from just being the technology arm, but technology is still a very big focus for cpa.com and a huge part of our mission. \r\n[00:21:45] Judy Vorndran: Is that like a fee for service thing as well, though, that part of it? \r\n[00:21:49] Kim Blascoe: So, so we do a lot of different things. So we do have, offerings that there's a fee attached to them. But we do a lot of freemium type of stuff. So we do tons of webinars that are free and we do it on our topics that we help practices transform our coaching and consulting is a fee based practice. Uh, some of our education is free base. The webinar stuff is, uh, is free. And some of it is fee. Like, we do some workshops and stuff like that that are have fees attached to them. We do tons of white paper. Um, if you go out on the CPA dot com website, there's a ton of resources out there that are all free to firms.\r\nAnd we are getting ready to launch a toolkit in our professional practices for transformation, because we have a lot of firms that are DIY firms. They like to do things themselves, but they want. They want the tools that we use, and it's not all the tools that we use, but it's a lot of the tools that we use in our coaching and consulting program.\r\nSo if they want to transform their own practice, we're going to give them the essential tools that they can use to get there. Right. So, but we have a lot of firms that are going through the coaching program and we kind of took our workshop that we've always done the CAS roadmap workshop. That we've done for like 15 years.\r\nI went through it in 2017. Maybe it's only been 13 years. I went through it in 2017 and I was like, so invigorated on what I learned. And I'm like, oh, this is so cool. I'm going to go back to my practice and I'm going to start implementing. Well, then you go back to your practice. Cause this was back pre COVID.\r\nSo we were on site for a few days together. So we went back to our practices. Got busy with my day to day, you know, responsibilities, my leadership role and stuff like that. And then a year later I reached out to my cpa.com rep and I'm like, okay, what do you have for me? Like I'm, I'm ready to get started now.\r\nAnd she goes, well, the workshop is all we have. I mean, this is a long story that I'm going to bring around short. I'm like, oh, okay. So I took it upon myself. So I really took that DIY role and I, I worked through transforming. Now, what was a fairly major CAS practice? Because our accounting practice, because we had done all these mergers, right?\r\nSo I had 37 offices. Everybody was doing everything differently. And we're like. Where do we start? So when I came to cpa.com and one of the reasons I joined cpa.com is they asked me to build out our coaching program, our coaching and consulting program. So I took what I wanted, what I was looking for back in 2018, when I came back and said, I've now spent a year not doing anything, can you help me?\r\nAnd I built it. I you know, with a team of people inside of cpa.com, we literally built out. An accountable program, so we took some content of the roadmap workshop and dove deep into a lot of that content. And now it's an 18 month program. We do a variety of, um, group sessions, and then one on one coaching sessions and round table sessions.\r\nAnd we pick a new topic each quarter, and we work through those topics, building it out with the firms. We provide them with the tools they have homework. So there's accountability. So you don't go back to your practice and not do anything and then wonder why. You know, your practice isn't transforming. So, you know, that was, that was one of the big reasons why I did come to cpa.com so that I could help other firms work through what took me two years to do. It was a two-year project. We had a huge human capital piece of it. So anytime you're working with human capital and change management, there's a lot of warm, fuzzy stuff and, and. You know, our HR team was telling us, you know, you just can't do that.\r\nYou have to go about it this way, you know, so just the human capital part of it for me, because I had a team of like 180 people at that point in time that were between India and the U S you know, so we had a lot of changes that we did inside of our practice and you know, all of that kind of got rolled and rolled into our coaching and consulting.\r\nInteresting. So, freemium and stuff that you have to pay for. Because is it self report? Well, yeah, go ahead. I was just going to say a lot of our freemium stuff also comes with CPE, so if you join our webinars and stuff, you get free CPE hours, and you can get a lot of them. And I think it's like, a lot of CPAs that are looking for CPE don't realize that there's so much free CPE out there with really good topics and substance.\r\n[00:25:50] Judy Vorndran: Yeah, we've really got, we've taken advantage of it because we're a small firm. We teach and go to things just because we want to stay current with the legal changes and so forth. But we've done it, taken advantage of a lot of that because there's so much out there that's free content that'll give you the CPE hours you want and get some information.\r\nIt's very interesting the way how that shifted. You know, I know a lot of, and a lot of associations made their money off the CPE, right? Or the, I'm a lawyer to continually education, but now other providers are giving it and they're being paid sometimes by a vendor or something. So it's really transformed the way you and I get up to date as opposed to sitting in a conference room, you can get an hour and still move on with the rest of your day and not be completely bonked down, losing several days at work. Yeah. Super interesting. \r\n[00:26:34] Kim Blascoe: I will tell you though, when we went virtual with everything during the pandemic, I'm like, I missed people. I missed going to conferences. I missed my friends like Jenny Hattori that had the same pain points back then as I had, cause our practices were very similar that you can't shift that part of it but you definitely can look at other opportunities.\r\nAnd there's so many now, from a virtual perspective, there's just so many that you certainly can solve a lot of that with freebies. \r\n[00:27:42] Meredith Smith: So then with that coaching and mentoring, what do you see CPA firms struggle with a lot? Or is there a common denominator of just kind of reoccurring items that just continually come up when you work with various CPA firms and leadership and whatnot?\r\n[00:27:59] Kim Blascoe: Tom Hood just, um, put out a new slide that I thought was really, really interesting. I asked him if I could steal it and I told him every time I talked about it, I'd throw his name out there. Um, and it talked about, it looked at April, 2023 and April, 2024. And it was talking about exactly what you just asked me, like, what are firms struggling with?\r\nRight. And I thought it was interesting to see some of the movement of the topics and like, You know, one topic actually went away, but for 2024, it was literally like technology, keeping up with technology due to accelerated digital transformation in gen AI and how AI is like in every conversation that we have these days.\r\nRight. Almost like it had never existed before. And, and really, I talk about it all the time. It's like I do a lot of work with Sage Intact and Nicole Kasich is always like, we had AI. It's just people didn't know we had AI. Right. So now it's like, A buzzword, so that's our, that's our current buzzword.\r\nThe other 1 was upscaling existing talent, which is still a big struggle with firms, even though we are making some headway on resolving that, especially in the cast practice space and then finding and retaining talent is another 1. now, finding and retaining talent was at the top of the list in 2023 and it moved down to, I think, number 3 or 4 in 2024.\r\nSo. Maybe we've made a little headway on it, but it's not going away. And part of that is probably because we know that there aren't as many accounting candidates coming out of universities as much as we had, like, you know, when I came out of university. So that's a little bit different. And then the last 1 is, you know, still working through maintaining a firm culture and a hybrid environment.\r\nI think, you know, there's still our struggles with that. We, we hear firms are talking about pulling people back in a couple of days a week. So that there is some of that. Sense of community inside of the firms and, you know, kind of continuing to build culture because it is kind of hard to build culture when you spend all your time on virtual calls.\r\nRight? You know, so. We're seeing a lot of those changes, but, you know, the people side of it is still a big struggle and technology, you know, is changing faster than it ever has before. So people trying to keep up with all of that is, you know, also a big pain point for firms.  \r\n[00:30:13] Meredith Smith: So, when you talk about upscaling existing talent, what exactly does that mean?\r\n[00:30:19] Kim Blascoe: Yeah, so, so I'll speak from a CAS practice perspective, but it really is something across the, across the entire gamut of public accounting firms. So, we have people that come out of school, And have basically been taught compliance based stuff, right? It's all still technical training, not very much, even soft skill training.\r\nWhen you think about that. So, we have these kids coming out of school and, and we're looking at them and we're saying, okay, it took me 20 years to build my advisory level skill set that I have. You don't have 20 years. So how can we get you to an advisor level type of role? So, as quickly as possible and, and, and what do we, what can we do to do that?\r\nSo, first of all, you know, we're looking at our practices and we're saying, you know, let's take a skills gap assessment on what you have today, because if you want your services to include advisory services, you have to have the people that actually can deliver the advisory services. And so often in our practices right now, we don't have that, especially in our cast practices.\r\nWe have a lot of cast practices that are really, really good at transactional through. Um, consult or controller type of services and they can't figure out how to move beyond that. So, you know, that's one of the things we work with firms on in our coaching program is, you know, thinking about the whole build.\r\nSo we call it kind of building a factory. Like, you wouldn't open a door to a factory with only 1 piece of equipment. If you need 6 pieces of equipment to do the, to deliver the product that you want to deliver. We need our cast practices to think that way too. So if you look at your services. We look at who you're going to work for, like the clients, basically the industry niche that you're going to work in, like who's going to deliver that and how do we get those people upskilled to those, to those different skill sets that we have today.\r\nSome people will never be able to deliver. Consulting services and advisory services. It's just not in their DNA. They're technical people. We need technical people. That's all good. I think we just have to, embrace the fact that not everybody's going to be an advisor, but the people that you do see, like, a glimmer, like, early on in their, in their careers, it's like, those are the individuals you grab, you mentor, you put in upscaling programs.\r\nWe're actually working. I'm hoping by will have a launch on this for 2025, or at least, uh, um, uh, here's what's coming in 2025. We are building out kind of like, how to build a trusted advisor. How do you build an advisor type of role that will have, like, a boot camp basket aspect to it. So, like, they can come and spend 3 days on site somewhere, and it literally is like, you know, doing, like, um.\r\nWorking with other people and doing role play type of stuff, you know, so that individuals get more comfortable doing that. Because again, we don't have 20 years to build these advisors. We need it now. Clients are asking for these services that they weren't asking for 10 years ago. Certainly the pandemic has changed a lot of that too.\r\nThat scared a lot of people. There were a lot of businesses that ended up not making it because they didn't have the cash flow. That they needed to sustain a pandemic, right? So there was no cash flow planning. There was nobody. I mean, nobody realized a pandemic was going to happen. Right? I don't know.\r\nMaybe some doomsday people were saying it was going to happen. Most of us didn't believe it. Right? And I think even when we were still home, almost a year later, we still didn't believe we were like, in the situation that we were in. But, you know, you think about, like, how do we get the, how do we get individuals.\r\nTo a point where, where the skillsets that they have match the services that we're providing inside of practices. And, and firms are looking all the time for opportunities to upskill those individuals. There's just not a lot out there. That's still an area that's being widely built out from a training and education perspective.\r\n[00:34:04] Judy Vorndran: For sure. Because you learn rules and we should clarify that CAS means client advisory services, which is a very broad based word. I mean, right, acronym because honestly, client advisory, like. What does that mean? \r\n[00:35:14] Kim Blascoe: One of the things that we're really working with now advisory leaders.\r\nSo one step up from CAS leaders, because most of our cast leaders roll up through advisory inside of public practices, especially the large firms. Right? So one of the things we're working on at CPA.com is how do we take all those advisory services, right? There's a lot of them. Anything that doesn't fall into tax or audit or a test.\r\nFalls into advisory or consulting services, right? So how do we take all of those services and start focusing on the client centric model where what's the best for the client? So like not thinking about a lot of times in bar, which is the direct technology build for a client rather than going through like a client advisory services practices, where we build the technology for the client, right?\r\nThat we're going to use for that client. So a little bit different. Model like they're very focused on a get in and get out model. CAS is very focused on get in and stay model, right? You know? So it's a, it's a very, very different model, but you know, one of the things on the bar side of the house is they're very focused on selling this and moving on to my next sale.\r\nWe're not like that, right? So we're like, how do we get everybody thinking bigger? So, and also a lot of the larger firms have an outsource CFO practice. So if you take those, the bar, the outsource CFO, the cast practice. And you start getting them to work together on what's the best opportunity for the client?\r\nWhat's best for the client? And what's also then does that make it good for the firm? Right? So, you know, we want to say to the bar practice is just building out that technology for client the right move. Or should you be talking to the client about potentially client advisory services? Maybe they don't need a tech build.\r\nMaybe they just need outsourced accounting and CFO services. So, and that could solve their problem. And then the firm benefits from that too, because it's not a one time fee and it's recurring revenue. Yeah, it's recurring revenue and everybody loves recurring revenue. You think about all the, oh yeah.\r\nStuff that's happening now. They love the re recurring revenue, so they immediately go to the advisory. They love cast practices because it is based off of recurring revenue. \r\n[00:37:20] Judy Vorndran: Yep. No, it's a huge. And I found that myself, cause we've done a lot of automation where we'll set people up to click sales tax, get them licensed, all the things, and then they don't maintain it.\r\nOr the people that started it helped get it set up, leave. And you're thinking, oh, my gosh, nobody's watching it anymore. You were watching it. Who's going to watch it now? And I think there's a lot of that happening in the co sourcing outsourcing area and in software where people are thinking, set it, forget it is just not correct.\r\nIt's not set it, forget it. So there's a huge disparity between what software companies and tech, you know, all the things is just rolling up where people like, I don't know. They want to hand it off because they're CEOs that are visionaries, but they are like, I didn't pick the right pieces to get my business in order.\r\n[00:38:16] Meredith Smith: So then kind of in the, in the spirit of that kind of dynamic, Software recurring revenue kind of changes in what ways are you seeing CPA firms kind of pivoting and transforming their practices?\r\n[00:38:32] Kim Blascoe: Yeah, so I think 1 of the most important things that we need to think through is that. We are still a fairly compliance based industry, right? And there's so much competition other than a test, which we own, right? The audit space. Accounting firms own that space. Other than a test, though, we really public accounting firms don't own anything else.\r\nRight? So tax, CAS services, all these additional advisory services, technically, anybody with a skill set can do those. And we are seeing competition come into the space that is very compliance based, but also very client centric. Right? So they throw a bunch of technology at it. They're they have a very specific ideal client profile that they're going after and they have way more money.\r\nA lot of them are back, so they have a lot more money to throw at things. So I think the importance to the accounting industry is to take a step back and say, where are we only doing compliance? And can we add advisory to everything that we're doing from a compliance perspective? And then also looking at what advisory and outsourcing opportunities are we not, do we not have in our, in our toolkit today that we should potentially look at adding.\r\nAnd the importance of that is, is that CPA firms still have the relationship with the majority of clients, right? So if you look at we mentioned in the beginning, there's 46,000 CPA firms out there, right? And you think about that. So they're the ones that hold the majority of the relationships. If we don't keep up with the competition or stay ahead, really, I think I look at adding advisory to everything we do as staying ahead of the competition because the competition is still very compliance based.\r\nIf we don't do that, we're going to lose our leg in the industry and we don't want to do that. So it's very, very important to AICPA and CPA. com that we continue to advocate. For that, um, in, in the industry for adding advisory services to everything we do for compliance so that we maintain the relationships and stay ahead of the competition.\r\n[00:40:36] Meredith Smith: Well, and that's where we even see from, we work with, with sales tax software vendors to help our clients solve a problem that they have, right. They need to collect sales tax. They need to get on an invoice. What's the best way to do that? And so often we partner with various sales tax software platforms to But what we also are finding them doing, it's like, you know, that same kind of vein of, well, we can solve this problem by way of putting tax on an invoice.\r\nOh, but then we can help you register. Oh, and then we can help you research the tax rules. And then we can help you put all of that collected tax on a tax return. So they are. Expanding and kind of, I would say, kind of doing what you're suggesting CPA firms do, but at the same time, you've got to understand, like, really, what's your core competency and what are you really good at?\r\nBecause as a software vendor, you're not good at advisory services when you're also not an advisory firm, but also the advisory firms, it's like. We do, and kind of going back to some of our earlier conversation, we do want to be kind of like all things for our clients, because that is that relationship.\r\nAnd we value that connection and want to assist you with your problems. But at the same time, that's where we look at it. And it's like, well, we've got to also partner with other firms because we can't be all things to all people. So let's get to know really good people that we can refer you to. And us as state and local tax experts, we don't have to also be competent in.\r\nPermanent establishment for some of our non U. S. based businesses, but let's partner with some of those other firms that are really good at that. \r\n[00:42:16] Kim Blascoe: Yeah. And you know, I think we, a lot of times talk, even in our coaching program, we talk about, we work, cause we work a small, medium and large firms, right. When we do coaching and consulting and you know, I always tell everybody, I'm like, okay, think about, think about the difference in the service offerings that you have between small, medium and large firms.\r\nRight. So your large firms, they probably have a huge. Amount of service offerings that they do, including assault practice, including a payroll practice or an HR consulting practice. So they have, they have like, you know, really like honed in on different services that in a generalist practice, they're going to keep it high level.\r\nAnd the large firms have kind of scoped that much in more, much more detail. Then you think about the medium sized firms and they probably have a good number of services, but not as many. So, they have to go to find resources in other places, and they just build those relationships. And then you think of the small firms where they're really focused on maybe a small number of services that they have to offer, and they absolutely have to go out and find other resources to help them. I always said, you know, one of the, you think of one of the beauties of merging in like a smaller firm, merging into a larger firm, it's like heaven on earth. The first year, when it comes to the service offerings you have available to your clients, right?\r\nSo you have like all this growth in the very first year, because you're like, Oh my gosh, we can do cyber. We can do R&D credits, you know, like all these things that before you had to go find resources for, and, and you realize like how many more. Service opportunities your clients have inside of those large firms, but, you know, there's trades to everything you do, you know, you get into a large firm environment and it becomes a little more of like.\r\nI hate to use the word silo, but, you know, like, you've become more practice and industry focused and now that generalist concept is a little bit different and not all clients like that. So some clients like working with small firms because it's a more intimate relationship. But then you have to go and find some of those additional resources. \r\nI don't know if we talked about this, but, you know, this whole India thing, we had a huge facility in Hyderabad at Deloitte. And what I found that was challenging for our team was we had to do things, have them do things 3 times. So even though we got this huge cost differential and the salaries, we have this huge training cost to the people in the US and these 4 people had to work in the middle of the night.\r\nAnd I see this going on this, this dilution across the nation, where using different countries to take advantage of wage disparity. And I wonder how you feel about that, given the CPA community in America, because it's almost like we're lowering the costs by giving other work to other countries, instead of making American business recognize the true cost of doing business in America by paying US wages. And sometimes I don't, I struggle with that, even though there's a need for it. \r\n[00:46:25] Kim Blascoe: Yeah. So, I mean, I guess I have maybe a couple of thoughts on that one. I think the philosophy today is different than when we first started getting into the foreign countries from a workspace. I think now we have, we, we really have a problem filling seats in the accounting space and hiring offshore helps solve some of those problems.\r\nI think initially the, the stars in the eyes were all about, Oh my gosh, we can get these individuals. For a much smaller fee, but I agree with you, it wasn't a dollar for dollar trade. There definitely was a, a learning and education difference between the individuals. in the offshore teams in some of the offshore countries versus, you know, what we saw on the US side.\r\nSo it really did require additional training. The other thing is, is I think when we 1st went into the offshore world and with at least have their offshore world for a really long time. They had it when I came in in 2010, we already had a cast practice, like a bonafide cast practice offshore, which was kind of cool because they were way ahead of their time.\r\nI had nothing to do with it. It already existed. I inherited it, but it already existed. But I think back then, you know, it was like, you know, let's, let's look at the profitability aspect of it. Then we very quickly learned that it is really important. Yeah. To do a very defined job description and what you're looking for skill sets on the offshore piece so that you make sure that everybody's hired for success.\r\nOtherwise, you're going to constantly be disappointed in the quality of the work that that you're getting over on the U. S side. And I think we all learned from that, right? It was very much a struggle and we all learned from it. And I tell my firms that I'm coaching with that are looking at doing an offshore piece because that's the other thing that offshore piece used to be a very big firm.\r\nThing right now, everybody does offshore. \r\n[00:48:17] Judy Vorndran: I get pitched for it every day. Somebody's finding me and say, I have resources in India, Philippines. I'm like, holy moly. I don't even know who you are, but they're pitching me to use them. \r\n[00:48:25] Kim Blascoe: It's all over the place and, you know, and all different service offerings.\r\nIt's just the way people are solving. You know, some of their employment issues nowadays, but, you know, I think the importance of that, you know, goes back to make sure that, you know, what you're hiring, right. And make sure that the skill sets that you're hiring fit the service offerings that you expect them to do.\r\nBecause when I talk to firms that I'm like, what do you want your offshore piece to do? And I've been here, right? Like I have done the offshore piece. I get it. And they're like, I want them to do everything from transactional to controller. Everything that's not automated. And I'm like, okay, but you understand controller type of services is a higher-level service.\r\nThat's a manager level service on the U S side, right? So, think about who you're hiring over on the offshore side, because in order for them to do those services, they have to have the proper training to do them. You can't expect, you can't expect those individuals to be able to do it on their own and their education systems.\r\nAre different than the U. S. education system. So, you might need to send some people over to do some training and, you know, maybe the, I always said the beautiful thing would have been to have had somebody that was willing on the U. S. side, a couple of people that were willing to maybe go spend a year over.\r\nYeah. We did a ton of secondments at the light tons of people spend, we would send a lot of people over there. I went over there many times, you know, so we send a lot of people over there, but nobody was there for the long haul, right. You know, go spend a year, help us train up our people. So, I think that's all really important and something to take into consideration when you're looking at the officer.\r\nSo, I don't think it's necessarily about profitability anymore. I think it's about finding people to do the types of services that we need to do for our individual practices because we just don't have as many bodies on the US side\r\nI think younger generations just wants more time and not as much, you know, hands on and wants to utilize tech.\r\nBut there's, there's a dichotomy going on here where they think tech solves all and there's still talent and operations that need to be done. In fact, Just talking to some other firm leaders recently at this boomer conference, which I assume is kind of similar to the cpa. com is doing, which I didn't realize was doing something similar.\r\nThat's why we're talking to you, but I'm lucky to these other teams. And they're like, well, I did it all the way. Like I know how it needs to be filed. So now I know the automation is right. And there's something to be said about that. You count on automation. We don't, I was taught never to count on automation.\r\nThat was just my training. You can't trust it. But I think we've got a generation that's saying, well, trust it. Yeah. But verify, right? We don't know how to verify it, though. So we've got to kind of figure some of that out nationally, nationally. \r\nMeredith and I years ago, we wrote this article about Sweden because Sweden loves their taxing authority. They love the part of their government that's involved in their life from birth to death.\r\nAnd so there's something about it. They've done really well, maybe because they're a homogenous society. I don't know. But we have this very anti tax. Thanks. Culture in America. And I'm like, but you know, you have roads and schools and fire departments and police and, and, you know, people taking care of science and airports.\r\nI mean, that all took tax dollars. Like you didn't, it didn't get built out. People were going on their wagons and riding horses just a little while ago. So that all paid for people coming together. \r\n[00:53:27] Kim Blascoe: Yeah. You know, an interesting story about that. Back when I was doing tax work, I had a. Client a new client they came into the country.\r\nThey were Canadians. They came into the country And so they were living here full time and so they had to file a tax return So I did their tax return form and I told them and he was he was a contractor So he had to pay social security tax and income tax and they They had not been paying at all. Right.\r\nHe was a 10 99 subcontractor. And so I prepared the tax return for him. I'm like all stressed out because like they owed just a ton of money. Right. In my mind, they owed a ton of money in company. Cause there was no planning. There was no planning on the upfront. It was like, they walked in my office. They said, do this tax return for me.\r\nAnd I'm like, Oh, where are you from? They're like, Oh, we're Canadian. And I'm like, Oh, cool. Okay. So we did the tax return. I handed them the bill and they go, that's all we owe. And it was, it was a husband and wife. They were sitting in front of my desk and I'm like, Oh, Really? I thought that was horrible. And they're like, Oh my gosh, no, in Canada, we give minimum 50 percent of our income back to taxes.\r\nAnd he's like, we think nothing of it. And you all complain about, you know, how much it costs you in income tax. And even if you ask social security and Medicare tax to that, you're not giving 50 percent your state tax. You're not giving 50 percent for most people. Right. So I thought that was a really interesting, like eye opener, like You know, it's a us problem, right?\r\nOur, it's like our, our, um, you know, kind of thought process about our taxing system and how everybody feels like they get taxed all the way around. And in all actuality, most countries are much worse than ours. \r\n[00:54:55] Judy Vorndran: They're much worse. And I feel like I wish people would appreciate that. I always try to get from a perspective of appreciation.\r\nI mean, certainly we advocate on behalf of taxing. Fairs, but we also recognize that got, they haven't complied. So we've gotta rep, you know, rep say with governments like, Hey, you know, give these guys a little grace so that we can get them in compliance. 'cause they do wanna do the right thing they just didn't know.\r\nSo, you know, but you can only plead the fifth so long . \r\n[00:55:19] Kim Blascoe: Right? And you know, the acknowledgement that government is a business, right? So if you're running a business. Which the government should be running a business. You have to be able to make money in order to do things like you said. Nice roads, clean cities, you know, like all those things that take a lot of money, people's time, and infrastructure to do.\r\nSo somebody has to pay for it. Right, but also, you know, I don't want to pay any more than my share. So that's right. My whole deal, but that's the challenge But I feel like everybody needs to actually pony up some money But it does it \r\n[00:55:51] Judy Vorndran: actually I feel it works out from my experience big Porter regional to small.\r\nI'm like the big firms The big companies bear the brunt of the tax obligations and small companies get away with murder, which is why the Wayfair decision did even the playing field. And there's no reason that decision need to go forward. Wayfair could have given a rip about South Dakota. They did it out of the goodness of their hearts because they're very wealthy individuals that started that company and they and Newegg and overstock.\r\ncom all came together, paid the legal fees to hide that fight on behalf of taxpayers. And I think there you have 3. Come some young tech entrepreneurs who are open to this process as they've learned to deal with America. Right. Okay. If I've got to do it because I've made myself a big name, I'm going to sue, get sued, get audited.\r\nI'm going to kind of settle. I'm going to let it go forward. And that's how that decision came forward. Because it was 100 percent a plan thing. It was not, it did not need to go to the Supreme Court. It was, it was a deprived, uh, procedure. And the fastest way the great Supreme Court was to go through South Dakota.\r\nBut it did even the playing field. To some degree from a regulatory things. \r\n[00:56:53] Kim Blascoe: Yep. Yeah. Definitely changed things and I think, you know, to some degree made things a lot more complicated or maybe. Yeah, \r\n[00:57:02] Judy Vorndran: oh, \r\n[00:57:03] Kim Blascoe: way complicated. \r\n[00:57:04] Judy Vorndran: I've never seen states act that quickly in my whole flipping life. I've been doing this almost 30 years.\r\nI've never seen every state get on board within 3 years. Every state has a wayfair law. Now they all are varied, but they all have 1. you just do not see that kind of conformity. Ever, but they're like, there's a huge amount of money not coming to my front door because it's coming to my, I'm getting packages delivered to my front door now.\r\nAnd so I'm going to even it. And you know, the other thing, the cost of doing business is slower now because of tech and people are open for business everywhere, including myself. I don't just have Colorado clients. We have clients all over the world. We can help anybody because we have tech. We can talk to you like we're doing now.\r\nWe're not barrier. We don't have barriers to entry by having someone drive up to our office. So, and even though we have offices, we work remotely because why go in if we don't need to. So it's really changed the dynamic of our ability to help 1 another. And with tech, we can do it. I would, of course, we were pandemic proof because.\r\nYou know, we're we're we're a necessary job. Yeah. \r\n[00:58:03] Kim Blascoe: Yeah. I did say it was 1. I thought that the 1 thing 1 really beneficial thing for cash practices coming out of the pandemic was clients now realized that you didn't have to be sitting in their office to have a conversation with them. Right? Yes. You know, even though a lot of, um, staff on cast practices were already working remotely, they still had a regional draw to them to some degree.\r\nSo like, if they had clients that still wanted them to come and sit in their offices, they did that. Yeah. When the pandemic happened and we spent a year on zoom and then like, I'd have clients and they, I'd be like, do you want me to start coming out again? They're like, no, like we like this. We're used to it.\r\nRight. And it was really the birth of virtual. Um, the virtual conversations and the, and CFO and trusted advisor conversations that individuals were having, having with their businesses and the feeling that sitting next to them wasn't as important anymore. \r\n[01:00:52] Meredith Smith: Well, and as we wrap up, and I can't believe we're kind of coming to the end of Q3, right? Looking into the end of Q4. As 2025 quickly approaches, does cpa.com have a focus that they're looking into that could impact the industry and kind of forward thinking? \r\n[01:01:09] Kim Blascoe: Yeah, so I think 1 of the, you know, I've, I probably mentioned today already, like, one of the big things that we're focused on is the advisory transformation piece.\r\nRight? So we will continue to focus on our audit and cast transformation and offerings that we have. And and we have a lot of firms that haven't even started any of that. You know, I think if you think about the audit transformation, it's a. It's a much slower move than cast transformation has been right, you know, because audit has been the same for many, many years.\r\nSo we now have, um, you know, things being built that change the way audits are done and and that's. Amazing and there's technology being thrown at it. So spreadsheets may be a thing of the past, even in the audit world. Um, so that's really cool. And we continue to work with cast practices on their transformation as well.\r\nBut I think overall, that whole, you know, discussion that we had earlier on the advisory piece of it and what that advisory transformation looks like, um, from an overall firm perspective, and then how do we get things, you know, aligned appropriately, you know, From a service offering perspective, so that we are more client centric and thinking about what that client experience looks like working, you know, with the firms, which is maybe a little bit different approach than we've had in the past.\r\nYou know, we've been very practice or service offering focused, not necessarily thinking about the client experience. So that's a big part of it with what we're doing today. We upscaling piece because we have a long way to go. And there, you know, you had mentioned when we were talking about. Like, you know, things that the younger generation doesn't know how to do a bank reconciliation.\r\nThey don't know how to do bank reconciliations. They grew up on their computers. Everything is on their phones. Everything is in real time. They don't have any of those skills yet. We still do that inside of cast practices, uh, from a business perspective. So, you know, building out even some of those, what we would consider to be entry level skills into a cast practice, because the service offerings in cast.\r\nAre different than what they need from an audit and tax perspective. So we continue to work on our upscaling programs and education that we have. Um, and I think, you know, that is 1 of the areas we know that firms come to us all the time and say, we need this. Right? So we have this thing called cast core at, which is.\r\nUm, an education packaged education platform for, uh, cast. Associates that they can go, they also have something called MBA express, which is really like a leadership soft skills thing, but we don't really have anything on that, that lower end, you know, in our, in our cast leaders are saying to us, you know, could you please build something so that when we have new people coming into our cast practice, we can give them, uh, you know, uh, cast 101 training on what cast is, because this is not something that is being.\r\nUm, trained and educated inside of the university level stuff. So we're working on a lot of that as well. So very much still focused on the education and training piece of it. But transformation is our number 1 focus and continuing to build vendor relationships that help the firms that we work with.\r\nYeah, \r\n[01:04:13] Meredith Smith: that's awesome. And I think we're so kind of grateful and helpful that there are resources out there like cpa. com. Um, especially because I think the industry is changing. We're not just green visors sitting in a desk, you know, not moving anymore, not talking to any people and, you know, it is truly a relationship.\r\nField, and so, Kim, we really, really appreciate your time today and thank you so much for being here and we look forward to continuing the relationship. \r\n[01:04:45] Kim Blascoe: Yeah, so much fun. Thank you for having me. \r\n[01:05:19] Meredith Smith: Well, this has been another episode of SALTovation. \u2018Til next time.\r\n","footnotes":""},"categories":[723,229,226],"tags":[252,167,284,126,265,476,999,30,1007,80,141],"class_list":["post-14267","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-podcast","category-state-and-local","category-tax-news","tag-accountant","tag-california","tag-cfo","tag-cpa","tag-finance-professional","tag-franchise-tax","tag-public-law-86-272","tag-state-and-local-tax","tag-tax-cases","tag-tax-provider","tag-tax-returns"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/taxops.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/02\/chris-M-pt-1.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/taxops.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14267","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/taxops.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/taxops.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/taxops.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/taxops.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14267"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/taxops.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14267\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14332,"href":"https:\/\/taxops.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14267\/revisions\/14332"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/taxops.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/14272"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/taxops.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14267"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/taxops.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14267"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/taxops.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14267"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}