President Trump and his Department of Government Efficiency (“DOGE”) have made quite an impact on the IRS and taxpayers, from reduced staffing to a significant drop in compliance to a delay in tax refunds. An unforeseen consequence of the push to reduce staff and increase online efficiency is the impact on data security, and why every tax pro is now a mark for cyber criminals trying to get access to the IRS system and billions of dollars in refunds. Joining Eric Green is senior consultant for Visory Sam Schuemacher to discuss what tax pros need to consider, and what taxpayers who care about their refunds need their tax professional to be on top of.

Get in touch with Sam thru sschuemacher@visory.net and attend a webinar about the IRS under the Trump administration at https://taxrepllc.com/20250515-visory/.

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How Trump Reshapes The IRS

The Push To Paperless Creates Data Security Issues

The Negative Effect Of Online Systems

Thank you for joining us on this episode of the show. I am joined by a great friend of mine, Sam Schuemacher. Sam is a Senior Consultant at Visory. If you’re not familiar with Visory, I highly recommend you consider it. What we’re going to get into in this episode in terms of Trump, DOGE, and the IRS, there’s something that nobody’s talking about. They’re talking about the tariffs and the layoffs, and we can talk about all that.

There’s a move online. Everything should be done online through the portal. What we’re going to get into in this episode is we’re trading one headache for another. The increased risk of fraud and data security issues, tax professionals, accountants, and bookkeepers are a major target of that. If you’re not familiar with Visory, it is a hands-on tech for cybersecurity and streamlining operations for accountants, consultants, and a number of businesses. I found it through Tax Rep members of mine who highly recommended it to me. We checked it out. Sam, it is a changing landscape.

It’s been shifting a ton. I joined Visory years ago. At that time, it was about, “How do we collaborate in the Cloud?” Now, it’s, “We’re collaborating in the Cloud, but we don’t know if we’re safe. How do we make sure that we’re doing what the FTC is telling us we have to do to protect sensitive data?” The conversation and the narrative have shifted a ton.

What we’ve seen over the last few months from the executive orders is accelerating a lot of that. The whole no paper check thing, I’m envisioning accountants becoming tech support for their clients who are suddenly being forced into a digital banking world and need to be able to manage a password and know how to click all the buttons. That’s going to be a big shift.

For those of you who don’t follow the YouTube channel, you can go check this stuff out. I’ve been very vocal about this. First of all, so everyone knows, 5% of Americans don’t have a home computer or a smartphone. 5% of Americans are 17 million people, to put that in perspective. If you’re like, “It’s only 5%.” We’re 95% of the way there. It’s seventeen million people. That’s a lot of people.

The IRS has laid off 2,000 people who answer the phones. They are closing 110 offices, many of which house the Taxpayer Assistance Centers. We get these calls. “I owe $500.” You’re not hiring a law firm to do that. I’d say, “Go downtown.” Here in New Haven, it’s 150 Court Street. Go to the walk-in. You might wait a little while, but you can talk to somebody at the IRS.

You can make your payment, whatever you need. It gets a little busier during February, March, and April, but overall, it was a huge help for elderly people, people who don’t necessarily have access to a computer or a computer that’s in a secure area. You can go to the public library, but I don’t think I’d be uploading my tax stuff through that. That’s going to go away.

Initially, I’m like, “The tech bros are going to come in. Commissioner Werfel, I thought, had a great plan of five years’ modernization. My thought was they were going to come in and say, “Five years? No. In eighteen months, we’re going to get this done.” Through natural attrition, 65% of the IRS could leave in five years anyway. In other words, let’s get the tech and the infrastructure in place, and then you’ll see the phone calls drop. We can then start letting people, on their own, retire and give them an incentive to leave early. Instead, they came in, got rid of everybody, and the online system is not fixed.

I’ll give you an example for those of you reading. Sam, I know you don’t do IRS stuff, but I can call the IRS. If you owe less than $250,000 and could fully pay what’s left on the 10-year collection statute, I can set up right over the phone. No financial documents necessary, but set up an installment agreement right over the phone. The online system only goes to $50,000. They got rid of half the people who answer the phones. We’re going to have a couple of years of real chaos.

I’ve been blabbing about this on YouTube for weeks. What I want to highlight and what I’ve dragged you into here for is that the IRS has a million attempted hacks a week. You talk to the IRS privately. They’ll tell you the weak link is the tax professionals. That’s the back door into the IRS. You mentioned the elimination of the paper checks, which I do want to get into.

For those folks reading, you saw the announcement. President Trump wants the IRS to get away from mailing checks. Everything should be done electronically, which sounds great. How many people, though, are unbanked? Unfortunately, more than you think. We have a potential fraud issue. People who are reading this are like, “I understand people hack in and they file a false return.” Not the crafty folks. They’re not going to file anything that would tip the hand that you’ve been hacked or that you have a data breach. What they’ll do is go into the legitimate returns that you’re about to file, and they will change the banking information.

An accountant sends it to the client, and the client says, “All looks good.” When they go to hit send, there is a hold period while that return gets uploaded. They’re front-running. They’ll change it there so that the return that the client got has the right banking information. What goes into the IRS has the hacker’s information.

What happens is that 1 week to 10 days go by. The client’s calling, saying, “When am I getting my refund?” They look at the return, but everything looks right, so they start calling the IRS. You’re on hold. You’re waiting. Refunds can only be held up to six months sometimes. Meanwhile, the money’s gone. What do you see as the issue with the paper checks?

A few things, and you touched on it. You’ve got unbanked people. You have 5% of the country, 17 million people, that don’t have smartphones, broadband home computers, which, in 2025, may seem shocking. When you talk about 5%, it doesn’t feel very impactful. When you talk about seventeen million people, suddenly, that’s a significant number.

Beyond that, you’ve got your rural and elderly populations that are in this mix. Those are going to be populations that are not educated on complex password management. They’re not educated on making sure multifactor authentication is turned on for all of these sensitive systems. They’re not educated on how to look for red flags in these emails that they’re going to be getting. They’re going to be clicking on anything that comes in that looks legitimate. Ultimately, the IRS is one of the most spoofed emails that people are getting.

What have we done? We’ve orchestrated control over banking. We’re forcing people into the banking system. We are replacing, in some ways, fraud with cyber risk for a vulnerable population. All of that’s going to lead to a fair bit of chaos and headaches. Accountants are going to be the ones that are answering the questions about tech support, like, “How do I reset my password? Someone stole my credentials. What do I do next?” All of it’s going to go right back to accountants.

 I’ll tell you why they won’t do it. I have been a fan of, unless the banking information matches the prior year, I should have to upload proof, like a bank statement or something. The problem with that is it slows down the refund. A lot of Americans on January 26th, 2025, sometime around there, were in H&R Block, Jackson Hewitt, or whatever, and were like, “I want my refund.” They’re even willing to give up part of it to get it in advance from H&R Block.

On the little credit cards that you can get.

I have to tell you the truth. Congress knows about this. We could eliminate all fraud. It’s not that hard. You file your returns, but there will be no refunds until June after we’ve matched all the data that comes in from the employers. Go and tell that to the American public. People are going to lose their minds. I spoke to one of our Connecticut reps in Congress. I mentioned that and he said, “People will lose their minds if you tell them, ‘Wait four months for your refund.’” We accept an amount of fraud.

Seventeen million people figure 25% are return files. There are 350 million people in America, but we only file about 150 million returns. Families, married couples, that kind of stuff. Let’s say 1/3 of those 17 million, which is 6 million, file. If it were $1,000 theft each, it’s $6 billion. What are they looking to save? $30 billion from the cuts at the IRS? I got an easier one for you. Why don’t you figure out a better way to have people confirm, like PayPal? It’s like, “We put $1 in your account. Confirm.” It’s going to hold it up for three days, but I’m on board with that. I’m good with it.

Why not? PayPal’s a great example. It works for bad actors. Think about the method where they know the routing number. The routing number is going to be the same for thousands upon thousands of bank accounts for the same bank. They can start guessing at bank account numbers, and they’ll get a little hit or a little PayPal charge of $0.90, $0.65, something under the radar or innocuous-looking. Once it’s successful, it’s $500, $300, or $600. Over the course of a few days or weeks, thousands of dollars could be siphoned out of your bank account. It happened to one of our employees.

How To Avoid And Stop Email Spoofing

I know a very good attorney who had $500,000 taken. It’s not like he’s an idiot. He is a smart guy. It is what it is. We’re all too busy. We talk about spoofing. About once a month, I or my law partner would get a message from someone at the firm, “Do you need me to pick up these gift cards now or can I do it later?” We’re like, “What are you talking about?” We had our former controller call us and say, “I’m trying to set up that wire you want done.” My law partner was like, “What wire?” He said, “You emailed me the wire.” We need multiple signatures from partners who have to log in and approve something to prevent that. He was going to send $65,000 to somebody.

For those of you who don’t know what spoofing is, it’s an email that they made it look like it was coming from me or my partner, Jeff. If you go and carefully look at the email and put the mouse on it, you’ll see the actual address, and it’s never one of us. It’s from someone else. We sent an email, “No one at this firm is ever to buy gift cards. No offense, but if I want to get gift cards for clients, I’ll go do it myself. I’m not going to tell you to go buy gift cards on the way in.” They went from person to person at the firm to try to get somebody to do it.

That story highlights the need for consistent cybersecurity awareness training and testing. That’s one of the things that we’ve been talking with accountants a lot about, not only for their firms, but for their small business clients, because that’s in their blind spot. What you’re talking about is looking for red flags and policies. You’re talking about, “Are we adhering to our policy that we’ve marketed within our organization?”

Everybody knows we have a policy. We have an approval process for AP. We have an approval process for gifts. We have all these protocols that are put in place to protect the business and the data, and avoid scams. With our accountants, we’ve been talking about that a lot. While most of our accountants at this point are enrolled in some sort of cybersecurity awareness training so that they can look for that spoofing, they know to look for Eric Green, but Green spelled with an M in the email address, and they’re starting to get wise to that and starting to be a little more protected, their small business clients haven’t even begun to invest in any of those safeguards.

We have cybersecurity insurance because we have credit cards. We run webinars and all this stuff. We have a lot of information. They test our systems. They’ve come in and checked. They noticed we had a remote desktop, something that was open, from one of our consultants who was doing work for us. They were like, “This is a violation of your cybersecurity policy.” We were like, “Shoot.”

Our policy, it seems almost on a monthly basis, goes and, at least externally, looks at our firewall, our website, and all that stuff, but we have to check off, “We have a data security plan. We’re utilizing Visory,” or whatever it is we’re doing. Nobody wants to deal with this. The accountant’s like, “I already have to be an accountant. I’m also a psychologist for my clients. I’m a little bit of a bank because I can’t bother with ignition and getting paid upfront or whatever. Now, I have to be a cybersecurity expert.” You don’t. That’s why you get Visory. They do it.

IRS And The Modernization Pause

People are like, “It’s the same thing.” No. It’s like a car. I can drive it, but I don’t know how it works. I’d rather let Sam deal with it. A couple of other things, though, I do want to talk about with the IRS, especially the modernization pause. When I first saw the headline, it shocked me. As I think about it, it doesn’t shock me. What were your thoughts when you saw that?

To me, it’s like we’re going to land an airplane that’s in flight so that we can check the GPS and make sure we’re going in the right direction. Personally, I feel like pausing innovation. When we started piloting direct file up to 25 states or something like that, this was a peak government move to pause innovation so we can think about innovation.

I could understand maybe putting a project on pause. I agree with you. One of the ideas was to eliminate taxes on 150,000 or whatever it is. If you get a W-2, and that’s most of America, why can’t you log on and confirm? I’m not bashing H&R Block or the accountants, why should I pay to have my return done? Can I log in and say, “W-2. I confirm that,” hit submit, and maybe confirm my banking information hasn’t changed? If it does, I have to upload something, which is my thing, and call it a day? It seemed like an obvious thing if the government wanted to help people.

I understand that if there were certain projects that the DOGE folks looked at and said, “Wait a minute.” One of my pets, I’ve posted pictures, and I don’t know if you’ve seen them, with the mail that I get every day from the IRS. Stacks. What do we do? We open it. I look for any deadlines and anything like that. We scan it and shred it. The government is spending about $10 million a year, roughly, printing and mailing.

I understand I’d have to opt in because there are some people who are unbanked or who don’t have a computer. You’re not getting rid of the mail entirely. Why can’t we get SmartVault? Licensed “SmartVault, Eric has an account with the IRS that I had checked off and that I confirmed. Put the stuff in my inbox.” I get an email. You have notices. First of all, I can download it and save it instead of opening, scanning, and shredding.

Even as an individual, I don’t know what the viability of it would be, but encrypted emails. Why can’t there be a secure portal or an encrypted email service that allows me to communicate with the IRS? We’ve been going back and forth by snail mail with the IRS for a little better than a year on my wife’s deceased aunt’s tax return. They keep coming back with, “You didn’t check this box.” I say, “We’ll check this box.” They’re like, “You need a new one because now the date has to be changed.” We’ve gone back and forth for over a year at this point via mail. We wait, and then we get our envelope in the mail, open it, see what little thing wasn’t right this time, fix it, and ship it back off. This could have been done in a two-week period if it had been in a portal.

That gets back to whether they could fix the online experience. They get ten million calls a year. Get rid of five million of them. Right. This is an incremental thing, to my mind. It’s almost like the compound effect. I don’t know if you’ve ever read Darren Hardy’s book, but he talks about the compound effect where little things make a big difference. Even if it’s only the tax pros that opted into this, that’s where a lot of the mail goes to. The accounting firms get tons of this.

It’s mostly the firms.

Leveling Up Your Cybersecurity Measures

Get rid of that. From your perspective, talking about cybersecurity, these new risks that you see, from your vantage point, what should people be thinking about?

There was a time not too long ago that cybersecurity was considered IT’s problem. It was a function of the business, but it wasn’t something that Sally at the front desk needed to worry about because we worked in offices. We had confined networks. Our threat perimeter was our four walls of our office, largely.

Many years ago, we started to see some more remote work, so we had some new risks associated with that. It wasn’t just a matter of securing what’s in the office, but we had some people with remote desktops or VPNs. They were accessing some data remotely, so we had to build a better mousetrap at that point.

With the big push to digital for everything, even at this level with the IRS, we need to put a renewed focus on policies and policy enforcement, knowing what good policies are.  The IRS has some pretty good templates out there for small businesses and practices. We’ve got a template that we’ve modified. We based it on the IRS template that we share with our customers. We help them write them.

We’re talking about the clients of accountants, tax preparers, and bookkeepers. For most small businesses, the only consultant that they have in their world is the accountant or the bookkeeper. That’s the person that they look to to help protect their financial future. They look to them for strategy. They look to them to tell them where they’re going to be in Q4, and whether or not they can afford to add another truck to the fleet for the bread company.

There’s almost a shift in responsibility at this point. I know accountants didn’t go to school to become IT professionals, but they’re being asked to be IT professionals by their clients at this point. Our accounting clients are coming to us and saying, “How do we help them? How can we advise them?” We educate them, “Here are the things that your clients should be doing. If they don’t know how to do it, send them to us. We’ll talk to them about it.”

It’s about password management. It’s about multifactor authentication. It’s about cybersecurity training. It’s about threat protection, not just using whatever piece of junk antivirus came on the computer you bought at Best Buy. You need a better mousetrap. That’s the shift that we’re seeing in terms of cybersecurity, especially as it relates to accountants.

You’re right. The more we go digital, the bigger the risk keeps going. If we’re dealing through all the portals, the easiest way in for someone looking to get access to data or access to the IRS system is through the tax professional. You point out something that’s interesting. I’ve been focusing on us, the pro. My clients who are uploading things to me, I’m sending a link to, and all of that. They’re part of this whole chain. They’re probably the weaker link.

They’re your biggest risk. If you think about social engineering, it is still faster and cheaper to hack a human than it is to hack a firewall. The MGM breach from 2023 started with a phone call. It was talking someone into giving up a password, which ultimately got them into a very robust system, and they were able to exfiltrate data.

It’s so much easier with a small business. You call Bob’s bicycle shop, and all Bob cares about is making sure that the school up the road has bikes that are functioning. He is not thinking about, “Is this phone call that I’m getting asking me to verify some information legit? Is this email that I got asking me to click on this thing because it looks like it’s from my accountant legit?” It is easy for someone to spoof something from you and send it to your client. The client thinks, “Eric needs me to go in and reset my password for this portal,” clicks on the link, gives up his credentials, and you’ve got a bad actor that can upload anything into your system.

It’s overwhelming in some ways. For the folks that are reading, you have potential IRS fines. You have the FTC because accountants are considered financial institutions. Congratulations. I’m sure you all wanted to be a financial institution. There is a real possibility of significant fines. I will tell you the truth, and you can give us your 2 cents.

There are some hacks that are going to happen. The hackers are too good. You have state actors, North Korea, Russia, and Iran. You have very sophisticated hackers trying to get in. I’ve had folks in the IRS stakeholder liaison office on before in the show. The takeaway was that if you have a firewall, multifactor authentication, an offsite backup, a software for malware, and all of that, and is like, “ I have Visory in place. I have a cybersecurity policy. We have written policies. We’ve done annual training,” and all that stuff, you won’t get fined. Hacks will still happen, but you’ve done everything you can to prevent them.

The people that are at risk, and I’m working on the tax pros, are folks who do not do that. If the FTC shows up or this comes to their attention, and you didn’t do all of that, you didn’t have a written information security program or a WISP, you didn’t have backup, and you didn’t have some cybersecurity in place like Visory or whatever, the fines are up to $50,000.

Remember something. For those folks who are reading, here’s the risk. When a tax professional gets hacked, they have to send a letter to all their clients. Their data is out there. You are going to lose clients. Clients are going to be like, “I’m done. I’m going somewhere else.” Meanwhile, you have to pay for credit monitoring for your former clients.

We did this on a webinar. There was a CPA, 64 years old, who was in the middle of selling his practice, suffered a data breach, and did not have any of the stuff in place. Hard costs, actual out of pocket, were $250,000, but he believes it cost him closer to $600,000 with lost business. It took him 10 years to rebuild his practice, and he sold it at 75.

It’s more of a, “I have to send an email to the client, saying, “Sorry. Your refund got taken. We have to call the IRS.” If you have a data breach, their data is gone. For all of your clients, you have to alert all of them. They’re not going to stick around. They’re going to blame you. They’re going to get pissed. You have to pay for the credit monitoring, which is not inexpensive. If you have 500 clients you’re paying monthly for, what is that going to come to? $75,000 in credit monitoring for the year.

This is not a malpractice issue. Hence, why you want cyber insurance for this. Cyber insurance is going to want to know, “Are you using advisory? Do you have a firewall? Do you have multifactor authentication?” You have to go through all of that. I know you’re not going to plug Visory. I’m going to plug Visory. It’s a car. I want to know how to drive it, but I don’t want to know how it works. That’s Sam’s job.

For those folks who are reading, if you’re still on the fence about this stuff, you’ve got to do it. You don’t need to be the IT expert. Call the people that are. It’s not terribly expensive. Put the right stuff in place so that if it does happen, you have done everything you can. You can sleep at night and be like, “I did everything I could to minimize risk. I’m not facing additional fines on anything.” Hopefully, you never have an issue.

You bring up a good point. The reality of a breach goes far beyond the financial impact. You might have to pay a fine or pay a ransomware, but the reputational harm can be the thing that’s the longest-lasting. The good news is that while this is a big topic and there are a million areas that we could go to talk about how to stay safe, the IRS and the FTC have done a fantastic job of building a roadmap.

The IRS gives you six things to focus on. They say, “You need antivirus, and it’s got to be next gen.” We’re talking about threat hunting. The difference there is that your threat hunting is the technology that’s AI-driven and is looking at patterns of behavior that are active in your network or on your computer. It looks for things that are consistent with bad things that it has seen in the past, so a pattern of behavior that could be bad. It’s going to quarantine it, analyze it, and then make a decision about whether it needs to be remediated or it can go on its merry way. Threat hunting is number one.

A firewall, if you have a physical office, is so critical, as well as multifactor authentication. You mentioned offsite backups. Where people forget to back up is often their Microsoft Suite or their G Suite. They think, “Microsoft’s got that. It’s in the Azure Cloud.” The key there is that if you have a breach or a ransomware event, if you don’t have a backup of your G Suite or your 365 Environment, you do not have a layer of business continuity. You can’t roll back.  You are going to have to go through tons of manual remediation to get that fixed and get back into your data, your mail, calendars, contacts, and all of that good stuff. Backups are key.

If you’re running a computer that’s more than five years old, replace it. Let’s get on something that’s more modern that has a chip set that’s going to encrypt your disk. Not having encryption is like giving someone the keys to your house while you’re away. If it’s encrypted, though, and they get a hold of your laptop, they’re not going to be able to get that disk and get into it as long as you’ve got all the right protocols on there, and then a VPN for remote access. That’s the IRS’s roadmap to security.

The FTC takes it a little farther and they say, “You should do a risk assessment, because how do you know what protocols to put in place unless you know what your risks are?” I love what they do with their language, Eric. They say, “You need reasonable control for reasonable risk.” I wouldn’t expect Sally’s bookkeeping to have the same measure of security controls as KPMG. That’s unrealistic. Sally’s got a much smaller risk profile than KPMG and a much smaller budget. For reasonable risk, let’s put reasonable safeguards in place. That’s the biggest difference.

Having a WISP is where the FTC comes in. They say, “You should define what your policies are around access controls. So does everyone need access to everything, or does Sam need access to the tech stuff? We’ll leave all the client billing stuff over there in the finance department,” things like that. I’m sure in your practice, not everyone needs access to every client.

For the folks reading, it sounds like a lot, but it isn’t. When the weather began getting crazier years ago, we decided we needed a whole-house generator. My wife works from home, and I sometimes work from home. I decided ridiculously to GC the job myself. I went and I saved a little bit on the generator. I then got someone to do the trenching for the electrical. I hired the electrical company to install the whole thing, the gas, and the propane.

I saved $500, and I wasted so many hours dealing with this. Call Visory. This is the kind of thing Pennywise found foolish. Could you sit and try to GC your own cybersecurity? I guess, but I wouldn’t. First of all, I’m not keeping up with everything. I need someone who does, who makes sure I’ve got all of these pieces in place. If I have to put together a written plan, I’d be like, “Here’s a sample of one.”

Dealing With The Rise OF AI Tools

In other words, you can knock this off pretty quickly and much more effectively by working with the right people. We’re going to be doing a whole webinar on this on May 15th, 2025. It’s free. Check it out. We’re going to do a lot on where the IRS is. We’re going to go into a lot of this stuff in detail with Sam, as well as some of these things that you should be thinking about. Sam, how’s the best way for people to get a hold of you?

We can put my email out there. That’s fine.

If this is something where you’re like, “I got to deal with this, and I don’t want to,” email Sam. That’s what you do. April 15th, by the time you’re reading this, has probably passed. It is a great time of year to deal with this and make sure this is all in place. This is going to get more interesting as we watch the government, for lack of a better term, fumble their way through this in terms of modernization, what’s going on with the IRS staffing, and the whole online experience. I do think we will get there eventually, but it’s going to be a chaotic couple of years.

AI use policies, this is the time to start thinking about those. They’re not required by the FTC, but I don’t think anyone should wait for DC to tell us when to have an AI use policy. If you are not talking about the use of AI in your firm, I promise there’s bring your own AI. BYO AI is how it’s referred to in the industry. People are using ChatGPT, so you better have a policy in place that tells them how they can appropriately and safely use ChatGPT. It’s happening, whether you’re talking about it with them or not.

That’s a good point. We’ve started using it. I use it mostly in my marketing, although there is an Ask Blue J, which is a database for tax research. This is my two cents before we go. Garbage in, garbage out. If you go to ChatGPT and ask questions, it goes out to the web and brings back whatever it finds. Where I find it’s very effective is where I take something. I took an article I wrote. It was probably 8 or 89 pages long. In Word, I upload it into ChatGPT and say, “Please write me a 500-word blog from this.” I know the information it’s pulling is good, and what I get out of it, with a little tweaking, is fantastic.

There have been lawyers where it has created bogus cases that they’ve cited. Like everything else, you need to be careful. It’s a tremendous tool, and it’s going to be life-changing. You need to understand how to use it properly. I do think firms should have a policy on, “What are we going to use it for? How are we going to use it?” I know ChatGPT is free. There are some paid ones like Ask Blue J, where there’s a database. It’s more of a close where they provide a lot of good information, where you will get better results depending on what you do. There’s a whole slew of AI tools, video stuff, and graphics. It’s unbelievable.

I’d love to nerd out with you one day on this. The executive order on removing barriers to American leadership in AI, I’ll narrow it down to one sentiment. Innovate now, we’ll regulate later. We took the guardrails off of AI with this one, so it’s going to be interesting to watch.

It feels like the Wild West. That might not necessarily be the greatest metaphor, but that’s what it feels like.

They’re likening it to the Manhattan Project of our age.

In terms of the shift, it probably is. AI is going to eliminate entire industries and create new ones.

Also, reshape the ones that remain.

Upcoming IRS Webinar And Closing Words

Sam, thank you for joining us. Everyone, thanks for tuning in. The webinar is on May 15th, 2025, with Visory and Sam. It’s free. Register. You’re going to get a ton of information. We’ll have more updates by then on what the hell is going on with DOGE, IRS, President Trump, the tariffs, all of it. Reach out to him. This is important. This is serious stuff.

I have an enrolled agent. She speaks all over the country, so I don’t want to name her. She had ransomware. She called the FBI and everything else, and they told her, “Pay it.” There’s nothing they can do other than document it. She did pay the $10,000. They did release the data, but they copied everything. She sought to let all her clients know. It’s a nightmare.

The lesson there, to double down on what you said, is get help. Get help from a professional. This is not your area of expertise. Often, you’re going to benefit from the economies of scale from providers like Visory that are buying thousands upon thousands of these enterprise licenses that we can resell at what are affordable rates to a small firm.

I find guidance from talking to you guys. It’s like, “Eric, you guys need this. You need that.” First of all, again, garbage in, garbage out. I’m trying to figure this out for myself. Even if I thought I did, and I have because I’ve listened to talks on experts mostly to understand what the hell’s going on, I won’t let you guys do it.

There are some things we shouldn’t DIY, like, “I have added GC-ing my own whole home generator to the list.”

Don’t do that. It’s a lot easier for the extra $500. Hire the company and let them show up to do the trenching and the electrical. Here’s the reality. I am better off sitting in my home office, working for four hours, billing at my billing rate, and letting somebody else do what they do best. I wouldn’t suggest doing a DIY offering compromise with the IRS. I’m not going to do DIY cybersecurity for our firm, or, if I have another house, a whole house generator.

Good life advice there.

Sam, thank you very much for doing this. Everyone, thanks for tuning in. We’ll see you on the webinar. Reach out to Sam. He’s got a tremendous resource for you, whether it’s to review what you’re doing, help you close any gaps, or if you are sitting there going, “I’ve been hoping to avoid all this.” Don’t take the chicken little approach. You’re going to deal with it one way or the other. You’re much better off dealing with it proactively and avoiding the nightmare than going through the nightmare.

That’s it. Be prepared. I am looking forward to our next conversation.

Thank you, Sam. Thank you, everyone. I’ll see you in the next episode.

Important Links

• Visory
• Samuel Schuemacher on LinkedIn
• Samuel Schuemacher’s Email
• Live Webinar – The IRS Under Trump: What it Means for Tax and Accounting Professionals
• Ask Blue J

About Sam Schuemacher

Sam is the Senior Director of Solution Consulting at Visory, where he combines nearly a decade of leadership in sales, customer support and technology strategy to design tailored solutions for clients. With a long history of partnering with sales and customer support, Sam brings deep insight into the IT infrastructure, cybersecurity and cloud challenges faced by businesses—especially accounting firms and financial professionals. With a passion for helping organizations streamline operations, enhance security and embrace cloud-based workflows, Sam has successfully guided over 1,500 organizations through their digital transformation journeys. His expertise in cybersecurity, data protection and compliance ensures that clients stay ahead in the fast-evolving world of financial technology.