CONSULTING
FOR KENNETH OMORUYI · CONFIDENTIAL
Executive Summaries
The field reading, compressed. Each summary is a two minute read of a full article from the dashboard feeds, with a note on why it matters to the engines.
Enrolled agent continuing education requirements
The IRS holds every enrolled agent to 72 hours of continuing education across each three year enrollment cycle, with a floor of 16 hours in any single year and 2 hours of ethics annually. Agents who enroll mid cycle carry a prorated monthly requirement until their first full cycle begins.
Credits only count from IRS approved providers, and those providers report completions directly to the IRS; an agent can watch their progress accumulate in their online PTIN account. Records must be kept for four years. Instructor credit is capped at 6 hours a year, and courses on identity theft and client data security count toward the federal tax law requirement.
Succession takes the driver's seat in the private equity boom
The wave of accounting firm deals is being driven less by strategy than by demographics. Partners in their late fifties through seventies, many without a documented transition plan, are reaching retirement without internal successors, and that vacuum is pushing small and mid sized firms toward outside buyers at record rates.
The article reports 53 private equity deals worth $29 billion between 2020 and 2025, and notes that the hardest part of every deal is not the price but the cultural integration afterward. Independent firms now compete against consolidators with far deeper capital.
Data privacy in the age of AI: more than just a tax issue
Federal law already treats tax preparers as financial institutions: the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act puts firms under the FTC Safeguards Rule, which requires a written information security plan. State rules layer on top, from California's privacy act to Massachusetts encryption mandates, with GDPR in reach for firms touching European data.
AI raises the stakes in two specific ways: client data collected for one purpose can drift into model training it was never consented to, and employees quietly using consumer AI tools can expose sensitive records to unsecured platforms. Firms remain prime ransomware targets, and basic multi factor authentication is increasingly bypassed through social engineering. The prescription is governance: training, tested backups, modern security, and a culture where staff report anything odd immediately.
AI technologies: how tax practices can prepare
The technologies landing first in tax practices are predictive analytics, natural language processing, compliance detection, and automated interpretation of the tax code. The article reports that 64% of finance leaders now rank AI and machine learning as a top investment priority for 2026, and that while nearly all firms see the advantage, nearly all also worry about implementation, with data security the leading concern.
The preparation it prescribes is a skills shift: AI fundamentals, data literacy, hands on tool mastery, and above all advisory capability, because automation moves professionals off data entry and onto higher value strategic work.