How to start a tax resolution practice (solo or small team)

Tax resolution is one of the few professional services where demand is structurally guaranteed: every filing season produces a new cohort of taxpayers with balances they can’t pay, notices they don’t understand, and years they never filed. The IRS collection machine never stops generating clients. What stops most new practices isn’t demand — it’s the gap between knowing the work and running the business of the work.

This guide is for the practitioner or experienced resolution salesperson going out on their own: what credentials you actually need, what the work bills for, what infrastructure is genuinely required on day one, how to get the first ten clients, and what a realistic first 90 days looks like. It assumes you already understand collections fundamentals — installment agreements, offers in compromise, currently-not-collectible status, levies and liens. It does not assume you’ve ever run a firm.

The credential question

Representation before the IRS — signing a Form 2848 power of attorney, negotiating with a revenue officer, filing an appeal — requires an enrolled agent, CPA, or attorney credential. That’s the line. If you hold one of those, you can found the practice and sign the representation yourself. If you don’t, you have two legitimate paths.

• Earn the EA credential. The Special Enrollment Examination is three parts, and experienced tax-relief salespeople routinely pass within months of focused study. It is the most direct route from selling resolution to owning resolution.
• Pair with a credentialed practitioner. Many strong two-person founding teams are one closer who runs intake, sales, and operations, and one EA, CPA, or attorney who reviews, signs, and represents. The economics support both seats from early on.
• What a non-credentialed founder can do alone: analysis of client-obtained transcripts, financial-profile assembly, document collection, scheduling, and the entire commercial side of the business. What they cannot do: hold themselves out as representing the taxpayer before the IRS.

Be precise about this from the first conversation. Practices that blur the representation line don’t just risk discipline — they train clients to mistrust the category, which makes everyone’s job harder.

The economics: what the work actually bills

The numbers below are typical market ranges for U.S. resolution work — not promises, not benchmarks you’re entitled to, and not what every case supports. Your geography, the complexity of the case, and the quality of your work product all move them.

• Discovery / diagnostic fees: commonly a few hundred dollars to around $1,500 for transcript pull, analysis, and a written findings deliverable — billed before any representation is sold.
• Installment agreement engagements: commonly $1,500–$3,500 depending on balance size, number of years, and whether financial disclosure (a 433-series statement) is required.
• Offer in compromise engagements: commonly $4,000–$7,500 and up — OICs are document-heavy, take months, and carry real rejection risk, which is exactly why they should never be sold before the financial picture supports one.
• Penalty abatement, lien work, levy releases, and unfiled-return catch-up: often priced as add-ons or phases within a larger engagement rather than standalone products.

Two structural observations matter more than any single number. First, the diagnostic phase is billable on its own — you do not need to give away the analysis to win the engagement. Second, resolution revenue is year-round. Unlike prep, there is no cliff after April; IRS notices go out twelve months a year.

The minimum viable stack

You need less than you think, but the pieces you need are non-negotiable. A new practice has to be able to do five things on day one, end to end, without improvising.

• Transcript access. Form 8821 (information authorization) gets you transcripts without representation; Form 2848 (power of attorney) adds representation rights. Before either is filed, clients can pull their own transcripts from IRS Online Account — enough to start a paid diagnostic.
• A case workspace. One place where the client’s identity, transcripts, financial profile, notes, and documents live. The day you run cases out of email and a Downloads folder is the day your second case contaminates your first.
• A deliverable. A written, professional analysis the client can hold. This is the difference between “we talked on the phone” and “my firm produced work product” — it is what justifies the diagnostic fee and what the engagement gets quoted from.
• E-signature. Engagement letters, 8821/2848 authorizations, and scope changes all need signatures, and chasing wet ink kills momentum with a stressed client.
• Billing. Invoice, collect, and record payment against the case — not in a spreadsheet you reconcile at midnight in April.

You can assemble this from parts — a CRM here, an e-sign tool there, a practice-management suite for documents — or run it on one platform built for the motion. RESO exists because assembling the parts is itself a founder tax: every integration seam is a place where the case record fragments. Either way, the test is the same: can a stranger open your case file and reconstruct what was found, what was advised, and what was signed?

Discovery as a product, not a sales expense

The single most important commercial decision a new practice makes is whether analysis is free. The legacy model gives away a “free consultation,” quotes a large fee from the client’s verbal account of their situation, and hopes the IRS file agrees later. That model produces bad quotes, refund demands, and a sales process that selects for whoever promises the most.

The alternative is to productize the diagnostic phase: charge a defined fee for pulling transcripts, decoding the account, and delivering written findings — IRS posture, urgency signals, program fit, and what a resolution path would plausibly look like. The client pays for certainty about their own situation, which is valuable to them even if they never retain you for representation.

• Cases that aren’t a fit still end with paid, defensible work performed — instead of an hour of free advice and a dead lead.
• Representation quotes are grounded in the IRS file, not the client’s memory, so scope surprises drop sharply.
• The deliverable does your selling: a client holding written findings about their own account rarely shops the engagement on price alone.

Pricing the phases

Structure engagements as separately priced phases rather than one blended retainer. Diagnostic first. Then, if the findings support it, a strategy or resolution-planning phase. Then implementation — the actual representation labor. Each phase has its own scope, its own fee, and its own deliverable.

Phased pricing protects both sides. The client never pays for an offer in compromise that the financial profile was never going to support. You never eat three months of unbilled work because the engagement was quoted before anyone read the account transcript. And when a client disputes a fee — it will happen — each phase has an artifact proving what was delivered.

Getting the first ten clients

Forget paid lead generation for now. Purchased resolution leads are expensive, heavily shopped, and reward the firms willing to promise the most. Your first ten clients come from places where trust already exists.

• Your existing book. If you’ve prepared returns, some of your clients owe. If you sold for a resolution firm, you know what an underserved client looks like. Start with the people who already know your name.
• Bankruptcy attorneys. Tax debt and consumer bankruptcy overlap constantly, and most bankruptcy attorneys want nothing to do with IRS collections mechanics. They need a competent referral target. Be one.
• Financial planners and advisors. A client with an IRS balance is a planning problem the advisor can’t solve. Advisors refer eagerly when they trust the work will be handled professionally — and reported back.
• Tax prep shops without a resolution arm. Seasonal prep offices see balance-due clients every spring and have nowhere to send them. A revenue-share or flat referral arrangement turns their dead ends into your pipeline.
• One channel, done consistently. Pick the two referral sources you can reach most credibly and contact them on a schedule. A new practice doing one outreach motion well beats one doing five sporadically.

The referral conversation is easier when you lead with the diagnostic product. “Send me anyone with an IRS problem and I’ll produce a written analysis of their account for a flat fee” is a concrete, low-risk offer. “I do tax resolution” is not.

Compliance guardrails from day one

Circular 230 governs practice before the IRS, and its constraints are not optional flavor — they are the operating rules of the profession. A new practice should treat three of them as bright lines.

• Never promise outcomes. Not “pennies on the dollar,” not “we’ll get the penalties removed,” not implied guarantees through cherry-picked anecdotes. You can describe programs, eligibility logic, and what the evidence supports. You cannot promise what the IRS will do.
• Diligence as to accuracy. What you tell clients about their own account must be grounded in the record — transcripts, notices, filings — not in what closes the deal fastest.
• PII discipline. You will hold Social Security numbers, full financials, and account transcripts for every client. Encrypted storage, access control, and a real answer to “where does client data live?” are table stakes — and increasingly, what referral partners ask before sending you anyone.

There is also a commercial argument for all of this: the firms that get refund-demanded, charged back, and reviewed into oblivion are overwhelmingly the ones that sold hope. Evidence-first practices keep what they bill.

A realistic first 90 days

The plan below assumes a solo founder or a two-person team, a credential in hand (or a credentialed partner), and no existing pipeline. Adjust forward if you bring a book with you.

• Days 1–15: Entity, E&O insurance, EFIN/PTIN housekeeping as applicable, CAF number confirmed, stack stood up, engagement letter and diagnostic deliverable templates finalized. Run one full fake case end to end before a real client ever sees your process.
• Days 16–45: Referral outreach begins — two channels, scheduled, with the diagnostic offer as the lead. Goal: first three paid diagnostics. Treat each one as a rehearsal of the full motion: authorization, transcript pull, analysis, written findings, findings call.
• Days 46–75: Convert diagnostics into representation engagements where the evidence supports it. Goal: first one or two implementation-phase engagements signed, with phased scope. Keep doing diagnostics — they are the flywheel, not a stepping stone you abandon.
• Days 76–90: Review the numbers honestly. Diagnostic-to-engagement conversion, average fee per phase, hours per diagnostic. Kill what isn’t working in the outreach motion, double the channel that is.

Notice what the plan does not include: a website redesign, a logo, paid ads, or a hiring plan. Those are second-quarter problems at the earliest.

What kills new resolution practices

• Quoting from the client’s story. The client says one year, the transcript shows four plus an SFR. Practices that quote before evidence subsidize their own scope creep.
• Free analysis. Every unpaid hour of diagnosis is margin you donate to prospects who were always going to shop three firms.
• OIC-first selling. Offers in compromise are the headline program and the wrong default. Most cases resolve through installment agreements, CNC, or penalty work — selling the OIC dream before the 433 math supports it is how refund demands start.
• No deliverable. If the engagement’s value lives in phone calls, the client’s memory of those calls becomes your fee defense. Written work product is cheaper than chargebacks.
• Process in your head. Fine for case one. By case ten, every undocumented step is a different outcome per client — and an impossible handoff when you finally hire.

Where RESO fits

RESO is the operating platform for exactly this motion: intake and consultation, transcript evidence parsed into a Discovery work product with your firm’s name on it, financial profiling, strategy generation, e-sign, invoicing, a client portal, and a Work Verification record that defends your fees — on one case record from day one. For a founder, the practical difference is that the methodology and the commercial stack are already built; you bring the credential and the clients.

The guide above stands on its own — the credential rules, the economics, the phased pricing, and the referral motion apply however you build the stack. But if the “minimum viable stack” section read like a parts list you’d rather not assemble, that’s the problem RESO was built to remove.

Start with one case run well

A resolution practice is not launched by the entity filing or the website. It’s launched the first time you take a stressed taxpayer from authorization to written findings to a signed, phased engagement — and the file proves every step. Build the practice that can do that once, cleanly. Then do it again.