Optery vs DeleteMe for Tax Advisory Partners

The firm's managing partner runs a baseline search and finds a home address, personal cell number and an approximate net worth estimate, the last one pieced together by a broker from property records and public filings rather than anything the firm disclosed. None of this is secret information exactly, but having it assembled into one searchable profile changes the risk from theoretical to concrete, especially heading into a season when tax professionals are actively being impersonated.

Given the firm's size and the fact that most partners have straightforward, consistent professional histories, the firm chooses Optery's business tier to enroll the full partner group under one account. The ongoing, automated model fits a firm that doesn't want to manage individual caseworker relationships for eight different people, and the screenshot verification gives the firm's own risk committee something concrete to review periodically.

One senior partner, who's held preparer credentials in four states over a long career with slightly different name formats on file in each, turns out to be a case automation handles poorly. Rather than moving the whole firm to a human-run service, the firm has that partner work directly with a caseworker to reconcile the older records, a manageable exception rather than a reason to change the default for everyone else.

Midway through the cleanup, the firm checks what the IRS preparer directory shows for each partner and finds two entries still listing a personal address from years earlier, before the firm's own office existed. Updating those isn't something either removal service does, since it's a government directory, but it turns out to be one of the more consequential fixes in the whole exercise, given how directly that directory ties a preparer's name to tax season specifically.

Once the program was running, the firm added a short, honest note to its annual client communication: the firm maintains an internal privacy and security practice for its own partners and staff, part of a broader effort to reduce the risk of impersonation scams that target both preparers and their clients each filing season. Clients responded well to it, seeing it as a sign of operational maturity rather than something to be alarmed about.

The following year's filing season passed without any partner reporting an impersonation attempt referencing personal details, though the firm can't say for certain whether that's the removal program's doing or simple good luck over one season. What they can say is the program gives them a documented, defensible answer the next time a client or regulator asks what the firm does to protect its own people from being used as a vector for fraud against client data.

The firm's own formation filing, from when it was a three-person practice, still listed the founding partner's home address. No removal service touches state formation records, so brokers would have kept re-scraping that address indefinitely without a separate fix. A commercial registered agent closed the gap, and the firm now treats reviewing the formation filing as a standing item whenever the partnership structure changes.

The managing partner's advice for a smaller firm considering the same setup: don't wait for a partner count that feels large enough to justify a business-tier plan. A two- or three-partner practice has the same seasonal impersonation risk as an eight-partner one, just distributed across fewer people, and the per-partner cost of an automated removal service doesn't meaningfully change with firm size.

The other piece of advice was to loop in whoever manages the firm's IT and email security at the same time, since the conversation about exposed personal information naturally extends into a broader conversation about phishing awareness training, one that filing-season impersonation scams make directly relevant to the same audience regardless of how many partners happen to be listed on the letterhead that year.

Advice for a smaller practice starting out:

• Enroll now rather than waiting for a partner count that feels large enough to justify a business-tier plan.
• Recognize that a small practice faces the same filing-season impersonation risk as a larger one, just spread across fewer people.
• Set the program up in the fall or early winter, before busy season raises the risk.
• Check the IRS preparer directory and the firm's formation filing for old personal addresses, since neither service updates them.
• Extend coverage to staff preparers with a public directory listing or client-facing role as budget allows.