Tax Manager

About the job

Most tax managers do partner-level work for manager-level money, then wait years for somebody ahead of them to retire. That is the problem this job exists to solve.

What you are walking into

The company has worked with business owners and high-income individuals since 1991. Our Erie office is real and staffed, with a virtual team behind it. The accountant who built this book is stepping back from the seat, and the book is staying.

Someone has to run the office. We would rather that person arrive with ambition than with seniority.

You carry a book, and the value of it lands on you

Think about what happens to the relationships you build today. You do the work. You take the call in March when something breaks. You are the reason that owner stays another year. Then the name on the door collects the value of all of it, and you get a review and a number.

Here, the book under your management is what your income is measured against, and there is no ceiling on it. Every owner you keep and every one you bring in moves your number, not somebody else's. The distance between a good year and a very good one stops being something you request and becomes something you decide.

On ownership, straight: we have not built a formal equity path and we will not print one we have not designed. What is true is that the conversation is open with the right person, and the right person is whoever runs this office well for a year first.

The seat

You run Erie. Review and sign-off, workflow, the season calendar, and the standard a return meets before it leaves the building. Hiring is yours. Training is yours. How the office feels in March is yours.

This is not a senior preparer role with a manager's title stapled on. You will not spend three years earning the right to change something.

On AI, since you are wondering

Every tax department in the country is asking what AI does to a career built on billable hours. Most are asking it in the hallway, because no firm will answer it out loud.

Ours is on the record. Hours per return are going to fall, and then keep falling. What a good tax mind is worth to a business owner is not going to fall at all. Firms that sell hours sit on the wrong side of that arithmetic.

We have committed budget this year to sit on the other side of it. What we have not done is choose the stack, and that is on purpose. The person running the office should have a hand in picking the tools that office runs on.

You have watched automation and offshoring hollow out the bottom of this profession. Review work is next. You can be the person holding the tools or the person the tools were bought to replace. We are hiring the first one.

You do not have to be technical. You have to be curious enough to ask how fast, instead of what happens to my job.

Three days in the office, and what they are for

Two versions of this job exist elsewhere and both are bad. One seats you in a chair five days a week so that somebody can see you in it. The other sends you home for good, where you learn from nobody and develop no one.

Three days in Erie with flexibility around them gets you a team you can build and a life that is not organised around a commute. Junior staff learn most of what they know by overhearing. Nobody overhears a screen.

Behind Erie sits a virtual bench, so volume does not turn straight into your evenings. We do not cap season hours and we will not pretend February is quiet. February here is lighter than February at a firm where every return has to be absorbed by the people in the building.

Time off, and the expectation that you take it

Our allowance is far enough past market that printing the number invites people to assume it is a typo. Ask on the first call.

The part that matters more is the culture around it. This profession is full of people who accrue time for a decade and spend none of it. Time off you are discouraged from using is not a benefit, it is a liability sitting on somebody's balance sheet. We expect you to spend yours, and the bench exists so that you can.

What it pays

$125,000 to $150,000 base, depending on experience and what you bring. That is the floor, and for the reasons above it is the less interesting number.

Also included:

• Health insurance
• Retirement plan
• Production-based bonuses and incentives, uncapped
• Paid time off well above market

What you bring

• Active CPA or EA in good standing
• Real review depth across 1040, 1120-S, 1065 and multi-state returns
• Command of ATX or UltraTax. If your command is in another professional package, say which and we will talk
• Experience managing people, or a straight case for why you are ready to
• Comfort leading colleagues you will mostly see on a screen