Elizabeth Beastrom left public accounting 30 years ago because she was sick of rekeying data into tax returns. Now, as President of Tax and Accounting Professionals at Thomson Reuters, she works to make sure no accountant has to do that mind-numbing work ever again.
“I was a lazy CPA,” she admits with a laugh during this episode of the Earmark Podcast. “I didn’t want to spend my time doing work that I didn’t think was necessary.”
In this conversation with host Blake Oliver, Elizabeth and Kirat Sekhon, Thomson Reuters’ Head of Technology, map out their vision for automating the entire tax workflow, from gathering documents to delivering returns. They want listeners to know that AI-enabled firms are going to outcompete everyone else, and the shift from compliance to advisory isn’t optional anymore.
Why Tax Firms Can’t Keep Doing Things the Old Way
The numbers tell the story. Fewer people are taking the CPA exam while more accountants retire every year. Meanwhile, tax complexity keeps growing, which means more demand for services with fewer people to do the work. Throw in private equity firms buying up practices and pushing for efficiency, and you’ve got a perfect storm.
But it’s not just about headcount. The new generation of accountants expects modern tools that actually work together—not the clunky desktop software their predecessors put up with.
“They expect to use intuitive and connected tools,” Kirat explains, “so they have a better experience while they deliver value to their customers.”
So why has tax software stayed stuck in the desktop era while cloud accounting tools have taken off? Kirat points to two reasons. First, tax calculations are hard to get right, and once you build something that works, nobody wants to break it. Second, accountants themselves haven’t pushed for change. When you’re working 80 to 100 hours during busy season, the last thing you want is to learn new software.
“The term SALY—same as last year—still comes through,” Elizabeth notes. “You found a way to do it and you like to replicate that. Change is hard, especially when you have to introduce that to the firm when you’re working 80 to 100 hours a week.”
But resistance to change is becoming dangerous. Elizabeth’s own exit from the profession 30 years ago shows what happens when the work becomes too tedious. Back then, she discovered she loved the advisory side, including talking to clients, understanding their businesses, and making recommendations that actually helped them improve. But she was stuck doing data entry.
“I would spend time talking to my customers,” she recalls. “Some of my best inputs came from the people in accounts payable or accounts receivable. I would get a detailed understanding of their process.” But then she’d have to go back to rekeying tax data, and the contrast was too much.
Building the “Bookends” Around Tax Prep
Thomson Reuters isn’t trying to fix one piece of the tax workflow; they’re automating the whole thing. Their strategy focuses on creating what Elizabeth calls “strong bookends” around their core tax engines (GoSystem Tax, CST, and UltraTax).
The front bookend came through their acquisition of SurePrep three years ago. Practitioners dump all their client documents into the system, and SurePrep automatically classifies them, pulls out the relevant numbers, creates a binder for review, and fills in the tax software. No more manual data entry.
“That’s a huge time savings when you don’t have to spend time doing all of that manual data entry,” Kirat says, “and they can actually focus on the return.”
The back bookend arrived with SafeSend, acquired earlier this year. It handles return delivery, e-signatures, and payment collection, eliminating what Elizabeth remembers as the nightmare of printing, mailing, and faxing documents back and forth 30 years ago.
What’s different about Thomson Reuters’ approach is they’re keeping these tools open to work with competitors’ software too, not just their own tax products.
“It is an open, curated ecosystem,” Elizabeth emphasizes. “If customers find value in part of their workflow, we want to make sure we connect to it.”
Beyond just automating existing steps, they’re trying to eliminate unnecessary work entirely. Take the client questionnaire—that paper organizer Blake’s mom still fills out by hand every year. Thomson Reuters wants to “kill the questionnaire” by using AI to pre-populate information from prior returns and only ask for what’s actually new or missing.
The next frontier is what Kirat calls “agentic AI,” systems that don’t just handle one task but orchestrate entire workflows. These AI agents can use multiple Thomson Reuters products in sequence, making decisions along the way to get a return from start to finish with minimal human intervention.
But everything the AI does needs to be auditable. Kirat stresses that any AI handling tax work must show exactly what decisions it made and why.
“Our customers expect the work product of an accountant to be 100% accurate,” she explains. “Without providing that audit log with the decisions and choices and confidence levels, we’re missing the mark.”
Blake agrees enthusiastically, sharing his frustration with current AI tools that don’t show their reasoning. “I want to know why it matched this transaction,” he says. “There’s an AI conversation for each one of these transactions. Why not give that to us?”
The Shift to Advisory Can’t Wait
If machines can prepare returns faster and more accurately than humans, what exactly are clients paying for? Two-thirds of Thomson Reuters’ customers say they want to shift to advisory services, but most don’t know how to actually do it.
Enter Ready to Advise, launched in June 2024. The tool takes everything from a completed return and analyzes it against potential tax strategies based on that client’s specific situation and goals.
“It will quantify the savings,” Elizabeth explains. “It will ask for more information to get to a range. It will allow you to have that discussion where you can say, ‘Hey Blake, I noticed from your 1120-S filing some potential strategies you should take.'”
Then it walks you through implementing those strategies and produces client-ready documentation. For firms struggling to move beyond compliance, this is huge.
But technology alone won’t fix the business model problem. Clients have been trained to expect strategic advice for free. “I might call my accountant and say, ‘Hey, tell me what this big beautiful bill does for me this year?,’ which is code for don’t charge me for this,” Elizabeth says, capturing the conundrum perfectly.
That’s where Practice Forward comes in. It’s Thomson Reuters’ tool for helping firms understand their worth and develop advisory pricing models. The goal is shifting from hourly billing for returns to year-round advisory subscriptions.
Ready to Advise also solves a talent problem. Traditionally, you needed years of experience before you could offer meaningful tax advice. But with AI assistance grounded in Checkpoint’s content (maintained by over 4,500 subject matter experts), newer staff can contribute to advisory work much sooner.
“That junior associate’s experience, paired with all the knowledge that there is available in generative AI today, is incredibly powerful,” Kirat notes.
Blake shares a personal example that drives home the value of advisory over compliance. His tax preparer advised setting up a C-Corp to potentially qualify for QSBS treatment, which could save millions in taxes someday.
“I can’t even quantify the value of that,” Blake says. “But that’s why I’m willing to pay thousands of dollars for a tax return. It’s that insight, not the return.”
Meanwhile, DIY tax software keeps getting better. Blake describes doing a business return himself using consumer software with ChatGPT open for research. The same process would have taken hours of manual work just a few years ago.
Firms that stick to just preparing returns are going to get squeezed from both ends.
“AI-enabled professionals and firms, they’re going to outcompete and outperform,” Elizabeth warns, “because they’re going to be able to do it faster, better and get to this advisory, which our clients want.”
What to Do Right Now
So where should a traditional tax firm start? Elizabeth recommends figuring out what you hate doing.
“What are your pain points that you hate to do?” she asks. “There’s a pretty high likelihood that I or a talented person on my team is going to be able to say, ‘This is how we can solve that for you.’”
The technology exists today. SurePrep can handle document gathering. SafeSend can automate delivery. Ready to Advise can help you identify tax-saving opportunities. CoCounsel can answer complex questions using curated, expert-verified content. The audit logs are there to verify everything the AI does.
The harder change is mental: accepting that the compliance work that defined the profession for decades is becoming commoditized, and the future belongs to firms that embrace automation as the foundation for higher-value advisory services.
Elizabeth even suggests bringing these concepts into accounting education to attract new talent. Currently, tax courses focus on rules and calculations rather than strategy. After all, accounting is still “the language of business,” as Elizabeth was told as an undergraduate. The difference is that AI can now handle the grammar and spelling, freeing professionals to focus on telling the story.
The transformation won’t be easy, but it’s not optional. As Elizabeth learned when she left the profession out of frustration with mundane tasks, talented people won’t stick around if the work doesn’t engage them. The good news is that automation finally makes it possible to eliminate the drudgery and focus on what really matters: helping clients succeed.
Listen to the full conversation with Blake, Elizabeth, and Kirat for more insights on preparing your firm for the automated future of tax.