Originally published on Forbes.com.
If tax blogging can be viewed in epochs, few tax blogs are BC (Before Caron. That would be Paul Caron – the Tax Prof.) So when one of the early bloggers hangs up his keyboard and rides off to the sunset of an upstream merger, we should all take note. Joe Kristan of Roth & Company, PC put up his last post this week.
When I wrote a post titled The Discerning Person’s Guide To The Tax Blogosphere, I identified Joe as the blogger with whom I felt the most simpatico. He is a partner in a regional firm and was interested in many of the same issues I was. He is also very interested in the Civil War and was quite envious as I blogged about my Sesquicentennial adventures before we were instructed to swim in our own lanes banishing such diversions to one of my alternate blogs.
The Fellowship Of Tax Bloggers
Joe started his blog in 2002, which was well before I knew what blogging was. He recalls only the Tax Guru, Kerry Kerstetter and Robert Flach, the Wandering Pro being up then and recalls the coming of the Tax Prof, who is sometimes referred to as the Blog Emperor. When I started in 2010, one of the things I did was read Blogging For Dummies, which suggested that you look at and comment on other blogs in your field.
Thanks to Joe and some others I found that the tax blogosphere was pretty much a welcoming and collegial space. I think that is likely because the underlying professional activity is much more lucrative than writing. So many of us end up being viewed as a little odd by our actual colleagues, binding us closer to our blogging buddies. My business partner who is also my life partner often suggests that I find something more interesting to write about and will sometimes chide me for focusing on my blog, when I should be, you know, working.
Although we have communicated a lot over the last seven years, I spoke with Joe for the first time yesterday. He told me that he was one of the founders of his firm in 1990. He and his partners spun out of what was then the Big Six (I think that was where the countdown was then. It was Big Eight when I started.) and started the firm. And now it is being acquired by a top 25 large regional.
The National Scene Not Best For Blogging CPAs
The blog was very much integrated with Roth’s technology platform and there is much to do when you are involved in an upstream merger, which is why Joe is hanging it up. He said the new firm is talking about involving him in its tax communication program, but I suspect it will not be the same.
I was already a fixture on forbes.com when my regional firm, of which I was one of the remaining founding partners, was acquired. They didn’t shut me down, but it was pretty clear that they were nervous about me damaging the brand. Every few weeks the tax practice leader of the New England cluster would tell me that some nameless person at the national level disapproved of something I had written. One of my high school classmates who had a military career told me that the most dangerous person in the Army is a lieutenant colonel with no ambition. I suspect that in a national accounting firm a sixty-year-old managing director is analogously situated.
I’m sure Joe will do a lot better than I did. He seems to have a lot more common sense, in spite of having bought into the IRS scandal narrative, one of our few areas of disagreement.
Here Is Your Big Chance
There used to be three sources for an overview of the tax blogosphere. Joe’s daily summary, a weekly summary by Paul Caron and Bob Flach’s What’s the Buzz. The Tax Prof turned his weekly summary over to Joe making it a compilation of his daily summaries. What’s The Buzz is nice, but it never purported to be thorough and Bob Flach, who scorns the expensive software that the rest of the industry uses and hates the GD extensions almost as much as the mucking fess that the idiots in Congress make out of the tax law, restricts his blogging during tax season to instruction to his clients not to bother him. Joe referred to the Flach version of tax season as a two-month death march.
So there is an opening for a bright lad or lass or a retiree with too much time on his or her hands to start a blog surveying the tax blogosphere. I hope it happens soon.
Update As Of August 1, 2020
After a too-long hiatus, Joe did come back with the Eide Bailly Tax News & Views blog.