Role / Enrolled Agent
Hiring an Enrolled Agent
The credential that lets someone stand between your clients and the IRS. Permanent, direct-hire placements for tax and accounting practices in all 50 states.
Define the role first
Preparation,
or defense
Enrolled agents are licensed federally and admitted to practice before the IRS, which means they can represent a client through a notice, an examination or a resolution. That is a different job from preparing a high volume of returns accurately and on time.
Plenty of enrolled agents have spent their whole career in preparation and have never argued a case. Plenty of others took the credential precisely to do representation work. Both are enrolled agents on paper. If the reason you are hiring is to take IRS correspondence off the owner’s desk, say so at intake, because it narrows the search to people who have actually done it.
What to look for
Ask for
real cases
Enrollment has to be current, and a practicing preparer needs a valid preparer tax identification number. Those are checks, not judgment calls, and they happen before anyone reaches you.
The judgment is in what they have handled. Ask about the kinds of matters they have taken on and how they ended, and about the returns they are genuinely comfortable signing. A candidate who has spent five seasons on individual returns is not the person to hand a partnership with three states and a messy prior year.
This role usually fits Standard. Someone holding client tax records and speaking to the IRS on your behalf is a trust hire as much as a technical one.
Related roles: Tax Accountant. See the accounting and tax overview.
Next step
Tell us about the role
One intake call. Tell us whether this hire is about volume or about representation and we will run two very different searches accordingly.
