Every prep practice already runs a resolution referral service — it just doesn’t get paid for it. Each spring you file returns with balances due, watch clients wince at the number, and either shrug sympathetically or hand them a phone number. The client’s problem starts where your engagement currently ends. That seam is a service line.
This guide is for CPAs and preparers with an existing book who want to add resolution deliberately: how to find the candidates already in your client list, how to triage with transcripts before committing to anything, how to price the line, what to say to a prep client, and when to refer out. It is not a pitch to become a high-volume relief shop — it’s the playbook for capturing work you’re already positioned to win.
Why resolution is the natural attach
New service lines usually fail on acquisition cost: you have to find strangers, earn trust, and beat incumbents. Resolution attached to a prep practice skips all three. The clients are in your book, the trust exists — you’ve seen their finances for years — and the incumbent is usually nobody, because the client has been ignoring the notices.
- You already hold the relationship a resolution firm spends hundreds of dollars per lead trying to buy.
- You already know the financial picture — income, dependents, business losses — that resolution analysis needs.
- You filed the return that created the balance, so you learn about the problem before any competitor does.
- A client whose IRS problem you solved does not shop their prep work next season. Resolution deepens retention on the original line, too.
Finding resolution candidates in your existing book
You don’t need marketing. You need a filter pass over clients you already serve. Work through the book looking for these signals — most practices find more candidates than they expected on the first pass.
- Balance-due returns you filed in the last three seasons, especially clients who owed in multiple years — serial balances rarely self-resolve.
- Clients who have forwarded you an IRS notice — a CP14, CP504, or anything from ACS — and got an explanation but no engagement.
- Unfiled years you know about: the client who skipped a season, the new client whose prior years were never cleaned up, the business owner perpetually “catching up.”
- Estimated-tax chronic cases: self-employed clients who underpay every year and roll the balance forward.
- Payroll-adjacent problems in small-business clients — trust fund exposure is urgent, high-stakes, and badly served by silence.
- Anyone who has asked you “can they really garnish my wages?” — that question is a levy notice you haven’t seen yet.
Build the list once, then make it a standing habit: every balance-due return you file from now on is a flagged resolution candidate, not a closed prep engagement.
The seasonal complement
Prep economics are a sawtooth: intense compressed revenue from February to April, then a long tail of extensions and quiet months. Resolution runs on the IRS notice calendar instead, which never pauses. Balance-due assessments post in early summer. Collection notices escalate through fall. Levies and lien filings land year-round.
That makes resolution the rare attach that smooths the curve instead of stacking on the peak. The diagnostic work — transcript pulls, analysis, findings — fits naturally in May through January, exactly when your capacity exists. Many practices run the filter pass in late spring, work the candidate list through summer and fall, and enter the next filing season with year-round revenue already booked.
Transcript-first triage before you commit
The most expensive mistake an expanding practice makes is committing to a resolution engagement based on the client’s account of their own situation. Clients underestimate years, forget assessments, and don’t know what an SFR is. The IRS account transcript is the ground truth, and it is available before you accept any representation.
- Start with what the client can pull themselves from IRS Online Account — often enough for a first paid look.
- File Form 8821 for full transcript access without representation authority; reserve the 2848 for when an engagement is actually scoped.
- Read for the structural facts first: which years have balances, what’s been assessed, active collection signals (levy and lien indicators), unfiled years, and how much collection-statute runway exists.
- Triage into three buckets: straightforward (installment agreement or penalty work you can clearly handle), complex-but-viable (worth a scoped engagement), and refer-out (next section).
Triage is itself billable — that’s the diagnostic fee framing below. But even if you charged nothing, transcript-first triage would pay for itself in the engagements you correctly decline.
Pricing the new line
The cardinal rule: resolution is priced separately from prep, on its own engagement letter, at its own rates. Folding resolution into a prep relationship’s pricing — “I’ll sort the IRS thing out, don’t worry about it” — anchors expert collections work at form-filing prices and trains the client to expect it free.
- Lead with a diagnostic or discovery fee: a flat charge for transcript pull, analysis, and written findings. Market ranges typically run from a few hundred dollars to around $1,500. It converts “let me look into it” from a favor into a product.
- Quote resolution phases from the findings, not before: installment agreement engagements commonly run $1,500–$3,500 in the market; offer in compromise engagements commonly $4,000–$7,500 and up. Treat these as typical ranges, never as promises of what any case supports.
- Phase the engagement: diagnostic, then strategy, then implementation — each with its own scope and fee. The client never prepays for a program the evidence hasn’t supported yet.
- Keep prep pricing untouched. The two lines should reinforce each other commercially without cross-subsidizing.
The conversation with an existing prep client
You don’t need a sales script — you need a service posture. The conversation works because you’re the professional who already knows their situation, raising something you noticed in their file. A natural version of it sounds like this.
- Open with the observation, not the offer: “When we filed your 2024 return you had a balance of about $19,000, and I know 2022 still has one too. Has the IRS been in touch?”
- Name the risk factually, without fear-selling: “Balances at this level eventually move to enforced collection — levies, liens. There’s a window where this is much easier to resolve.”
- Offer the diagnostic, not the resolution: “Before anyone talks about programs, the right first step is pulling your IRS transcripts and getting a complete picture of what they have on file. I do that as a flat-fee analysis with a written summary.”
- Let the findings sell the next phase: present the written analysis, walk through what it shows, and quote any further engagement from the evidence in front of you both.
- Never promise outcomes at any point — not the OIC, not the penalty removal. You’re offering certainty about their situation and competent handling, which is what they actually want.
The diagnostic-first structure also protects the prep relationship. If the analysis shows a simple fix the client can do themselves, you say so — and the goodwill from that costs you nothing, because the analysis was paid.
When to refer out vs. handle
A prep practice adding resolution earns trust by knowing its edges. Most collection cases — installment agreements, CNC determinations, penalty abatement, straightforward lien and levy work — are well within reach of a credentialed practitioner who works methodically from the transcript. Some are not.
- Refer out: anything with criminal exposure or fraud indicators — the client needs an attorney before anyone says another word to the IRS.
- Refer out: Tax Court litigation. Filing a petition is one thing; trying a case is a specialist’s job.
- Refer out (or co-counsel): very large balances with revenue officer assignment and complex asset pictures, until you’ve built that muscle deliberately.
- Handle: the long middle of collections work, which is most of what your book will surface.
- Either way, run the diagnostic first. A paid transcript analysis that ends in a well-documented referral is still a served client and a fee earned — and the receiving attorney starts from your findings instead of zero.
Representation scope follows credentials: EAs, CPAs, and attorneys can represent before IRS collections and appeals. If you’re a non-credentialed preparer, the diagnostic line is still yours to build — pair with an EA or attorney for the representation phase, as many practices do.
Staffing it without hiring
The instinct is that a new service line needs a new hire. Resolution attached to an existing book doesn’t — if the workflow is honest about where the time goes. The expert hours in a resolution case are analysis and negotiation. Most of the rest is mechanical: decoding transcripts line by line, assembling the financial profile, formatting findings into something a client can read, chasing signatures and documents.
- Cap the line at first: a handful of active resolution matters alongside prep is sustainable solo; twenty are not. Grow the cap deliberately.
- Batch the diagnostics: transcript pulls and analyses run efficiently in dedicated blocks, especially off-season.
- Systematize the deliverable: the findings document should be produced by process, not re-invented per client at 9pm.
- Let the client portal carry document collection — the back-and-forth of bank statements and pay stubs is the hidden time sink in 433-based work.
- Phase gates keep scope contained: no implementation work begins until the strategy phase is signed, which means no unbilled drift.
Compliance posture for the expanding practice
The rules don’t change because resolution is your second line, but two of them bite differently here. First, Circular 230’s bar on outcome promises: prep clients trust you, which makes a casual “we’ll get that knocked down” land as a guarantee. Describe programs and evidence; never promise results. Second, data discipline: resolution files carry full financial disclosure on top of the return data you already hold. Your storage, access, and retention practices need to be ready for that before the first 433 is assembled.
Where RESO fits
RESO is built for exactly this attach. The transcript evidence is parsed into a Discovery work product carrying your firm’s name — the diagnostic deliverable this guide keeps pointing at — and the financial profile, strategy generation, e-sign, billing, and client portal all run on the same case record. For a prep practice, that means the resolution line launches with a methodology already in place rather than a process you invent across your first ten cases, and the work survives in a form your next hire can inherit.
Everything above works regardless of tooling. But the practices that stall on this attach usually stall on the same step: producing a professional written deliverable fast enough, often enough, that the diagnostic fee feels obviously fair. That step is the one RESO industrializes.
The first move
Don’t announce a new service line. Open your client list, flag every balance-due return from the last three seasons, and pick the five clients whose situations you know best. Have the conversation above with each of them. If even two say yes to a paid diagnostic — and in most books, more will — you have a resolution practice. The rest is doing it again, on a calendar the IRS keeps filling for you.