Why We Don't Offshore — And Why It Matters

At some point in the last fifteen years, most mid-size and large CPA firms in the U.S. quietly moved a large fraction of their production work overseas. The partner you meet with is American. The associates you email with are American. The bookkeeper on the call is American. The person actually preparing your return, doing your reconciliation, and building your workpapers is very often in India, the Philippines, or Latin America.

I want to be clear: this isn't a comment on the skill of accountants outside the U.S. Many are excellent. The issue isn't skill. The issue is what you thought you were buying.

What you thought you were buying

You thought you were buying a U.S. CPA doing your work. You thought the phrase "our firm" on the marketing site meant the people in the building on the marketing site. You thought the price you were paying reflected labor rates in your country.

At most firms above a certain size, all three of those assumptions are wrong. The partner's rate is $500/hour. Their offshored staff's cost is $15/hour. The billing rate to you is somewhere in between, and the partner sees you for a total of maybe two hours per year while thirty hours of production sit under a manager coordinating handoffs to a team you'll never meet.

This is the business model. It's not hidden. It's just not marketed.

Why it matters

Three reasons.

One: your work is being done by people who don't know your business. Not because they're less capable, but because they're one of thirty engagements they're producing for that firm in that season. There's no continuity, no context, and no memory of last year's judgment calls unless someone documented them in a workpaper. Real client relationships die under this model. What replaces them is a Kanban board of "tasks in progress."

Two: the review is thinner than you think. The partner is reviewing an output prepared by staff they didn't hire, don't manage, and won't retain. The review is by definition an audit of an output, not a partnership on the work. When something goes wrong, the postmortem is a training issue for the offshore team — not a change in how your return gets prepared next year.

Three: your data is farther away. More systems, more handoffs, more places where things can go missing. Every offshore firm has a data-security narrative. Most of them are true in theory. In practice, more surface area means more risk.

What we do instead

Everyone at Laléa & Black who touches your work is a U.S.-based CPA employed by the firm. No offshoring. No contractor labor arbitrage. No "we have partners overseas."

We're a boutique by design, not by scale limitation. We took the decision early on that we would keep the firm small enough that every partner reviews every return that leaves the office, and that every associate who touches your books has been vetted by the partner accountable for the relationship. That decision caps our maximum size. We're fine with the cap.

What that means for pricing

It means we're more expensive per hour than a national firm — and often less expensive per year, because the total hours are fewer. Fewer people means fewer handoffs, fewer re-reviews, fewer coordination meetings, fewer duplicate check-in emails. A senior CPA who's been on your account for four years does the work in half the time a fresh-eyes junior takes.

It also means we say no more often. If we don't have the capacity to bring on a new client, we don't take them on. When you become a client, you're not fighting for attention against a queue of two hundred engagements. You're in a book of maybe forty relationships that your partner actually knows the inside of.

Why I'm writing this

Because if you're reading it, you're probably deciding whether to work with us or with someone bigger. The bigger firm will feel more impressive on the website. They'll have offices in three cities and a marketing team and a strategic partnerships page.

What they won't have is the person you meet with doing the work you're paying for. We do.

If that's the tradeoff you want, we should talk.

Daniel Litvin, CPA is the founder and managing partner of Laléa & Black. He has practiced as a CPA in California since 2008.