Debbie Taylor, the recently appointed chief tax strategist at Carson Group, has seen the benefit of offering tax strategy and services at her wealth management firm for more than two decades.

Her ability to overlay tax expertise with wealth planning has often helped her win clients when competing against registered investment advisors larger than her Franklin Lakes, N.J.-based firm.

“It enabled me for many years as a woman in the industry to differentiate myself and grow my firm,” Taylor said.

Taylor said her interest in tax planning began at the age of 10 when she was accompanying her CPA father to work. Now, Taylor, a CPA herself, has been tapped to work with Carson CEO Burt White to make tax strategy and planning a core part of client services across Carson’s network of advisors.

Since that November announcement, Taylor’s team has provided advisor colleagues with a 12-month calendar of tax touchpoints for clients, presented at a gathering in the firm’s base of Omaha, Neb., and set up monthly training sessions and weekly office hours.

“We believe strongly that managing wealth requires a three-lane focus,” she said. “Investment management—which we know is table stakes—and then strong financial planning. But third is tax planning, which includes areas like family planning, distribution planning and legacy planning.”

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Different Models

Touting tax services alongside wealth management has been a growing trend in recent years, but the models and approaches so far are varied.

Over half (51%) of advisors take the least complex route of using tax planning software as part of their practice, a 10.7% increase over the past two years, according to T3 Technology Hub’s 2025 annual advisor survey. The highest-ranked firms for such tax services via the T3 survey were Holistiplan, FP Alpha, Intuit ProConnect and Drake Tax Planner. However, the trend toward leveraging tax and financial planner software is not just being driven by vendors; in 2023, Cetera took tax-focused firm Avantax Private in a $1.2 billion acquisition, giving its network of advisors access to the firm’s services.

Meanwhile, advancements in artificial intelligence will likely drive software capabilities further. On Tuesday, tax, estate and insurance platform FP Alpha announced an AI-driven tax insights offering for financial advisors. NextGen Tax Insights will give advisors “high-level, actionable tax insights for each client, offering greater value than ever before, including tailored and more customized strategies for tax savings opportunities,” according to the announcement.

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Other RIAs are looking to bring tax specialty in-house to combine with technology. In February, Mesirow Wealth Management hired advisor and tax specialist Gary Pattengale in a newly created role to provide tax services to its network of advisors. In January, Sequoia Financial Group acquired Carlson Capital Management, a $3.8 billion firm that brought with it an internal tax planning and preparation services specialty. Last November, RIA Allworth Financial acquired CCA LLP, a tax-focused CPA firm, to bolster its in-house tax capabilities.

Meanwhile, other types of partnership models are springing up. Merchant Investment, an investment firm that provides growth capital and other support to RIAs, took a minority stake in its second full-service CPA in February, Venning Advisors, which has 15 offices around the United States.

More Services

Matthew Carter of M&A advisory firm Turkey Hill said the recent moves to tax and other services stem partly from the drumbeat of fee compression concerns over the past decade.

“Wealth management firms across the industry have felt the need to offer more services to their clients in addition to just managing their assets, and two of the more familiar services that are related to wealth are tax and trust and estate administration,” Carter said.

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Carter said that adding tax services, whatever their form, can help with client stickiness, organic growth and recruiting RIAs looking for such add-ons. The former advisor turned M&A specialist said he remembers being frustrated with not having a tax practice to assist with client needs.

“If you don’t have it in-house, you’re trying to track down CPAs, leaving messages, and it can lead to you holding off on trades or rebalancing a portfolio,” he said. “If you have a team member available to answer questions or advise, it’s so much more efficient.” 

One challenge to bringing a tax strategist in-house is that many client referral programs for wealth managers run through CPAs. If advisors are servicing clients in-house, some of those referral channels may be eroded. However, Carter said there are workarounds and is “anticipating deals involving tax services to continue in a number of different areas, including more acquisitions.”

Brian Price, CEO of RIA Mesirow, said the firm’s advisor base’s growing need to bolster its tax expertise across its national network led to the hiring of tax specialist Pattengale.  

“Taxes have become a greater and greater piece of the investment decisions and the financial planning aspect of our work for clients,” Price said. “Having that ability to incorporate advanced tax strategies and working with clients was a capability that we found very attractive.”

According to Price, Mesirow advisors are seeing client tax needs ranging from taking out retirement income to restructuring estates to managing a move to a new location in retirement.

Thanks to advancements in technology and AI, the actual preparation and filing of tax forms is much faster and simpler, Pattengale said. However, when it comes to managing investments and financial planning, things can get complicated and result in some “nasty surprises” when the tax collector comes.

“That’s hard to manage for an advisor, especially if you’re a smaller firm wearing many different hats,” he said. “Having the right tools and resources, knowing how to interpret the data and how it applies to clients all comes into play.”

Growing Need

Earle Pratt, president of full-service CPA Venning, said the connection to investor Merchant’s RIA network will lead to businesses serving those advisors—who are running small businesses—and partnering with them for their client work.

“We saw a real need for this from wealth managers about five years ago,” Pratt said. “They were looking for a more holistic and systematic approach that included accounting, taxes and other financial.”

Although Venning is a third-party partner, Pratt said the tightness of the relationship with the wealth manager is important.

“We’re meeting with the wealth management partner before the client to strategize together,” he said. “Then we often join calls with the client two to three times a year. It’s much easier when we know each other and the clients they are working with.”

Taylor of Carson said it’s becoming crucial for financial planners and tax preparers to be in concert, partly because more people are retiring with large, tax-protected retirement accounts.

“There are so many transactions during the year for a client, and if there is no discussion with the tax side, there is just this tremendous void that is not being filled,” she said.