Some people have had the same CPA for fifteen, twenty, even thirty years. They know the history, they know the family, they’ve seen every return. It’s a good relationship, and it should be — that kind of continuity is genuinely valuable. But almost nobody asks the obvious question about it: what happens when that person retires?
In our experience, most independent CPAs are one or two people. In our experience, there’s no bench, no younger partner quietly learning the client relationships in the background, no real plan for what happens to two decades of institutional knowledge the day they decide to stop working. Sometimes there’s a sale to another practice, and the file gets handed to someone the client has never met. Sometimes there isn’t, and the client finds out only when they call in February and the number doesn’t work anymore.
Either way, whoever picks it up next is starting from zero. They didn’t see the decisions that got made ten years ago, or why. They don’t know the family, the business, the history behind the numbers on the return. They’re reading a file, not continuing a relationship — and the client who thought they had continuity discovers, usually at the worst possible time, that they didn’t.
This isn’t a knock on independent CPAs. Many of them are excellent, and the relationship is often exactly as good as it feels. The issue is structural, not personal: a firm built around one person’s expertise has no way to outlive that person’s career. It was never designed to.
We find this is one of the quieter reasons clients choose a firm like ours. Our tax work isn’t the responsibility of one person nearing the end of a career — it’s led by a CPA with four decades of experience, including years at KPMG, working alongside two younger family members, a CPA and a CFP, and an Enrolled Agent, all of whom are already involved in the same client relationships today. When continuity matters, it isn’t a promise about the future. It’s something already built into who’s in the room.
The right time to ask what happens when your CPA retires isn’t the year they retire. It’s now, while there’s still time to make sure the answer is more than a guess.