Invest1 distinct publisher3 min readPublished
The credential is being underwritten as a switching cost rather than a fee line, and the price shows up in hours that would otherwise carry fee-paying advisory relationships. Nobody in the account has measured the churn it prevents.
The Investor · Invest desk
Compiled by The InvestorSomething wrong?How this is made
Price this on the time side of the ledger, because that is where it is paid for. Panko put a complicated return at up to five hours [7] and put an entire assets-under-management relationship at roughly 20 hours of advisor attention a year [8], so the 85 returns he filed last year [5] can run to 425 hours at the top of that range, which is the annual servicing budget for about 21 advisory relationships [1] [2]. One five-hour return consumes a quarter of what a client costs to serve for a year [3], and the prep pays worse per hour than the advice does [9], which is the bill advisors are quietly paying.
What it buys is a switching cost, and the paperwork is the part worth pricing: an advisor who prepares the return holds the document a successor firm would have to reconstruct, and a client who leaves has to move two relationships instead of one. Thompson is direct about preferring that to referral flow [3], and he is also making a compliance argument that cuts at the uncredentialed, since when he tells a client to roll over a 401(k), that is tax advice whatever the disclaimer says [14]. He spent years talking around it [15].
The structural term is the entity wall, and it is the better puzzle here. Both men run tax and advisory as separate companies, partly for liability [10], even though duplicated operations strain a small RIA [11] and Panko concedes that most of his tax clients are advisory clients anyway, so a single entity would be more efficient [13]. What the duplication buys is a narrower discovery surface, because a combined company hands the SEC or the IRS access to the whole business rather than the slice the exam came for [12]. The result is two sets of books that keep the exam narrower, insurance priced in admin hours.
The counter-thesis is Panko's own: returns are a production input rather than a retention expense, because doing them keeps him inside the code, and planning is largely the ability to picture how an action lands on a return [17]. Kurtz's version of that is catching mutual fund capital gains distributions and moving clients into more tax-efficient funds [18]. If that holds, the hourly comparison misprices the work.
This is probably an overstatement of the retention effect, and here is why I would say so anyway: nothing in the reporting measures attrition or fee levels [19], so stickiness is a practitioner's hypothesis, sincerely held and unaudited. That claim runs into a few complications. Filing season concentrates those hours into a few months, so the binding constraint is seasonal capacity rather than an annual average, which is worse for growth than 425 hours spread evenly [1]. Merit asked Kurtz to become a tax professional [16], which moves the cost of credentialing to the employer and the retained client onto the firm's book rather than the advisor's. And Panko says he struggles to say no when an advisory client asks [6], which is how a practice ends up pricing its scarcest hours by accident, and the exam is the cheap part [1].
Ranked by verification strength, evidence, and original report placement.
Offering in-house tax prep can be less lucrative than advisory work on an hourly basis.
The enrolled agent (EA) designation is granted by the IRS and requires passing a three-part test.
As clients expect more from advisors on taxes, some advisors are seeking additional tax credentials to better serve them.
Kevin Thompson, founder and CEO of Fort Worth-based 9I Capital Group, became an EA and said, 'I'd rather have a sticky client relationship than a referral that's here today, gone tomorrow... that's why I got EA.'
Andy Panko, founder of Metuchen, New Jersey-based Tenon Financial, also became an enrolled agent.
Panko went from completing four or five tax returns in his first year as an EA to 85 last year.
Distinct publishers with included, body-backed reporting in this cluster.
1 article · August 27, 2026
Follow any of these and your For You feed starts watching them — no settings page required.
invest
The $28,000 zero-tax IRA draw has a 2028 expiry date and a gap in its arithmetic1 distinct publisher
invest
The IRS is still auditing 2017: UnitedHealth's transfer-pricing fight is a reserving problem1 distinct publisher
invest
Supermicro clears its own CEO in a $2.5 billion smuggling case others are still investigating1 distinct publisher
Evidence-backed comparisons of source perspectives and observed adoption signals. Read the methodology
Which Builder, Operator, and Investor concerns the observed source mix emphasized—not a truth score.
Evidence, demonstrated adoption, hype gap, incentives, and confidence are assessed independently, each on its own current evidence. How these are measured.
First-hand practitioner accounts, no data
Strengths: three named, identifiable practitioners at named firms speaking on the record about their own credentialing decisions, plus a verifiable institutional fact about the EA exam. Weaknesses: one publisher, no documents, no survey, no regulator or industry data, and the story's own central premise is unmeasured. The one quantitative comparison used to price the credential — roughly 20 hours per year per AUM advisory relationship — carries no attribution or methodology.
Three named adopters, one volume figure
Real, dated, self-disclosed adoption exists: two solo-practice founders obtained the credential and one firm asked an employee to, and Panko supplies an actual volume trajectory from four or five returns to 85. But adoption is anecdote-scale — no count of EAs among advisors, no RIA-industry penetration figure, no trend data — so the score reflects confirmed individual uptake without any evidence of breadth.
Retention payoff asserted, cost understated
Moderately overstated. The framing — a credential that makes relationships hard to move — is supported only by practitioner motive quotes, while the piece concedes but does not size the offsetting cost: prep is less lucrative hourly, and up to five hours per return against a claimed 20-hour advisory relationship implies meaningful capacity displacement that nobody in the account quantifies. Positive rather than high because the article does volunteer the downsides (lower hourly value, dual-entity strain, exam record exposure) instead of selling the credential unconditionally, and the capability gains described are specific and plausible.
Credentialed practitioners describing their own service
Every substantive claim comes from an advisor with a direct commercial interest in the credential he holds and the tax service he sells: Thompson and Panko are founders promoting differentiated offerings, and Thompson's disparagement of PTIN-only preparers ('absolutely insane') advantages his own credential. Kurtz's firm asked him to credential, aligning his account with his employer's positioning. This is normal trade-press sourcing rather than concealed sponsorship, and the publication does include unflattering operational detail, so intensity is elevated but not extreme.
Descriptively solid, analytically thin
Confidence is moderate-low. What the advisors did and said is well documented and internally consistent, so the descriptive layer holds up. What the story argues — that the credential functions as a switching cost worth its hours — cannot be checked from a single publisher with no retention, fee, or industry-penetration data and one unattributed benchmark carrying the cost comparison.