Somewhere on your client list, a financial advisor is doing part of your job better than you are, and your client hasn't told you.

That's not an accusation, it's simply what the data shows. In the recently published white paper, The Year Round Advisor, which looked at more than 1,000 financial advisor-client meetings and found that tax strategy came up in at least 79% of meetings — not in those during tax filing season, but in all months throughout the year. For example, in June, tax strategy was discussed in 79.6% of meetings held then; and in November, the discussion rate was 80.5%.

Indeed, the data shows that the amount of tax conversations clients are willing to have doesn't shrink outside of April, it just moves to whomever else is in the room.

Imagine a client sells a rental property in August. Her financial advisor flags the capital gains hit before she has to ask; but her CPA finds out the following March, from a 1099 attached to an email. Nothing was done wrong, and the return will still be accurate. However, by tax season, she trusts one of those two people with her financial life more than the other — and it isn't the one with the tax license.

The anxious clients are the disengaged ones

Among clients who brought up their CPA unprompted in an advisor’s meeting, 23% of those clients expressed dissatisfaction. That's nearly one-quarter of clients already describing their CPA relationship unfavorably to someone else, in a room the CPA isn't in.

Clients who expressed any tax fear were 3.6-times more likely to be dissatisfied with their CPA, and that pattern held across every fear type the report analyzed. This clearly shows that anxiety and disengagement aren't two separate problems; rather, they're the same problem, showing up twice.

This isn't a competence gap. According to the whitepaper, when clients are unhappy with their CPA, it's rarely about technical mastery or the fees they're paying. Errors and accuracy concerns, poor communication or lack of responsiveness, and lack of proactive planning together account for more than three-quarters of the reasons clients cite for their dissatisfaction with their CPAs. By contrast, fees rank a distant fourth, cited by less than 10% of clients, and specific disagreements over a tax position or strategy registered even less.

Most tax & accounting firms already know the tax code well enough to serve their clients. What separates the firms that keep a full relationship with their clients from those firms that only get part of a client's business is cadence, not expertise.

That means this is a solvable problem — with the staff already on payroll.

Where the anxiety concentrates

The single most commonly expressed client fear is owing more taxes than expected at filing time, which was cited more than twice as often as the next fear on the list. After that, the expressed fears cluster tightly: capital gains from a sale, underpayment penalties, a higher bracket, surcharges related to their income-related monthly adjustment amount (IRMAA), and required minimum distributions (RMDs) burdens are all within about three percentage points of each other.

These fears aren't equally damaging, however. The gap between satisfied and dissatisfied clients is widest, at 15 percentage points, around fears of penalties and underpayment. It narrows to 7 points on capital gains, and to just 2 points on tax-bracket sophistication.

That means that a client caught off guard by a penalty is more upset than a client whose return involved a genuinely complex calculation. Being surprised costs a tax firm far more goodwill than being wrong.

A calendar, not a strategy deck

Financial advisors already run on a structure of bringing up concerns before clients raise them, and these are usually tied to the calendar rather than waiting to see if the client asks about it first.

If tax firms want to mimick this cadence, here is a simple calendar that suggested one action per quarter:

Q1 (Jan–Apr) — Review expected liability and withholding before the return is filed, so there's no surprise at filing.

Q2 (Apr–Jun) — After the April 15 estimated payment deadline, confirm safe-harbor withholding status and flag early-year capital events.

Q3 (Jul–Sep) — Run a mid-year tax projection, especially for any client that sold a home, stock, or business that year.

Q4 (Oct–Dec) — Confirm that any RMDs and qualified charitable distributions (QCDs) were executed before December 31, and flag remaining tax-loss harvesting opportunities.

None of these actions require new staff or a new service line. It only requires a little more out of the check-ins the firm is already having with clients. Then, firms can move these actions onto their schedule, instead of leaving it to whomever the client happens to ask first.

Check the gap before you close it

Before you beging this process with clients, aksing yourself, as a tax professional, a few honest questions might identify any problems quickly. For example, when do your actually talk to clients about taxes — only at filing or only when asked? How fast do you really respond, measured against the last 20 client emails, and is this your intended standard? Do you know which clients had a capital gains event, RMD, or conversion this year without being told? When a client leaves, do you know why, or do you immediately blame fees?

Most firms and tax professionals overestimate their own responsiveness. That's consistent with a 23% dissatisfaction rate even among those professionals that likely believe they're doing fine.

Somewhere, a financial advisor already knows a client's RMD is coming due in December. The only open question is whether that client hears about it from their CPA first, or from someone who isn't one.

You can find out more about how tax firms are managing their AI technology here