When the IRS Doesn't Move, Tax Professionals Take the Heat

Every tax professional has heard it.

"Why hasn't the IRS responded?"

"Why is my refund taking so long?"

"Why hasn't my amended return been processed?"

Unfortunately, many taxpayers direct their frustration at the one person who is actually trying to help them: their tax preparer.

The reality is simple.

Once a return, amendment, abatement request, penalty appeal, or correspondence is submitted to the IRS, the tax professional has no control over how quickly the IRS processes it.

Yet we are often expected to provide answers that the IRS itself cannot provide.

The IRS Has Made Progress, But Significant Delays Remain

The IRS processes millions of returns each year. During the 2025 filing season alone, the agency processed more than 78 million tax returns by March.

For electronically filed returns that are accepted without issue, taxpayers typically receive refunds within about 21 days.

But that is where the good news often ends.

The National Taxpayer Advocate reported that during fiscal year 2025:

• The IRS processed approximately 3.7 million individual amended returns.

• The average processing time exceeded 5 months.

• The IRS processed approximately 1.6 million business amended returns.

• The average processing time exceeded 13 months.

Think about that for a moment.

A business can wait more than a year for the IRS to process an amended return that was properly filed.

Millions of Returns Are Still Being Delayed

According to the National Taxpayer Advocate, the IRS suspended more than 13 million returns during the 2025 filing season for additional review. Those reviews frequently resulted in delayed refunds and delayed resolution for taxpayers.

Many of these reviews are triggered by:

• Identity verification requirements

• Credit verification

• Income matching issues

• Fraud prevention programs

• IRS processing filters

Even when a taxpayer has done nothing wrong, the return may sit in review for weeks or months.

Correspondence Backlogs Continue

One of the biggest frustrations for taxpayers and tax professionals alike is IRS correspondence.

When a letter, response, penalty abatement request, or supporting documentation is mailed to the IRS, there is often little visibility into when it will be reviewed.

Recent reports from both the Government Accountability Office and IRS watchdog agencies found that taxpayer correspondence backlogs remain above pre-pandemic levels and that the IRS still lacks a formal plan to fully eliminate those backlogs.

In practical terms, that means taxpayers may wait months simply for someone to review documents that were submitted long ago.

Staffing Challenges Are Adding More Pressure

The IRS has also faced significant staffing reductions.

Reports indicate the agency lost approximately 19,000 employees during 2025, including thousands of employees involved in return processing and taxpayer service functions.

Fewer employees means:

• Longer processing times

• Longer phone hold times

• Slower responses to correspondence

• Increased delays on complex cases

For taxpayers waiting on answers, the experience is frustrating.

For tax professionals trying to help, it can be equally frustrating because we often have access to the same limited information as the taxpayer.

The Tax Professional Is Not the IRS

This is the message taxpayers need to hear.

Your tax professional can:

• Prepare the return correctly

• File documents timely

• Respond to IRS notices

• Follow up with the IRS

• Monitor case progress

• Advocate on your behalf

What we cannot do is move your file to the front of the IRS line.

We cannot force the IRS to open your correspondence.

We cannot speed up an amended return.

We cannot make an IRS employee review a penalty abatement request tomorrow instead of six months from now.

Once the documents leave our office and enter the IRS system, the timeline becomes largely outside our control.

A Better Partnership Between Clients and Tax Professionals

The best client-preparer relationships are built on trust and communication.

Most tax professionals care deeply about helping their clients solve problems. We spend countless hours on hold with the IRS, submitting documentation, checking statuses, and following up on unresolved issues.

When delays occur, we are not the cause of the problem.

In fact, we are often just as frustrated as our clients.

The next time you are waiting on an IRS response, remember this:

Your tax preparer is not the obstacle.

Your tax preparer is the person standing beside you, trying to navigate the same IRS system that everyone else is struggling with.

Patience may not make the process faster, but understanding who controls the timeline can make the process far less stressful for everyone involved.

Watch Fire Your SOP Run: What Agent #5 Actually Does for Your Practice/Business

Yesterday I wrote that the fastest way to start with AI is to take something you already do every week and hand it to an agent. A few of you replied with a fair question: what does that actually look like? So I recorded it. Here is Fire Your SOP, Agent #5, running live on a real workflow.

Watch the demo (about 5 minutes): https://youtu.be/Tpaxd5wyFmE

The whole thing is on one screen. You pick a workflow you already run, payroll, month-end close, bank rec, client onboarding, or you paste in your own written procedure. You hit Analyze. And in seconds it breaks that workflow into its real steps and tells you, step by step, what an agent can take off your plate and what should stay with a human. No blank page. You start from work you already do.

The part that surprises people

When it analyzes your workflow, every step gets one of three verdicts.

Green means fully automatable. The agent just does it. Yellow means AI plus a human: it drafts, you approve. Red means human required, your judgment, and it stays yours. In the demo I run it on payroll, and eight of the nine steps come back green, one yellow where a manager approves before anything runs, and none red. That color map is the moment it clicks for most people. You can finally see, concretely, which parts of a job you have been doing by hand that you simply do not need to anymore, and which parts genuinely need you.

Then it does the thing most tools stop short of. It writes the agent for you. You drop your firm or business details in once, it pre-fills them everywhere, and it hands you the complete prompt with the rules baked in: never run payroll without manager approval, flag any unusual paycheck, follow the overtime rules. You are not writing it. You are copying it.

What this does for an accountant or bookkeeper

If you run a firm, your day is full of procedures that are mostly mechanical and still eat real hours. Fire Your SOP is built to pull those hours back.

A few from the demo, with the time they give back once an agent carries them: payroll runs about four to eight hours a cycle by hand and thirty to sixty minutes with the agent. Month-end close gives back fourteen to eighteen hours a month. Bank rec, two and a half to four and a half hours per account. Client onboarding, five to eight hours per client. You do not have to automate everything. You pick the one workflow that hurts most this month and you start there.

The deeper win is what those hours become. Every hour an agent carries on production is an hour you can move to advisory, the work clients actually value and pay more for, or simply an hour you get back. That is how firms take on more clients without adding headcount.

What this does for a business owner

You may not run an accounting firm, but you run procedures, and most of them live in one person's head or in a document nobody has opened in a year. The month-end routine. How you onboard a new client. How payroll gets done. How an invoice dispute gets handled.

That is a quiet risk. When a process lives only in someone's head, it breaks when they are out, it gets done differently every time, and it cannot scale. Fire Your SOP takes the procedure you already follow and turns it into a documented, runnable workflow an agent can carry, with the judgment calls clearly flagged for a person. You get consistency, you reduce your dependence on any one person, and you free your team for the work that actually grows the business. You are not inventing a new way to operate. You are making the way you already operate faster and far more durable.

How it works, start to finish

Four steps, one sitting. Choose a workflow you already run, or paste your own SOP. Analyze it to see the green, yellow, and red breakdown. Convert it into the working agent and prompt. Deploy it and watch the time come back. Once you have run it for a couple of weeks and worked out the kinks, the same content drops into a permanent agent.

See it, then try it

Watch it run here: https://youtu.be/Tpaxd5wyFmE

And if you want to do more than watch, here is how to start today, free:

• Claim a free AI agent and put it on one real task: https://aiaccounting.legacysbc.com/claim-agent
• Join our free community: https://aiaccounting.legacysbc.com/community
• Come to our free live demo today at noon CST and watch our agents run on real work, then ask anything: https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/88BF2OrbRmaow1zWs-zdMw

One more thing, just for today. Through close of business this Friday, our full AI Agent Library, five Pro Bundles of your choice for $799, comes with a full year of membership free. After today the year goes back to paid.

You do not have to have AI figured out. You just have to start, at your pace.

The Fastest Way to Start With AI Is Something You Already Have

Most people think starting with AI means learning something new. It does not. The fastest way to start is to take something you already do every week and hand it to an agent. That is exactly what this week's spotlight agent does.

Meet Fire Your SOP (Agent #5).

Every firm and every business has procedures. The month-end close. The bank rec. Client onboarding. Running payroll. Most of these live in someone's head, or in a document nobody has opened in a year. Fire Your SOP takes any one of those written procedures and converts it into the prompt and workflow an AI agent needs to actually run it.

You do not have to design anything. You do not have to know how AI works. You bring the procedure you already follow, and the agent does the translating.

How it works, in four steps:

1. Pick a workflow. Use one of the four pre-loaded options (close, reconciliation, onboarding, or payroll) or paste in your own SOP.
2. Review the breakdown. The agent deconstructs your procedure into its real parts: the inputs, the decisions, the outputs, and the judgment calls a human still needs to make.
3. Fire the SOP. You get back a structured prompt and checklist your team can run today through any AI tool.
4. Wire it up later. Once you have run your fired SOP for a couple of weeks and worked out the kinks, the same content drops into a permanent agent.

The reason we love this one as a starting point is that it removes the scariest part of AI: the blank page. You are not inventing a use case. You are taking the thing that already eats your Tuesday and making it faster.

See it in action this Friday.

This Friday we are sharing a walkthrough of our agents running on real work, including this one. If you have been curious what these actually look like in practice, this is the easiest way to see it. Save your seat here: https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/88BF2OrbRmaow1zWs-zdMw

And if you want to start before then, the whole Free AI Starter Kit is waiting inside our community. Join free, claim your first agent, and put it on a real task today:

• Join the free community: https://aiaccounting.legacysbc.com/community
• Claim your free agent: https://aiaccounting.legacysbc.com/claim-agent

The firms and owners pulling ahead are not the ones with the most tools. They are the ones who took one thing they already do and let an agent carry it.

You do not have to have AI figured out. You just have to start, at your pace.

Introducing the Free AI Starter Kit: Everything You Need to Begin (At Your Pace)

 

If you run an accounting practice or a business of your own, you already know AI should be part of how you work. The hard part has never been the "why." It's the "where do I even start?"

So we built the answer, and made it free.

Meet the Free AI Starter Kit.

It's a simple, no-cost bundle that takes you from "I should really look into AI" to actually using it on a real task this week. No big commitment, no figuring it out alone. Here's what's inside:

• A free AI agent of your choice. Pick the one that hits your biggest time-sink, reconciliation, month-end close, document chasing, cash-flow tracking, invoicing, and put it to work today.
• All four of our AI guides. The AI-Powered Accounting Firm, 50 AI Prompts That Replace Busy Season Overtime, From Zero to AI-Assisted in 30 Days, and The Bookkeeper's AI Automation Guide.
• A "Start Here in 15 Minutes" quick-start. The exact first steps, so you get a win on day one instead of staring at a blank screen.
• A starter prompt pack. Copy-paste prompts built for real accounting and business work, tuned to whether you run the books or run the business.
• An invite to our community and this Friday's live demo, where you can watch an agent run on real work and ask anything.

Why a "kit"?

Because the thing that stops most people isn't access, it's the overwhelm of not knowing the first move. A kit removes that. It hands you one agent, one guide, one prompt, and one clear step. You don't have to master AI. You just have to start, and the kit makes starting take about fifteen minutes.

Two versions, because you're not all the same.

There's a version for business owners, built around getting the back-office grind off your plate so you can run your business instead of living in it. And a version for accounting professionals, built around the production work that eats your week so your time goes to judgment and clients. Same idea, different starting line.

How to grab it.

It's all waiting inside our free community. Join, claim your free agent, and the kit is yours:

• Join the free community: https://aiaccounting.legacysbc.com/community
• Claim your free agent: https://aiaccounting.legacysbc.com/claim-agent
• Save your seat for Friday's live demo: https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/88BF2OrbRmaow1zWs-zdMw

The firms and owners pulling ahead aren't the ones with the most tools. They're the ones who put one to work, saw it pay off, and built from there.

You don't have to have AI figured out. You just have to start, at your pace.

AI Doesn't Have to Be Complicated

If you're an accountant, bookkeeper, or small business owner, you've probably heard the same message:

"You should be using AI."

Most people agree.

The challenge isn't understanding that AI matters. The challenge is knowing where to start.

There are hundreds of tools, thousands of videos, and more opinions than anyone can keep up with. For many professionals, AI feels exciting and overwhelming at the same time.

That's exactly why we created AI for Accounting.

Built by a Firm That Does the Work

I own Legacy Small Business Consulting, an accounting and advisory firm that has spent years helping business owners understand their numbers, improve operations, and grow profitably.

We didn't create AI for Accounting because AI became popular.

We created it because we were already using AI inside our firm and saw firsthand how much time it could save and how much consistency it could bring to everyday processes.

The agents we share aren't theoretical.

They're based on real workflows, real client work, and real business challenges.

We've tested them.

We've refined them.

We've used them.

And because every firm and business is different, these agents can be adapted to fit your own systems and processes.

Learning AI Shouldn't Require a Huge Investment

One thing we noticed early on was that many professionals wanted to learn AI but felt like the cost of entry was too high.

Some programs charge thousands of dollars before you ever see a result.

Others require complicated implementations before you know whether AI is even right for your business.

We wanted a different approach.

We wanted people to be able to learn, experiment, and see real value before making a major investment.

That's why we made much of AI for Accounting free.

Join the Community for Free

We recently moved our community to a new home on Heartbeat and opened the doors.

Inside you'll find:

• Weekly live Q&A sessions

• A growing library of AI agents

• Real-world demonstrations

• Practical education focused on implementation

• Accountants, bookkeepers, and business owners sharing what works

Most importantly, you'll be learning alongside people who are applying AI to the same types of work you do every day.

Join the free community: https://app.heartbeat.chat/aiforaccountingaia/invitation?code=5FJGG4

Claim a Free AI Agent

Learning is great.

Putting AI to work is even better.

That's why we've made it possible to claim a free AI agent and put it to work on a real task today.

No cost.

No commitment.

No complicated setup.

Just choose an agent and see what AI can do in your business.

Claim your free agent: https://aiaccounting.legacysbc.com/claim-agent

See It in Action

One of the questions we hear most often is:

"But what does this actually look like?"

The best answer is to show you.

That's why we regularly run live demonstrations where you can watch an agent work through real business tasks and see the process from start to finish.

Register for the free live demo: https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/88BF2OrbRmaow1zWs-zdMw

Start Small. Build Confidence.

You don't need to become an AI expert overnight.

You don't need to automate your entire business this week.

You don't need to have everything figured out.

Start with one process.

One workflow.

One agent.

Learn what works.

Adjust it to fit your business.

Then build from there.

That's how real adoption happens.

That's how real results happen.

And that's exactly why we built AI for Accounting.

You don't have to have AI figured out.

You just have to start.

You Don't Have to Have AI Figured Out. You Just Have to Start.

 

If you run an accounting or bookkeeping practice, you've heard a hundred times that you should be using AI. What nobody tells you is where to begin — and that uncertainty is exactly what keeps most firms stuck on the sidelines.

So let me make it simple. We want you involved. We want to help. And we genuinely don't care how you start — we just want you to start. Here's every on-ramp, from free to all-in, so you can pick the one that fits where you are today.

Start for free.

You can get value this week without spending a dollar:

• Claim a free AI agent and run it on one real task — a bank rec, a month-end close, a client proposal. See what it does before you decide anything. https://aiaccounting.legacysbc.com/claim-agent
• Join our free community on Heartbeat, where my four AI guides are waiting for you inside, free. https://app.heartbeat.chat/aiforaccountingaia/invitation?code=5FJGG4
• Come to our free live demo this Friday and watch an agent work on real accounting tasks, then ask anything. [Friday demo link]
• Book a free 15-minute call with me and we'll find your single best first step together. https://calendly.com/legacysbcllc/15min

Any one of those is a real start. None of them cost anything.

When you're ready for the full toolkit: membership.

When you want a whole set of agents working for you — not just one — a membership is the move. It's $29, $59, or $99 a month, and right now every membership includes one full bundle of your choice, free — a $249 value. That free-bundle perk goes away June 29, so this is the window. Membership also comes with your pick of the guides, weekly live Q&A with our team, our community, and updates for life on the bundle you claim: as we add new agents to it, they're yours automatically. https://aiaccounting.legacysbc.com/pro-membership

And this week only: 12 months for the price of 10.

If you already know membership is for you, lock in a year and save: pay for 10 months, get a full 12 — two months free, at any tier ($290 / $590 / $990). Join this week and you still get the free bundle before June 29.

• $29/mo tier — $290/year: https://www.paypal.com/ncp/payment/BT2BJS4SZ9X3C
• $59/mo tier — $590/year: https://www.paypal.com/ncp/payment/DXC32HW7H47LJ
• $99/mo tier — $990/year: https://www.paypal.com/ncp/payment/UYN2M44RDEFGQ

The point is simple: start.

The firms pulling ahead aren't the ones with the most tools. They're the ones who put one to work, saw it pay off, and built from there. Start the conversation. Start the education. Be part of the transformation — at your pace.

Stop Using AI. Start Delegating to It.

Here's the mistake almost every accountant and bookkeeper makes with AI, and it's the reason most of them quietly give up after a week.

They treat it like software.

They open the tool, poke at it, type a question, get a so-so answer, and think: "Okay, that's a faster Google." Then they go back to doing the work by hand, because the work still needs doing and they don't have time to "learn AI" on top of everything else.

The shift that changes everything is this: an AI agent is not a tool you use. It's an employee you delegate to.

The hire you could never afford

Think about why you haven't hired help. It's not that you couldn't use it. You could use it desperately. It's that hiring is expensive, training takes months, and handing off work to someone who might get it wrong feels riskier than just doing it yourself at 9pm.

So you stay stuck doing the $30-an-hour work because there's no clean way to get it off your plate.

An agent is the junior team member you can finally afford. It doesn't need a salary, it doesn't need three weeks of onboarding, and it will run the same task the same way at 9pm or 9am without complaint. The catch — and it's an important one — is that you have to manage it like an employee, not poke at it like a search bar.

What "managing it" actually means

This is the part nobody tells you, and it's why people bounce off AI. You already know how to do this. You do it every time you'd hand work to staff:

1. Pick the right task. You wouldn't hand a new hire your most judgment-heavy client on day one. Start with the repeatable, rules-based grind: chasing documents, categorizing transactions, cleaning up a chart of accounts, drafting the same client email for the hundredth time.
2. Give it context, like an onboarding. A new employee who knows nothing about your firm produces generic work. An agent is the same. Tell it your client, your software, your tone, your rules. The five minutes you spend setting it up is the difference between "meh" and "I'd have sent that myself."
3. Review the output. You are now the manager, not the doer. You read it the way you'd read a junior's draft — quickly, with your expert eye — and you catch the one thing that's off. That review is where your judgment lives, and it takes a fraction of the time doing it from scratch would.
4. Refine it over time. The first version is a trainee. You correct it, it gets sharper, and within a few rounds it's doing that task better and more consistently than a rushed human ever would.

The aha

Once you stop asking "how do I use this tool?" and start asking "what would I hand an employee?" the whole thing clicks.

You're not learning a new piece of software. You're doing the thing you've wanted to do for years — building a team — except this team starts at zero dollars and is ready today. Your skill was never the bottleneck. Your hours were. Delegation is how you break the link between the two.

And here's the quiet part that matters most: when the grind comes off your plate, what's left is the work only you can do. The advisory conversation. The judgment call. The client who needs a human who actually understands their business. That's the work that pays the most and burns you out the least, and it's the work you've been too buried to get to.

Where to start

You don't need a strategy. You need one task and one agent.

• Claim a free agent and hand it the task you dread most: https://aiaccounting.legacysbc.com/claim-agent
• Join our free community, where accountants and bookkeepers are learning to manage these "employees" together: https://aiaccounting.legacysbc.com/community

Hire your first one today. Review its work. Then hand it the next thing. That's the whole game.

(And because the weekend response was so strong, we extended the bundle deal one more day — through today: buy any bundle and your first 6 months of membership are free. https://aiaccounting.legacysbc.com/pro-bundles)