Almost every firm owner I talk to tells me two things in the same conversation. The first is that they want to build an advisory practice. The second is that they cannot find the people to do it. In my years in tax, I have rarely heard anyone connect those two statements to a group of professionals many of those firms already employ: enrolled agents.
When our profession debates who is qualified to advise, the conversation defaults almost immediately to the CPA license, and that is understandable. It is a rigorous credential with a broad body of knowledge behind it, and it has been the profession's signal of expertise for a long time. But the debate usually collapses into a requirements comparison: education hours, exam scope, state licensure, breadth of practice. Measured that way the EA credential looks narrower. It is centered on federal taxation. It does not carry an audit or attest function. It is not a state license.
That comparison isn't wrong. It is just incomplete, because evaluating a credential only by its technical requirements skips past something that matters a great deal in advisory work: who decided to earn it, and what they did before they did.
Look at who chooses to become an EA
For many professionals, becoming an EA is not a career decision they made at 18 while choosing a college major. It is a decision they make after they are already in the workforce.
They find their way into tax, they gain experience, they discover they are good at it, and then at some point they make a deliberate decision to go deeper — to study federal taxation, to earn a credential, to expand what they are capable of doing for taxpayers.
I think we underestimate what that says about the person. There is a level of intentionality in it that a standard professional track never demands. Many EAs did not simply follow a predefined path into this profession; they built one.
Because of that, the EA population brings something else that is extremely valuable in advisory work: diverse professional experience. Some came from bookkeeping or accounting. Others came from payroll, banking, financial services, operations, entrepreneurship, sales or management, and some spent years working inside the industries that now make up the businesses they serve. They didn't leave those experiences behind when they became tax professionals. They brought them along.
That matters, because advisory happens in the real world, not just in the Tax Code. A business owner rarely walks into your office with a perfectly defined tax question. They tell you they want to hire someone, or that they are thinking about buying a building, or that the business is growing faster than expected. They want to take more money out of the company. They are considering selling, or worried about cash flow, or trying to work out whether they can afford an investment. The tax implications are only one part of those conversations, and a professional who has experienced business from several different seats may be able to hear them differently.
That doesn't make every EA a great advisor, just as holding a CPA license doesn't automatically make someone a great advisor. But it does mean we should stop evaluating the EA credential solely by comparing its technical requirements with other credentials. We should also look at the professional who chose to earn it.
The credential is a starting point, not the finish line
The EA credential is specifically centered on federal taxation. EAs have unlimited practice rights before the IRS and can represent taxpayers on matters involving examinations, collections and appeals, which gives them a legitimate technical foundation for tax work.
But I don't think the strongest argument for EAs in advisory is simply that they know taxes too. The bigger argument is what can be built on top of that foundation. An experienced EA may already understand entity structures, compensation, deductions, retirement plans, estimated taxes and most of the other issues that shape a business owner's year. They may also have years of experience sitting across from taxpayers, answering questions, explaining consequences and watching the results of decisions clients made months before those decisions ever reached the return.
Think about the perspective that creates. Tax preparation is essentially the final chapter of a story that has already happened, and the advisor's opportunity is to get involved earlier in the story.
Train for the transition instead of waiting for it
That is the transition firms should be training EAs to make, and it is a training problem far more than a hiring problem. Instead of only asking how to report what a client did, teach them to ask what the client is about to do. Instead of only identifying the tax consequence, teach them to identify the decision creating it. Instead of waiting for the return to reveal the problem, teach them how to have the conversation before the problem occurs.
That is advisory.
If your firm is struggling to staff an advisory practice, it is worth asking whether the real constraint is the hiring market or a definition of who counts as a candidate — one written back when compliance was the only thing the firm sold. And for many EAs, advisory is not an entirely new profession. It is the next evolution of the profession they already chose.
