Carson Group launches tax program led by veteran planner

As more wealth management firms seek to help financial advisors provide tax-related services, Carson Group completed an internal M&A deal and launched Carson Tax Solutions.

Veteran certified public accountant and planner Debra Taylor, who was already using the Omaha, Nebraska-based registered investment advisory firm as the RIA for Franklin Lakes, New Jersey-based Taylor Financial Group, sold her business and rebranded it to Carson Wealth while agreeing to lead the firm's new tax program, the firm said last month. 

The deal of undisclosed size closed on Jan. 1 and added to nine other M&A transactions secured by Carson last year. The firm has continued to expand, even as at least five executives departed from the firm amid its CEO succession and a gender- and disability-based discrimination lawsuit in 2024.

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Carson Group now lists more than $40 billion in client assets across 51,000 households working with more than 150 advisory offices and 50 locations of Carson Wealth, compared to $35.5 billion and 50,000 customers in April 2024, when the firm announced that it had selected Chief Strategy Officer Burt White to replace Omani (formerly Ron) Carson as CEO. 

Private equity-backed Carson remains one of the largest hybrid RIAs in the industry. After Taylor and White had spoken for several years about the way that tax planning gives advisors a competitive edge, White suggested around six months ago that she spearhead the firm's efforts to aid advisors in figuring out "how to deliver all of these services to their clients," she said.

"It's not scalable, and it's not easy to do tax planning," Taylor said in an interview just before hosting a webinar for the firm's advisors about developing 12-month service calendars that deliver savings on clients' payments to Uncle Sam throughout the year rather than during the traditional focus periods in the fourth quarter or the so-called tax season. 

"It requires rolling up your sleeves, digging in and creating a lot of processes around it," she added. "There are a lot of myths out there and a lot of misunderstandings."

The firm represents only the latest major wealth management firm investing in tax-related services through M&A and technology tools that simplify or automate various strategies. New research tying tax-loss harvesting or other planning methods to substantial savings in client portfolios and suggesting that wealth management customers want these services is amounting to a more compelling business case for offering them. For example, tax-related planning and advice comprised a significant source of value calculated in a report last month by advisor matchmaking and lead generation service SmartAsset. 

To wealth management firms and their clients, taxes are a "huge deal right now," because "the offensive and defensive strategies really play to each other," said certified financial planner Jaclyn DeJohn, the author of the report and SmartAsset's director of economic analysis. On the other side of the connected but historically separated professions, more CPA and accounting firms are branching into wealth management.          

"A lot of advisors are shifting more into tax-oriented services. Consumers expect to have more of a one-stop-shop for their financial needs," DeJohn said in an interview. "They often don't realize the heavy, heavy tax savings that can come to their bottom line."

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Taylor "grew up in the tax and accounting business literally from the time I was 10 years old" by answering phones and photocopying documents for her father at the family CPA firm she later took over and turned into a full-scale advisory practice about 25 years ago, she noted. Taylor's practice came to Carson's RIA in 2015 after prior tenures with Private Advisor Group and HD Vest Financial Services, the forerunner firm to Avantax. 

She came to know White when they were both with LPL Financial, the brokerage firm used by Carson Group before it switched to Cetera Financial Group in 2017. The 10 advisors and other employees of Taylor's advisory practice manage $385 million in client assets.

"This partnership will equip our advisors with tools to better serve their existing clients, as well as to add new clients with sophisticated tax planning needs," White said in a statement. "Debbie brings a wealth of expertise in tax planning and will significantly bolster our capabilities. Her leadership will be instrumental in enhancing our tax services and supporting our advisors in delivering comprehensive financial solutions."

The Tax Solutions program consists of educational resources like the webinar as well as guides to tax planning methods that Taylor has written and collected over her career and technology integrations for Carson's advisor desktop and customer relationship management software. 

Many of the tax-linked services are "so hard to explain and quantify to clients," and they may entail tasks that advisors have been "providing manually all these years," she said. "It's very clunky and inefficient to do that, which is probably one of the reasons that a lot of advisors don't do it."