Can CPAs use AI for marketing content?
Yes. Neither rulebook asks who typed it.
A tax explainer on your firm’s site is judged on what it says and who receives it. A partner at eleven at night, an agency, or software in ninety seconds: it does not enter into the question.
Two rulebooks sit behind that, which is unusual: the AICPA Code, which binds you as a member, and Treasury Circular 230, which binds you as a practitioner before the IRS. Neither is interested in the keyboard.
Draft · Estimated payments after a first profitable year
The safe-harbour rules are the part clients find counterintuitive. You can owe a great deal in April and owe no penalty at all, because the penalty is worked out against what you paid in during the year.
Which is why the question to ask in October is not what you will owe. It is what you have already paid.
Excellent · nothing to fix
Overall 91 · publishable bar 80
Three things do not move, whoever does the drafting.
The licence is a person’s
The Code binds the member. Circular 230 binds the practitioner. Both are people, and no tool can be either one for you.
Something has to be kept
A copy of what went out, and the tax year it described. Taken on the day, because a rewritten page cannot be un-rewritten.
A CPA reads it
Before it is live, not after a client rings in March. The job is to make that reading quick and hard to skip.
The rule already asked you for a procedure.
Circular 230 has a section pointed at whoever oversees a firm’s tax practice: take reasonable steps to see that the firm has adequate procedures, and that they are followed, for the rules its people work under. Advertising sits inside the part those procedures reach, which makes “we started drafting with software in January” a change you are expected to have thought about.
At a two-partner firm that is you, on a Tuesday, in the hat you wear least often. A draft that arrives looking finished invites a skim, which is the one thing a review cannot be.
Keep a copy, and keep its year.
Circular 230’s retention rule is narrower than most firms assume. It attaches to fee information put out by mail or e-commerce, and asks for the communication, who received it, and thirty-six months from last use. Whether a page quoting a price counts as e-commerce is a judgement your counsel makes. The clock is the part to carry away: it runs from last use, so a page still up is still in use.
That is the floor the regulation sets. The reason to keep everything else is not Circular 230. It is the calendar.
What a tax-year record is
- The words as they went live.
- The tax year the figures in them describe.
- The date they went live.
- The CPA who read them before that.
Four lines, on the day. Nobody reconstructs the second one later.
What firms have instead, come February
- The page as it reads now. Somebody updated the limits in January. What a client read in November is gone, and the page will not admit it.
- The newsletter, in the sending tool. It belongs to the platform, is pruned on the platform’s schedule, and leaves when the firm does.
- A post with no year in it. Accurate the week it published, a year out from January, and nothing says which.
- The copy, but not the approval. One answers what the firm said. Only the other answers who stood behind it.
One copy at publication, with the tax year on it, filed where the firm keeps its own things. It goes wrong because it is a one-minute job on the days nobody has a minute.
Only the third one is work software can take.
The first two stay with you, and should. The third is a reading job, which is where Verand comes in and the only place it does. It drafts from your firm’s own positions, checks the finished page against the rules a US CPA firm is subject to, marks what would be a problem, names the tax year it assumed, and stops.
Name the tax year
In the copy, not only the metadata. A reader arriving in January cannot otherwise tell.
Every figure to a primary source
The IRS, the regulation, Treasury or your state authority, with its year.
Read the fee sentences twice
Anything tying your fee to the size of a refund comes out, however gently phrased.
Check the distance to the IRS
Cut anything reading as pull, access or an inside line. It arrives unasked for.
Disclaimer on the live page
Confirm it renders where the page publishes, not only in the draft.
Approve, keep, publish
In that order, named and dated. Afterwards it stops happening.
Four ways a tax draft goes wrong, and where to look first.
A figure from a year that ended
This is the one. Limits, brackets and thresholds move on a calendar, and software trained through last spring states last spring’s figure in the present tense. A stale number reads exactly like a current one, which is how it survives a skim in the ten weeks when a year out matters most.
Fees that read as contingent
Nobody sets out to write a contingency. It arrives dressed as reassurance, from a draft trying to sound generous.
You pay nothing unless we find money back, so there is no downside to letting us look.
Flagged for you. Written as a kindness, read as a fee tied to the refund.
A closeness to the IRS nobody claimed
Models have read a great deal of tax-resolution marketing, much of it from outfits your rulebook does not reach. So lines about knowing how the Service thinks, or what gets a file moved along, surface in a post about quarterly estimates. Circular 230 is specific about implied influence.
Advice for everyone, which is advice for no one
Elect the S corporation. Bunch the deductions. Open the solo plan. Each is right for somebody and wrong for a client two doors along, and a draft with nothing underneath it recommends all three flatly.
The first three are why a CPA reads the draft. The fourth is why it is worth telling the software what your firm thinks, once and properly.
One limit, said plainly.
This page is about US CPAs and the two rulebooks above. Your state board writes advertising rules on top of both and they vary, so Verand carries the federal and AICPA layer with a truth-in-advertising floor beneath it, and treats state variance as something still to add. Canadian CPAs answer to CPA Canada and a provincial body, which is on the roadmap rather than in the product.
The four that come up every filing season.
Do I have to say a post was drafted with AI?
Neither rulebook asks for a byline naming the software. Both ask whether the published thing is truthful and not misleading, which is a question about the words. Plenty of firms disclose anyway, preferring a client hear it from them. It is a policy call for the firm and your counsel.
Should the old Circular 230 notice go at the bottom of a post?
No, and Verand deliberately does not insert it. The covered-opinion rules that made that paragraph routine were withdrawn in 2014, and Treasury said it expected the habit of stapling it to every email and writing to stop. The pack requires a different disclaimer instead, written for published tax content: informational only, current at publication, not a substitute for advice on your own circumstances. If the old notice is still on your site, take it down.
What do I keep, and for how long?
Thirty-six months from last use, covering fee information sent by mail or e-commerce, with a note of who received it. Past that the useful record is the firm’s, not the regulator’s: the words as published, the tax year they describe, the date, and the CPA who approved them. Some state boards go further, so ask your counsel.
Could Verand publish for me while I am buried in March?
No, and no plan, setting or connector changes it. Every draft stops at a person at the firm. The connector cannot publish, cannot clear a compliance block and cannot delete anything. If nobody reads it in filing season, it waits.
Two questions this page hands to their own pages.
AI content for CPA firms
What a draft is checked against before anybody can publish it.
/cpas The testWhat counts as advertising for CPAs
Whether a post is a solicitation, and what changes once it is.
/what-counts-as-advertising The checklistWhat a CPA blog disclaimer says
What the block contains, and why the 2014 notice comes off.
/disclaimer-requirementsSources: Treasury Circular 230 and the AICPA Code of Professional Conduct, plus the 2014 decision withdrawing the covered-opinion rules. Validated against AICPA and Treasury rules. AI-researched and operator-reviewed. Your counsel confirms applicability. Not legal advice. 31 CFR Part 10 §10.27, §10.30, §10.36 · AICPA Code §1.510, §1.600 · TD 9668, 79 FR 33685 (June 2014)
Yes, you can use it. No, it can never publish.
Seven days, every feature on, one click to cancel. The first draft lands during setup with its tax year named and the gate already run.
No routine, schedule or connector presses publish. That is not a setting.