Earmark Team

Section 7216: What tax professionals must know before sharing client information

Earmark Team · September 2, 2026 ·

Grady has hit capacity. He runs Lighthouse Accounting LLC, a solo firm that provides tax preparation, planning, representation, bookkeeping, payroll, and some attestation work. To grow, he could hire seasonal preparers, outsource work to a contractor, or merge into a colleague’s firm.

Those staffing and business decisions are also federal compliance questions.

Giving a contractor access to a client portal, forwarding a client email, or sharing a client list with a potential buyer may trigger Sections 7216 and 6713 of the Internal Revenue Code. A knowing or reckless violation of Section 7216 is a misdemeanor punishable by up to one year in prison, prosecution costs, and ordinarily a fine of up to $1,000. The maximum fine rises to $100,000 when the disclosure or use is connected with a crime involving the misappropriation of another person’s taxpayer identity. Section 6713 separately imposes a civil penalty of $250 per unauthorized disclosure or use, capped at $10,000 per calendar year; for identity-theft-related conduct, those amounts rise to $1,000 per disclosure or use and $50,000 per calendar year. Unlike Section 7216, Section 6713 contains no express knowing-or-reckless requirement, and the same conduct can trigger both provisions.

In Episode 35 of Tax in Action, Jeremy Wells, EA, CPA, uses Grady’s choices to explain a practical three-question test:

Is this tax return information?
Is a use or disclosure occurring?
Does an exception allow it without the taxpayer’s consent?

Tax return information goes beyond the completed return

Generally, Section 7216 prohibits a tax return preparer from knowingly or recklessly disclosing or using a taxpayer’s tax return information for a purpose other than preparing the return, unless the Code or regulations authorize the disclosure or use.

For these rules, a tax return includes an original or amended income tax return imposed under Chapter 1 of the Code. That includes Forms 1040, 1120, and 1041. Form 1065 and employment tax returns such as Forms 940 and 941 are not automatically covered because they are not returns of income tax imposed under Chapter 1. Information from those filings may nevertheless become protected tax return information when furnished in connection with preparing a covered income tax return.

The term “tax return preparer” is also broad. It can include people who prepare or assist with returns, their employees, and providers of auxiliary services. Examples may include tax software companies, e-file providers, tax-focused publishers, and professional liability insurers. Creditors, office landlords, and people who provide information at a taxpayer’s request or provide services only incidentally related to return preparation generally are not preparers.

Most importantly, “tax return information” includes information furnished in any form for, or in connection with, preparing a return. It can include:

Names, addresses, and taxpayer identification numbers
Documents supplied by the client
Calculations and recommendations produced by the preparer
IRS acceptance notices and e-file rejections
Statistical compilations, even when anonymized

The client’s reasons for providing the information play a part. A profit and loss statement given to a business coach to improve operations may not be tax return information. The same statement given to a tax professional for return preparation may be protected.

That purpose-based definition leads to the next question: What counts as a use or disclosure?

A disclosure doesn’t require sending a document

A use occurs when a preparer relies on tax return information to take or permit an action. For example, if you identify a client’s IRA eligibility while preparing a return and recommend a contribution, you’ve used the information. Classifying an action as a use does not mean it is prohibited; rather, ask whether the Code, regulations, or valid consent authorize the use.

A disclosure occurs when you make tax return information known to another person in any manner. Examples include:

Emailing a return
Granting access to tax software or a client portal
Sharing a client folder
Forwarding an email containing client information
Allowing someone to see information on your screen

Some disclosures happen without an intentional file transfer, so access itself matters.

Once you identify a use or disclosure, you must determine whether an exception applies.

Employees, contractors, and buyers face different rules

Grady’s seasonal employees generally may access client information without written consent if Grady and the employees are based in the United States and work for the same firm. If Grady is based in the U.S. and hires an employee overseas, however, he needs written consent from each affected taxpayer before providing access. For Form 1040-series taxpayers, Social Security numbers generally must be masked or redacted before a foreign disclosure unless both the U.S. and foreign preparers maintain adequate data protection safeguards and the consent contains the prescribed language.

Donna, an independent bookkeeper, presents a different problem. If Grady brings her in as an outside contractor and gives her access to his portal, she isn’t an officer, employee, or member of his firm. Grady may disclose information without consent under the preparer-to-preparer exception only if Donna qualifies as another tax return preparer located in the United States, including as a qualifying auxiliary-service provider. The disclosure must be necessary for preparing or assisting with a return or providing auxiliary services connected with return preparation, and Donna may not make substantive determinations—an analysis, interpretation, or application of the law—or provide advice affecting the reported tax liability. If those conditions are not satisfied, Grady must obtain valid written consent before giving Donna access to the portal.

He could instead refer the bookkeeping clients directly to Donna. If the clients give their information to Donna themselves, Grady isn’t making the disclosure. But, Grady should not give Donna client names or contact information directly without consent or another applicable exception, because doing so would itself disclose tax return information, and the client-list exception does not authorize solicitation of services other than tax return preparation.

A firm sale has its own exception. The regulations permit certain disclosures without individual consent in connection with the sale or other disposition of a tax return preparation business. Grady may share a list containing client names, addresses, and tax form numbers without individual consent if the potential buyer first signs a confidentiality agreement. That agreement must protect the information and prohibit its use or disclosure for any purpose other than due diligence for the purchase.

Other exceptions cover certain narrow and fact-specific disclosures to software and e-file providers, related taxpayers without a harmful conflict, peer reviewers, courts, regulators, law enforcement, and successor preparers after death or incapacity.

The consent rules are critical when no exception applies.

Consent must come before the disclosure

Taxpayer consent must be written, knowing, voluntary, and received before the use or disclosure. A signature obtained on Tuesday can’t cure a disclosure made on Monday.

Valid consent generally identifies:

The preparer and taxpayer
The purpose and recipient, or the authorized use
The information being disclosed or used
Any applicable disclosure to a preparer outside the United States
The taxpayer’s signature and date

The preparer must give the taxpayer a copy when the consent is signed. One document may authorize multiple uses or multiple disclosures, but not both, and each must be specifically identified. For taxpayers not filing Form 1040-series returns, a consent may use another format, including an engagement letter, provided it satisfies the regulation’s core requirements, and the separate-document rule does not apply. A consent may specify its duration; if it does not, it remains effective for one year from the date of signature.

Generally, conditioning services on the taxpayer’s consent makes the consent invalid. A narrow exception permits a preparer to condition tax return preparation services—or change their terms or cost—when consent is needed to disclose information to another preparer for services connected with preparing the taxpayer’s return.

Apply the same test to every workflow

Section 7216 sets a legal minimum, but it’s not a complete privacy program and is only one part of a firm’s privacy and data security obligations. Jeremy recommends analyzing potential disclosures in the same order every time:

Determine whether the information qualifies as tax return information
Decide whether a use or disclosure is actually occurring
Check the regulations for an exception
If no exception applies, get valid written consent in advance

Apply that test before hiring a seasonal preparer, outsourcing client work, or opening due diligence. Then listen to the full Tax in Action episode for Jeremy’s complete walkthrough of the Lighthouse Accounting case study.

Should your firm move everything into the Intuit Accountant Suite yet?

Earmark Team · September 1, 2026 ·

An accountant was poking around in a new dashboard, or “playing with his data,” as Intuit’s Director of Product Management, Karla Uribe, put it, when something jumped out. A client’s cash on hand had dropped sharply. He wasn’t looking for it. But there it was, so he called the client to find out what was happening before the trend turned into a crisis.

That kind of catch used to take real work. You’d export data into a spreadsheet, import it into another app, or wait until month-end and hope you noticed. Now it can surface on its own.

On Episode 153 of The Unofficial QuickBooks Accountants Podcast, host Alicia Katz Pollock of Royalwise sat down with Karla to talk about the Intuit Accountant Suite (IAS). Alicia cheerfully called it “the official episode of The Unofficial QuickBooks Accountants Podcast.” The timing is perfect because Intuit is asking accountants to move their whole practice into one hub, and as Alicia noted, plenty of firms haven’t switched yet.

IAS offers a deal many firms haven’t weighed out yet. Bring your clients, teams, and data into one place, and you get bulk actions, guided month-end closes through Books Close, and firm-wide KPI dashboards in Client Insights. Karla makes the case for that move while staying honest about its limits. Your current tech stack isn’t going anywhere yet, and AI only earns its spot when it beats how you already work. Switching is just a toggle, not a migration, and it’s reversible until January. So the real questions are which pieces to test now, and how to make your feedback count while Intuit is still writing the roadmap.

Let’s walk through why consolidation is the foundation, where Books Close and Client Insights fit, what happens to the tools you already pay for, and how your feedback actually moves the product.

One place instead of scattered apps

Ask Karla what problem IAS solves, and she answers, “one centralized place where accountants can manage all aspects of their teams, their business and their clients.”

She sees two big wins there. The first is getting your data in one place, because that “unlocks other value.” The second is bulk actioning. You take the steps you repeat in every client file, then standardize and templatize them. You tell the system how you want the work done, then apply it across your whole portfolio.

It solves a familiar pain point for many accountants. As Alicia notes, most of us turned to outside tools to run the practice: “We’ve got the bookkeeping in one place, but all the management happens somewhere else.” It got worse when accountants spread clients across several QuickBooks Online Accountant accounts, sometimes for permissions, sometimes because performance suffered with too many clients. Karla says both problems are fixed now, and the whole portfolio can live in one IAS instance.

Making the move is simple. “It is really just a toggle,” Karla said. Your data transfers automatically. There’s no migration. The harder part is getting your firm trained on a new interface. That’s why Intuit built guides, videos, and how-tos around the switch.

Two optional steps are worth the effort. First, if you have multiple QBO realms, pick one as your master and use the Transfer Client experience in Settings to consolidate the rest. Second, a setup tool lets you organize teams and clients the way you actually work, by region or by service line. Consolidating may also lift your standing in the ProAdvisor Pro Partner tier program, which can change what you pay for the paid features. And if the timing isn’t right, QBOA sticks around through the end of the year, so you can switch back until January.

That’s the setup. The payoff shows up in what gets layered on top.

Consolidation unlocks Books Close and Client Insights

Books Close is a guided, AI-assisted module you add onto IAS. It’s priced per client and built to streamline month-end close across your whole client book. Karla was clear that working across the portfolio in bulk is “not something that you could do before within our Intuit platform.”

In practice, it handles transaction checks, anomaly review, and client collaboration when documents or context are missing, all in one place. Alicia made it concrete. If rules are auto-adding transactions from the bank feed, Books Close shows you exactly which ones were auto-added so you can verify them. Or set a threshold so any transaction over $2,500 gets flagged, in case it should be capitalized. It’s a checklist for the data checks you’d otherwise dig through files to run.

Karla also confirmed an agentic Books Close is coming that will automate routine steps. For now, you can see and control every step yourself.

Client Insights sits in the Accelerate tier, which will cost $149 a month for the whole firm but is free for now. It’s a dashboard you configure. You choose the clients and KPIs, and your ecosystem data comes along, including bill pay, payroll, tax, and ProConnect data. You don’t need spreadsheets or a third-party app.

What takes it beyond another dashboard is the insights find you. Anomalies, revenue and profit-margin swings, cash and balance sheet ratios, and bookkeeping health become the cash-on-hand story. One accountant told Intuit, “I wouldn’t have caught that if it wasn’t because you clearly signaled” the month-over-month change.

Alicia spun out the use case on the spot. Group clients by industry or region, build your own benchmarks, and spot the outliers. That client may be doing something special you can copy. Maybe they’re failing, and you just caught it early. It’s a path from compliance and data entry toward advisory work. Though as Alicia fairly noted, not every bookkeeper wants that path, and staying small is a fine choice.

Dashboard fatigue might be a concern now that dashboards show up all over QuickBooks. But Karla reminds listeners that they can control what surfaces. You can pin focused widgets to your home page, and more controls are coming. There’s also conversational Intuit Intelligence as an alternative. For example, you can ask Client Insights, “Give me a couple of clients I might need to focus on today.” That way, you don’t need to read everything through charts.

Where your existing tools stay, and what “co-building” really means

Alicia raised the obvious objection. Firms are already deep into Dext, Financial Cents, Karbon, Canopy, Asana, and even spreadsheets. So where does Books Close fit?

Karla didn’t oversell it. “We don’t expect everyone to drop everything and come to our product.” IAS may complement those tools. Over time, it may replace parts of them where “the data is native,” and the savings add up. She recommends accountants “just try it. There’s no cost to try it right now.” Make your own call. Longer term, Intuit wants to be an open, multi-platform system so portfolios with non-QuickBooks ledgers can live in one place. That’s the vision, but it’s not a feature you can use yet.

On AI, Alicia described the split she sees online. Some accountants say bring it on. Others ask why Intuit is stuffing AI everywhere when the bank feed still makes mistakes. Karla conceded the point. “AI for the sake of AI does not” make sense, she said, and the bar is “improving the way things are done, not doing it differently.” Her own test proved it. Alicia tried the new AI invoice creation and could have built the invoice faster by hand. If a feature doesn’t beat your current method, Karla said, you shouldn’t use it.

Meanwhile, feedback is “the most important of all of the data points” Intuit uses to prioritize. They collect roughly 10,000 data points a month through in-product forms, boards, end-of-experience surveys, and support tickets. The new Resolution Center is proof. Accountants asked to see their clients’ open support requests and their status, so Intuit built a consolidated, permission-controlled view. Alicia noted she has DIY clients who spend four hours on the phone with support when one click from her would have fixed it.

But Karla drew a line between co-building and bug-hunting. “We don’t ever intentionally put anything in the market that is not working, expecting you to find the errors.” Research and pilots happen before launch. But Intuit can’t learn which of ten possible improvements accountants care about most in a lab.

When Alicia brought up the forum frustration over bugs, slowdowns, and changes, Karla pointed to an internal priority she calls “nail the foundations.” She says it sits at the same level as new feature work, or higher. Every team carries a bucket of customer-reported problems. “We can’t just build new stuff. We have to get it right.” Alicia added her own request while she had the chance, requesting a public change log in the notifications bell, so accountants can scan every fix and release instead of getting surprised.

Your move while the roadmap is still open

IAS is a platform bet. Consolidation unlocks Books Close, Client Insights, and firm-wide templates. But the payoff depends on how carefully your firm tests it. What do you try now? Which features justify consolidating a realm? Where do your current tools still win? And how do you get your feedback into the process that decides what ships next?

This is bigger than a product switch. It’s a chance to move from compliance and data entry toward the advisory conversations you want to have on your own terms and your own timeline. And it’s a reminder that the roadmap is being written right now, while the headline features are still free.

Where to start:

Turn on Client Insights (Accelerate) while it’s free. It was Karla’s pick for the one feature every firm should try right away.
Test Books Close with one client. As Alicia urged, don’t write off an early version. Six months from now it may do exactly what you need.
Consolidate your realms. It unlocks features and may improve your Pro Partner tier benefits and pricing.
Keep your tech stack where it still wins. IAS may complement your tools long before it replaces any of them.
Flood that feedback. With 10,000 monthly data points shaping the backlog, yours genuinely counts.
Remember the escape hatch. Switching is a toggle, and it’s reversible until January.

To hear Karla’s own words on AI, reliability, and where the platform is headed, listen to the full conversation.

Alicia Katz Pollock’s Royalwise OWLS (On-Demand Web-based Learning Solutions) is the industry’s premier portal for top-notch QuickBooks Online training with CPE for accounting firms, bookkeepers, and small business owners. Visit Royalwise OWLS, where learning QBO is a HOOT!

175 fixes and a fresh sales pitch: What to verify before you trust Intuit’s promises

Earmark Team · September 1, 2026 ·

Watch the recent In the Know! session, and you’ll see Intuit believes it’s turned over a new leaf. The company now wants to treat accountants as customers rather than as a sales channel. That’s a big claim. And as any good accountant knows, a claim is only as good as the evidence behind it.

In this “Now You Know” recap on The Unofficial QuickBooks Accountants Podcast, hosts Alicia Katz Pollock and Matthew “Spot” Fulton walk through that In the Know session. They cover QuickBooks performance fixes, updated Expert Services, and the features rolling out in Intuit Accountant Suite in August. They view every promise as a claim to verify, not a gift to accept. They welcome the fixes, but Intuit still hasn’t published the changelog that would prove the headline number. The new Expert Services guardrails leave open questions about Intuit’s human reviewers touching client files, and pricing barely came up at all.

175 improvements, but where’s the receipt?

Stacey Blanchard, Product Marketing Lead at Intuit, opened with a poll about speed. She asked how often listeners wished a page, workflow, or report would load faster. Only 11% said they never notice it. Thirty percent said rarely, 40% said at least once a week, and 20% said almost every single time they log into QBO.

Alicia offered a reality check. Before you blame QuickBooks, consider when’s the last time you actually unplugged your router for a minute. A clogged connection may be the real culprit. Matthew observed that pages often load, flash, and reload before they settle. So count “one, two, three Mississippi” before you click that gear icon.

Intuit claims they’ve made 175 “meaningful improvements.” The team framed it with the line, “building new things is only half the job—the other half is listening.”

Several of the fixes are genuinely useful. For example:

Duplicate-transaction warnings now appear before you post instead of after
Suggested bank-feed matches carry confidence icons—a green check when QuickBooks is sure, an orange alert when it’s guessing
Categorization is meant to learn from your own file first, reaching the broader database only when your file offers no pattern
Conflicting bank rules now get surfaced, so you can pick the right one and clean up duplicates
A cleaner dashboard with resizable, reorderable widgets, more than 100 keyboard shortcuts, over 50 report fixes so columns aren’t cut off and pages print as they appear, and extended sign-in timeouts

But Matthew notes, “I would love an actual list of those 175 meaningful improvements, please.” Alicia shared a simple fix: use that empty notification bell in the upper-right corner to post a running changelog. “I think that would go a long way towards consumer confidence.”

For now, she recommends restarting your router before you blame QBO. And if a tab looks timed out but another QBO tab is still active, just refresh. You’re still signed in. And keep asking Intuit for the changelog.

Accountant as customer, or accountant’s lane invaded?

The bigger story is what Intuit now says it believes about you.

Liron Zighelnic, Director of Product, AI-Powered Agents at Intuit, framed her team as “AI plus HI” (human intelligence). Her larger message is that accountants are “our customer, not a sales channel,” and the center of the client relationship.

The Expert Services changes carry weight. Intuit setup experts will coach new business owners for 90 days instead of 30. Intuit Intelligence builds a dynamic “setup hub” shaped around the client’s stated priorities, rather than a static checklist. And a step in the setup flow lets clients attach their accountant’s firm information directly.

Then come the guardrails. A new “Intuit Experts Services” toggle is off by default when an accountant user is attached. Self-serve clients who explore it get a pop-up encouraging them to talk to you first. If they turn it on, you’re notified. And firm-billed files stay off until you enable them.

But Matthew is skeptical. “I thought this is how it was supposed to be the entire time,” he said. And open questions remain. If a client starts their own file with the toggle on and attaches you later, does it flip off? Alicia’s believes it should, “because otherwise none of this has any meaning.”

The August bank-feed change is thornier still. AI takes the first categorization pass. High-confidence transactions post, uncertain ones get flagged to the owner, and a human Intuit expert reviews in the background. As Alicia said, “It means they’re going into our files unauthorized.” Is that a paid service, or free labor that trains the model? Matthew noted, “One thing that never came up during the entire presentation was anything to do with pricing.”

Before you trust any of it:

Confirm the default-off behavior in your own client files
Ask who pays for the human-review layer and whether it’s AI training or a billed service
Press for pricing before you lean on the setup hub

That same verify-before-you-adopt logic applies to what’s coming in Accountant Suite.

The August toolkit: tabs, a unified inbox, and portfolio insights

Adoption is climbing. Alicia noted a real shift since May. Attendees who answer, “Haven’t heard of it,” dropped into the single digits, and the majority are now using it.

Multi-client tabs

These are in Core (free) through August. Keep your Accountant Suite portal open, plus up to five client files in separate browser tabs. Click a transaction in Books Close and the client file opens alongside it. Matthew shared the perfect use case scenario: you’re mid-project when another client calls, so you pop their file open, answer, close it, and get back to work without opening an incognito window.

The unified inbox

This replaces the limited requests area. It gathers requests, receipts, messages, and reminders across every client into one place, reachable from a new inbox button in the upper-right corner. You can filter by client, send email or text reminders, and request information from QBO users, firm team members, or outside contacts who join through a free portal without a paid seat. Smart templates feed Intuit Intelligence, which in one demo caught a mismatch. The transaction was $58, and the uploaded receipt was $25. But Matthew pointed out this will need “tiered levels of control and accessibility, or visibility.”

Accelerate

The higher tier delivers cross-client portfolio insights. Ask Intuit Intelligence to identify which clients had a transaction-volume increase of more than 25% last quarter, and you have a pricing review, capacity plan, or advisory conversation without opening a single file. Version one is high-level KPIs only. There’s no transaction drilldown yet, although it suggests follow-up questions. Accelerate is free until January 2027. Books Close stays separate at $8 per client, with no firm start date for billing.

Start your testing with multi-client tabs, since they’re free and low-risk. Demand Intuit provides clear inbox permissions before inviting outside contacts, and use the free Accelerate window to judge real value before they announce pricing.

Do the homework (or take Intuit’s word for it)

Intuit is asking the profession to believe it has changed. The performance fixes, the “accountant as customer” framing, the new toggle, and the Accountant Suite rollout are all evidence, but evidence a good accountant tests before accepting.

Healthy skepticism is professional diligence. Verify the guardrails in your own client files. Ask the pricing and data-access questions. Hold Intuit to the transparency it hasn’t yet delivered. Do that work, and these tools can free up serious capacity and grow your advisory line. Skip it, and you’re just taking Intuit’s word for it.

So restart your router, then hit play. Listen to the full episode with Alicia and Matthew for every guardrail, open question, and August rollout detail. Then decide which changes actually earn a place in your workflow.

The country that existed only on paper

Earmark Team · September 1, 2026 ·

Seventy Scottish settlers reached Central America in November 1822, expecting to begin new lives in a thriving country. They’d been promised paved streets, government buildings, a cathedral, an opera house, and farmland that could produce three corn harvests a year. Gold supposedly filled the nearby rivers.

Instead, as Caleb Newquist explains in Episode 117 of Oh My Fraud, “There was only jungle.”

The settlers hadn’t followed a vague rumor. They’d purchased land, exchanged British pounds for Poyaisian dollars, and received documents that appeared official. But Poyais, the country Gregor MacGregor promoted, didn’t exist as advertised.

Its infrastructure existed only on paper.

Before inventing a country, Gregor invented himself

Gregor claimed he was born on Christmas Eve 1786 at his family’s ancestral estate in Glengyle. That story connected him to the MacGregor clan and the outlaw Rob Roy MacGregor. Most historians, however, believe he was born in Edinburgh and was the son of an East India Company ship captain.

His family mythology gave him useful material. The MacGregors claimed descent from ninth-century Scottish kings and used the motto “Royal is my race.” King James VI abolished the MacGregor name in 1603, and the ban lasted until 1774. Gregor belonged to the first generation legally allowed to use it in more than 170 years.

He soon learned to turn status into opportunity. In 1803, when he was 16, his family bought him an army commission for about £450 (roughly £40,000 today). After marrying Louisa Bowater, the daughter of a British admiral, he used her dowry to buy a captaincy. He later began calling himself “Colonel,” “Sir,” and chief of the MacGregor clan without earning those titles.

That pattern followed him across the Atlantic.

One real victory gave credibility to later claims

In 1812, Gregor sailed to Caracas and offered his services to General Francisco de Miranda. He brought a real army commission and exaggerated stories about his experience. Miranda, busy fighting a revolution, “didn’t really have the extra time to run background checks,” Caleb notes. Within two months, Gregor was a colonel.

Gregor did achieve one notable military success. In July 1816, he led his surrounded troops on a 34-day fighting retreat through hundreds of miles of Venezuelan jungle. Simón Bolívar praised the retreat as “superior to the conquest of an empire.”

But Gregor’s later campaigns ended badly. He abandoned the Republic of the Floridas on Amelia Island, escaped an assault on Portobelo while many of his men were captured and executed, and deserted troops again at Rio de la Hacha. Former subordinate Michael Rafter documented these failures in Memoirs of Gregor MacGregor, published in June 1820.

The warning was public before the first settlers ever sailed.

Gregor made Poyais look official

In April 1820, King George Frederick Augustus granted Gregor at least 8 million acres on the Mosquito Coast in exchange for rum and jewelry. The land was real, but it was undeveloped and poorly suited to farming.

Gregor returned to London and transformed it into something else. He declared himself Cacique, or prince, of Poyais and promoted a country with a capital city, a bank, a military, a constitution, paved streets, rich farmland, and rivers full of gold.

Then he surrounded the fiction with convincing materials:

Land offices in London, Edinburgh, and Glasgow
Land certificates and government bonds that raised £200,000
Poyaisian dollars printed using the Bank of Scotland’s press
A flag, military uniforms, and government officials
A 355-page guidebook credited to the nonexistent Captain Thomas Strangeways

Each item made the others seem more credible. Yet none proved that the promised country existed. The documents showed how much effort Gregor put into the promotion, not whether his claims were true.

A strong economy made the fantasy easier to sell

Britain’s economy also helped. During the early 1820s, manufacturing and wages were rising while interest rates and living costs were falling. Latin America was the emerging market of its day, with bonds offering returns of about 6% compared with 3% elsewhere.

Gregor’s pitch combined those conditions with familiar human weaknesses: trusting a confident promoter, feeling comfortable with risk during good times, fearing missing out, and wanting to join something exclusive. Doctors, lawyers, former soldiers, craftspeople, bankers, and families all signed up.

Once respectable people began buying land and booking passage, hesitation felt less like caution and more like missing a rare opportunity.

The gap between paper and reality became deadly

The first 70 settlers arrived at the Black River settlement in November 1822. Nearly 200 more came in early 1823. They found no city, government, shelter, or working economy.

Then the rainy season brought mosquitoes, fever, and dysentery. One historical account reported that nine people died within the first few days and 120 became sick. In May 1823, the Mexican Eagle evacuated survivors to British Honduras, but more than half of the settlers ultimately died.

Gregor blamed the people he had placed in charge and presented himself as another victim. He fled to Paris, repackaged Poyais for French investors, and was acquitted after his 1826 trial. He continued selling versions of the scheme into the 1830s. He was never convicted and died in Caracas in 1845, where he received full military honors.

Even more remarkably, some survivors defended him. Gregor’s charisma, along with the victims’ shame and trauma, made it easier to blame failed administrators than to accept that the entire project had been a fraud.

Paperwork should begin verification, not end it

Poyais did not lack documentation. It had certificates, bonds, currency, offices, uniforms, and a guidebook. The tragedy was that those materials looked enough like proof to discourage harder questions.

For accounting professionals, the case offers several lasting lessons:

Confirm claims through sources independent of the promoter
Verify credentials instead of relying on impressive titles
Treat high returns, social proof, and confident answers as reasons for more scrutiny
Take credible warnings seriously, even when they spoil an attractive story

A polished document can still support a fiction. As Caleb concludes, “You can always trust a dishonest man to be dishonest.”

Listen to the full Oh My Fraud episode for the complete story of Poyais and Gregor’s remarkable escape from accountability.

Vulnerability, Curiosity, and the Messy Middle of Leadership

Earmark Team · August 28, 2026 ·

At Nancy McClelland’s “Vulnerability as a Strength” panel at Scaling New Heights, the session opened with a word cloud. The question on screen was, “How does it make you feel when you think you’re the only one who doesn’t have it together?” Almost every answer was some version of “poopy” — alone, overwhelmed, not awesome. By the end of the session, the same room answered a different question. “How does it feel to realize you’re not the only one who struggles?” The screen filled with seen, validated, not alone, resilient, community. There were tears in that room. Nancy took a picture of the word cloud.

In Episode 33 of She Counts, Nancy and co-host Questian Telka talk about the two very different sessions they each led at that conference. Nancy ran a panel on vulnerability in leadership. Questian, along with co-presenter Ashley Rhoden, COO of High Rock Accounting, led a session on guiding clients and teams through change. When they compared notes afterward, they realized both talks made the same point. The strongest leadership skill in accounting isn’t having all the answers. It’s being willing to say out-loud what you don’t have figured out and staying curious enough to notice what your team and clients aren’t saying. As Questian put it, “Vulnerability is about recognizing and naming what’s happening inside of us. Change leadership requires us to recognize what is likely happening inside of someone else.” They’re two facets of the same muscle. Here’s how each one works, and why leadership happens in the messy middle.

Why admitting what you’re not good at makes you a stronger leader

Nancy has now run this panel twice. Both times, she started with what she calls a deeply invasive survey designed to reveal deeply rooted feelings and how people cope with them. Then she pulls out the common themes.

Patterns repeated across all six widely admired leaders: Every one had made a costly business decision. Every one had made a major client error. Every one had faced a physical or mental health crisis. The themes that came up included reconciling perception versus reality, building resilience through community, balancing control with letting go, finding meaning in the past, and managing stress and anxiety. These are the same coping strategies often used in cognitive and dialectical behavioral therapy.

There can be a huge gap between how leaders look and what they’re privately carrying. Questian described a friend telling her she “seemed to have everything perfectly together.” She nearly spit out her drink. “I feel like I’m falling apart most of the time.” Both hosts admitted they tend to share the hard stuff only after they’ve worked through it, like the woman who returned to a professional group after a long absence and explained, “It was just too hard to reach out while I was in the messy middle.” When leaders only share mistakes after they’ve been polished into a tidy success story, nobody gets to see the real scale of the failure, or how a person keeps going before they solve the problem.

The panelists were honest and specific about their weak spots, like conflict avoidance so strong it gets in the way, ADHD, the discomfort of hiring and firing, and the desire to be loved that makes holding people accountable genuinely hard.

So how do you admit a weakness without making your team fear for their jobs? Nancy’s answer, drawn from her panelists, is:

Your team already knows where you’re weak. Pretending otherwise backfires.
Name it, then ask for help. “You’re really good at this. I’m not. Do you have ideas for me?”
Invite people with complementary strengths to help shape the firm’s future and offer the same support back. Mentorship goes both directions.

That same self-awareness makes you attentive to what’s happening inside someone else. And that’s where Questian’s session picks up.

Reading the change your client never announced

Questian’s practice is niched in nonprofits, where boards turn over constantly, and the decision-makers change with them. Change rarely arrives as an announcement. It usually shows up sideways:

Slower response times
Canceled meetings
New, unfamiliar faces in meetings
Shifts in who’s making decisions
Unexpected reporting requests
A client simply going quiet

She lost her first client that way. The organization was losing funding, responses stretched out, meetings got canceled, and eventually the executive director called to say they had to tighten their belts. In hindsight, the signs were all there.

Her advice is to meet regularly, build genuine rapport, and ask open-ended questions. What’s new? What’s changed? What are you planning for the next few months? Her questions, not their announcements, surface the most information. Nancy connected this to the “lead with curiosity” lesson from the Reframe conference: resisting the accountant’s instinct to jump straight to a solution. She also passed along a tip from Twyla Verhelst: before your next client meeting, run the transcripts of your last two or three meetings through an AI tool and ask what’s worth following up on. It’s not a substitute for rapport, but it’s a memory aid for when you have more client relationships than you can hold in your head.

This helps you become the person a client calls first. Change stops being a threat and becomes the doorway into advisory work. And as Questian pointed out, it’s far more expensive to find a new client than to grow a current relationship.

The messy middle is where leadership happens

Whether the change is internal, such as new technology, standardized processes, and documented SOPs, or on the client side, the hard part is emotional rather than technical.

Change happens in three parts: ending the old way, the messy middle, and the new beginning. “When you are in the messy middle,” Questian said, “that’s where we lose people and where we fail.”

Resistance almost always traces back to a fear of losing something, whether it’s control, expertise, authority, job security, or identity. Documenting SOPs so a team member can take a vacation without their laptop sounds like a gift until someone thinks, if you create those SOPs, then you can replace me. So get buy-in early, while feedback can still shape the decision. Frame the change as solving their problem. And remember that a launch date doesn’t come with an emotional switch. Questian described one team member who met her with resistance at every turn. She simply kept showing the benefit until they came out the other side and buy-in finally landed.

When a client’s needs shift, name it out-loud. Compare the original scope to the new outcome they’re after. Sometimes scope grows to support a negative. For example, helping a nonprofit evaluate cost cuts or a workforce reduction is a distinct project that deserves its own pricing. Center the conversation on the client’s needs, be transparent, avoid surprises, and lead with sensitivity, especially when the situation is painful. Absorbing unbilled, out-of-scope work “builds resentment,” Questian warned, “and it weakens the relationship.”

And there’s a bigger reason to get good at this. As Nancy argued in nearly every talk she’s given this year, as AI takes on more technical work, empathy and connection are more valuable than ever before. Trust and psychological safety stop being soft skills and start being the professional skills that set you apart.

Two questions to sit with

Nancy summed up her panel in three lines:

No one has everything figured out
Vulnerability doesn’t weaken leadership when it’s paired with responsibility and self-awareness
You build resilience through community

Questian’s take is that relationships and scopes evolve when organizations evolve, and that evolution is an opportunity.

“Resilient firms aren’t built by people who never struggle,” Nancy said. “They’re built by people who don’t hide their struggles.” For women navigating rooms where they’re often the only one without a seat at the table, that reframe can mean pulling up a chair. Transparency is a professional strength, not a liability.

Nancy left listeners with an exercise. Write down every person who actually knows what you’re carrying right now. If the list is short, you’re not letting anyone in. Then flip it and ask yourself, “Whose load can you help lighten?” Or, as the hosts asked on LinkedIn, which side of leadership needs more attention from you right now, being more honest about what you’re carrying, or becoming more curious about what someone else is carrying?

They closed with a line from Nicole Davis, highlighted on one of Nancy’s slides from her SNH panel: “Vulnerability is a strength that the greatest leaders wear with pride.”

Listen to the full conversation between Nancy McClelland and Questian Telka and earn CPE credit for it on the Earmark app.