CPA & Tax Firms
Audit, tax, advisory, bookkeeping — from solo practitioners through mid-market regional firms.
Industry · Accounting & Finance
IT & cybersecurity for accounting firms in New York & New Jersey.
The FTC Safeguards Rule now covers tax preparers. The SEC has new cyber-disclosure rules for advisors. Larger clients are asking for SOC 2 attestations as a condition of engagement. The regulatory floor under accounting firms moved — quietly and recently — and most IT providers haven't kept up. We have. Managed IT, cybersecurity, and private-cloud hosting (yes, including QuickBooks Enterprise) for accounting firms, tax practices, and RIAs across New York and New Jersey. Owner-led, flat-rate, Fairfield NJ.
Who we work with
The firms with the most to lose — and the least IT staff.
We're built for small-to-mid-sized accounting and financial-services firms where one breach, one ransomware event, or one missed SEC disclosure can take the firm down.
Registered Investment Advisors
RIAs subject to the SEC's cybersecurity disclosure and ID-theft red-flag rules — and clients asking harder due-diligence questions every year.
M&A & Transaction Advisory
Boutique advisory shops handling deal data rooms, NDA-heavy workflows, and audit-trail-critical document custody.
Wealth & Family Office
Discreet client work, high-net-worth concentration, and the social-engineering targeting that comes with both.
What the regulators expect
The four compliance frameworks most accounting firms can't ignore.
You may be subject to one of these or all four. We've operationalized them so they overlap instead of competing for attention.
FTC Safeguards Rule
Updated 2023. Now explicitly covers tax preparers and many bookkeepers — not just banks. Requires a designated qualified individual, written infosec program, risk assessment, MFA, encryption, incident-response plan. Most firms didn't realize they were covered.
IRS Pub 4557
"Safeguarding Taxpayer Data." Required of every paid tax preparer. A written information-security plan is a hard requirement to maintain your PTIN — and yes, the IRS does ask.
NYDFS Part 500
If you do business with any DFS-regulated entity in New York, the chain pulls you in. Requires a CISO, written policies, MFA, annual certification. The 2023 amendments raised the bar materially.
SOC 2 (Type 1 / Type 2)
Increasingly required by your larger clients (especially public companies, PE-backed portcos, and tech) as a condition of engagement. Not regulation — market reality. We get firms attestation-ready in months, not years.
How we cover the controls day-to-day.
Most "compliance" vendors sell you a written policy and walk away. We implement the controls that the policies describe — and prove they're operating through our own continuous-monitoring layer.
- Identity, MFA, and conditional access — JumpCloud across every system that touches taxpayer or client financial data; phishing-resistant MFA on the systems that matter.
- Microsoft 365 hardened to a defensible baseline — tenant lockdown, sensitivity labels, encrypted external sharing only, audit-log retention extended to your retention obligations.
- Encrypted backup & tested restore — including the immutable, off-system copies that survive ransomware. Restore drills run quarterly with the results documented.
- Audit-grade logging — centralized, tamper-evident, retained beyond minimums — because most attestations turn on whether you can prove what happened, not whether you say it.
- Sub-processor / vendor management — your downstream vendors (your tax-prep software vendor, your e-file transmitter, your portal) re-attested annually through our Argos Trust platform.
- Written Information Security Plan (WISP) — the IRS-required document, maintained as a living artifact, mapped to the controls actually in place.
- Live compliance evidence — continuous control mapping through our own Argos GRC platform. When your client asks for evidence, you have it — the same hour, not in two weeks.
What we actually fix
The gaps we see in accounting firms.
Twelve years of doing this work in this region. The same problems show up everywhere; here are the ones that cost real money.
QuickBooks Enterprise running locally on a workstation.The single biggest concentration of business-critical financial data in your firm sitting on a machine someone forgot to patch. We move it to our private cloud with virtual-desktop access — same QB experience, materially better security and uptime.
Tax-season surge with no IT scaling plan.Headcount doubles, contractor laptops appear, secure portals get bypassed because they're slow. We pre-provision the workstation pool, port-controlled BYOD options, and a secure client-document workflow that handles 4×-volume cleanly.
No written information-security plan.The IRS Pub 4557 requirement most preparers don't know exists. We build, maintain, and version-control the WISP — mapped to the actual technical controls running in your environment, not a Word template downloaded from a forum.
Client files attached to email or shared via "ShareLink, expires never."The #1 audit finding. We deploy a secure client portal (CCH Axcess, TaxDome, SuiteFiles, or a hardened SharePoint — whichever fits your stack) that staff actually use because the workflow is faster, not just safer.
Disaster recovery is "we hope our backups work."For an accounting firm in April, "hope" is unacceptable. We run real RTO/RPO targets with documented restore tests — the kind your insurer will start asking for if you renew cyber coverage in 2026.
SOC 2 readiness asked for by a Fortune-500 client and panic ensues.If you're scoping toward SOC 2 Type 1 (or 2), we get you there through our Argos GRC platform. Most CPA firms try to do this with consultants and spreadsheets — it's 5x faster and 5x cheaper as continuous monitoring.
An honest note
There is no "FTC Safeguards Certified IT Provider." There is no "SOC 2 Certified MSP."
Those labels are marketing. What exists are your firm's compliance obligations and the IT provider's operating discipline — and the way you evaluate the second is by looking at how they run themselves. Our own SMB1001 Bronze certification, our continuously-monitored SOC 2 Type 1 readiness program (live in our public Trust Center), and our hash-chained audit evidence demonstrate that discipline. We'd rather show you the program than wave a badge.
Honest about scope.
A few things we deliberately don't take on, so you know up front:
- We don't replace your tax-prep, audit, or general-ledger software — we secure and integrate around it (Drake, Lacerte, ProSeries, UltraTax, CCH ProSystem fx, CCH Axcess, Thomson Reuters Onvio, Karbon, TaxDome, Canopy, QuickBooks Enterprise, Sage Intacct, NetSuite, and others).
- We don't serve as your Designated Qualified Individual under the Safeguards Rule — that role belongs inside your firm — but we build the program, train the DQI, and run the technical evidence.
- We don't sell SOC 2 attestations — we get you ready for the attestation, and the actual report comes from your independent CPA.
- We don't serve broker-dealers or banks — their regulatory regime (FINRA, OCC, FDIC) is a different operating model.
The model we actually run.
Flat-rate, all-in, no surprises. Most accounting firms land at:
$135–$150 / user / month
All-in: managed IT, cybersecurity, identity, backups, helpdesk, monitoring, WISP maintenance. Microsoft 365 licensing and vCISO advisory billed separately at cost — no markup theater.
Optional add-on: QuickBooks Enterprise (or any practice-management) private-cloud hosting — single-tenant, NJ-based, virtual-desktop access for remote and tax-season-temp staff. Priced per environment, in writing.
See What It Costs →
Where we work
Accounting firms across New York & New Jersey.
Based in Fairfield, NJ. We work hands-on with CPA firms, tax practices, and RIAs across New Jersey (Bergen, Essex, Hudson, Morris, Passaic, Union, Somerset, and Middlesex counties) and New York (Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx, Westchester, Nassau, Suffolk, and Rockland). On-site visits are part of the model, not an extra.
Fairfield · Wayne · Montclair
Newark · Jersey City · Hoboken
Paramus · Hackensack · Morristown
Manhattan · Brooklyn · Queens
Westchester · Nassau · Suffolk
Don't take our word for it
Verify us yourself, before we ever talk.
Three free, instant, no-sales-call tools. Use them on your own firm or on us — either way you get real data, not a brochure.
Free · 60 seconds
Security Scorecard
Grade your firm's security posture instantly and see your top risks ranked.
Get your score → Free · instantEmail-Security Scan
See whether attackers can spoof your domain — the entry vector for the wire-fraud and CEO-impersonation scams targeting accounting firms.
Scan my domain → Free · instantBreach Exposure Check
Find out which of your firm's credentials have already leaked in known breaches — including the partner credentials attackers will target first.
Check exposure →
New · Technician Transparency
Before someone with "IT support" credentials touches your client tax data — verify it's really us.
Help-desk impersonation is the #1 social-engineering vector targeting accounting firms in 2026. Every Intelligent Automation technician is identity-verified, and your office manager can confirm it in seconds before granting access.
Frequently Asked
The questions firms actually ask.
Can you host our QuickBooks Enterprise in your private cloud?
Yes — single-tenant, NJ-based, with virtual-desktop access for all staff (including tax-season temps) from anywhere. We migrate the company file, run the SQL backend, handle the QB licensing model, and integrate with Microsoft 365 and your tax-prep software. Priced per environment, in writing, no surprise.
Do you produce the FTC Safeguards Rule written infosec program for us?
Yes. We draft, maintain, and version-control the written program — mapped to the controls actually running in your environment — and we train your Designated Qualified Individual to own it internally. Same for the IRS Publication 4557 WISP, which is functionally a subset of the Safeguards Rule program.
A client (or prospect) is asking for our SOC 2. We don't have one. Can you help?
Yes — this is increasingly common, especially when CPA firms serve public-company or PE-backed clients. We run a SOC 2 Type 1 readiness program through our Argos GRC platform, get you to attestation-ready in typically 4–6 months, and partner with an independent CPA firm for the actual audit. The continuous-monitoring approach is materially cheaper than the consultant-and-spreadsheet path most firms try first.
We have tax-season contractors. How do you handle BYOD and temporary access?
A pre-built contractor-onboarding workflow: time-bounded JumpCloud accounts, controlled-access virtual desktops (no client data hits the contractor's personal device), MFA, automatic deprovisioning on end-of-season. Onboarding takes about 15 minutes per contractor; offboarding is automatic on a date you set.
We have NYDFS Part 500 exposure through one of our clients. Are you up to speed on the 2023 amendments?
Yes. The 2023 amendments raised the bar materially — mandatory CISO designation, MFA across the board, expanded incident-reporting timelines, enhanced governance. Our Argos GRC platform maps your environment to Part 500 specifically, so the annual certification is real evidence, not a checkbox.
What if we get hit with ransomware in April?
We pre-stage the IR plan, the immutable off-system backups (the ones ransomware can't reach), the law-enforcement and insurer contact protocol, and the client-notification scripts. Most accounting-firm ransomware events are recoverable inside 72 hours if the backup architecture is right — and unrecoverable in a week if it isn't. We make sure yours is right.
How fast can you onboard a new firm?
A firm with 10–30 staff is fully transitioned in 30–45 days — first two weeks are inventory and risk assessment, then deployment runs in parallel with your day-to-day. If you're approaching tax season, we'll structure the transition around your calendar so nothing's at risk in March/April.
Free · 45 minutes · No sales pitch
Request a Safeguards Rule readiness review.
We'll walk through your current posture against the FTC Safeguards Rule, the IRS WISP requirement, and (if applicable) NYDFS Part 500 — and tell you straight where the real gaps are. If there's nothing for us to do, we'll say so. If there is, you'll have a written plan you can act on with anyone.