What counts as advertising for CPAs
Two rulebooks reach your firm, and they stop in different places. Answer four questions about the thing you just wrote and this page tells you which of the two reaches it, what decided each one, and what changes if either does.
Monthly bookkeeping and close
One rulebook follows your licence. The other follows the subject.
Neither has an exemption for blogs and neither has an exemption for education. What they have is different reach, so the same tax-season post can sit inside one, both or neither.
The AICPA Code, on advertising and solicitation
The rule is one sentence long. A member in public practice may not seek to obtain clients by advertising or other forms of solicitation in a manner that is false, misleading, or deceptive. A second sentence rules out coercion, over-reaching and harassing conduct.
Note what it does not say. Nothing about channel, format or department, and nothing about tax. If your firm is seeking work, the Code is reading.
AICPA Code ET §1.600.001 · note 1Circular 230, on solicitation and advertising
It opens by naming its own boundary: with respect to any Internal Revenue Service matter. Inside that boundary a practitioner may not use any public communication or private solicitation carrying a false, fraudulent or coercive claim, or a misleading or deceptive one.
Narrower subject, longer list of ways to fail, and two duties the Code has no equivalent of: one about fees, one about keeping what you sent.
31 CFR §10.30(a)(1) · note 2Four questions, two answers
Answer for the thing actually in front of you. Or load one of the six a firm publishes most and watch the two verdicts come apart.
Is the firm seeking work through it?
Look at the whole page, not the paragraph. A byline, a firm name and a “book a call” button beside the text are usually the answer.
Is it about an IRS matter?
Returns, refund claims, notices, examinations, penalties, written tax advice. Bookkeeping, audit, assurance and outsourced finance work are not.
Whose name is on the piece?
This one moves less than anybody expects. It changes who answers for the words, not whether anyone does.
Does it say anything about what you charge?
A figure, a package price, a “from” number, a published schedule, or a fee that moves with how the work turns out.
This is a reading aid, not a ruling, and it cannot see your piece. Nothing on this page is legal or tax advice.
Three places people expect the two to agree, and they do not
Each one has had a firm apply the wrong rule to the right page, usually by deciding one answer covers the whole website.
Bookkeeping, monthly close, outsourced finance, audit and assurance. The Code reaches how you advertise every one, because it reaches a member seeking clients. Circular 230 reaches none of it, because its first clause limits it to an Internal Revenue Service matter.
Code: reaches230: does notThe instinct that private means safe is wrong here, and both books say so in their own words. The Code covers advertising or other forms of solicitation. Circular 230 covers any public communication or private solicitation. One recipient is inside both.
Code: reaches230: reachesBoth books closed this door, separately. The Code says members must not do through others what they are prohibited from doing themselves. Circular 230 says a practitioner may not accept assistance from anyone who obtains clients in a way the section forbids.
Code: reaches230: reachesThe third-party sentence is at ET §1.600.010.01. Its Circular 230 counterpart is §10.30(d), headed improper associations. Notes 1 and 2.
The Circular 230 notice under your signature stopped being necessary in 2014.
It is the one piece of Circular 230 most firms can recite, and it existed to pull a writing out of the covered-opinion rules at the old §10.35. Treasury deleted those rules on 12 June 2014 and replaced the section with a short competence standard. The thing the legend was escaping no longer exists.
Still in signatures, still under firm PDFs, still at the bottom of blog postsThe preamble is unusually direct. Treasury and the IRS wrote that they expect that these amendments will eliminate the use of a Circular 230 disclaimer in e-mail and other writings, having noted firms were inserting it into writings with no tax advice in them at all. They did not ban it, and an accurate statement of the limits of your advice is still fine.
The CPA pack does not insert it, and that is recorded in the pack rather than left to chance. The disclaimer it does require is a different one, there because the writing is general information rather than advice to a particular reader. A claim about your content, not a relic of a withdrawn rule.
Six things that are now true of the post
Being advertising is not a problem. It is a short list of conditions, and most firm content already meets the first three without anybody trying.
- 01Misleading is a wider net than falseBoth books land on the same word, and the Code closes with a catch-all: anything likely to cause a reasonable person to misunderstand or be deceived. A post can be accurate line by line and still leave an impression that is not. That is the version of this rule that catches firms.
- 02No false or unjustified expectations of a favourable resultNote the second adjective. A promise you cannot keep is the obvious failure. A hope you let a reader form on thin ground is easier to write and just as clearly named.
- 03No implied pull with the IRS, or with anyone elseThe wording is broad on purpose: implying the ability to influence any court, tribunal, regulatory agency or similar body or official. Years inside the Service is a credential, and you may say so plainly. Suggesting it buys your client a different answer is a different sentence.
- 04A fee you quote is a two-part promiseThe Code does not object to naming a price. It objects to naming one you already thought was likely to be substantially exceeded and not telling the prospective client that. Both halves have to be there. Separately, if costs may be incurred, the page has to say who pays them.
- 05Publishing a fee schedule starts a clockPut a schedule out and Circular 230 holds you to those rates for at least 30 calendar days after the last date you published it. The line that catches a seasonal pricing page nobody thought of as a commitment.
- 06Keep the email, and keep the listFor direct mail and e-commerce communications, a practitioner retains a copy of the actual communication plus a description of who it went to, for at least 36 months from the last time it was sent or used. A records rule hiding inside an advertising one, and the one firms are most often surprised by.
Items 1 to 4 are the four things ET §1.600.010 names, read alongside §10.30(a)(1) and (b)(1). Item 5 is §10.30(b)(2). Item 6 is §10.30(c). Contingent fees are their own rule and sit outside this list: §10.27(b) prohibits them on a matter before the Service with three narrow exceptions, and §1.510.001 rules them out on preparing an original or amended return or a refund claim. Every one is traced below.
Working out which book applies takes a minute. Holding every post to the stricter of the two is the job.
Nobody fails this on a service page. They fail in the second week of March, in the fourth paragraph of a post nobody reread, where a sentence about getting a client out of a notice went a clause too far.
That is what Verand checks. Name the AICPA, Circular 230 or your state board during setup and the CPA pack loads itself. From then on every draft is read against it before it can leave, and a person at your firm presses publish. It cannot publish for you.
What it does not do is decide scope. Which of the two books reaches a given page is your call, which is what this page exists to help you make. What Verand does is read the claims inside the draft, on every draft, and refuse to hand over one that breaks a hard rule.
“Thirty years in practice means we know people at the IRS, which is why our clients’ notices close faster than anyone else’s.”
Validated against the AICPA's and Treasury's published rules. AI-researched and operator-reviewed. Your counsel confirms applicability to your firm. Not legal advice.
A licence and a practice, and they are not the same set of people
This is what makes a CPA firm different from every other regulated business. Two bodies, two populations, and an overlap wide enough to hide how differently the two are drawn.
- A member in public practice, seeking to obtain clients
- Every line the firm sells, tax or not
Your state board writes advertising rules of its own on top of this, and several are stricter than the Code on superlatives. That is a third book and this page does not speak to it.
- A practitioner, on any Internal Revenue Service matter
- Not your bookkeeping page, not your assurance work
Practitioners are not only CPAs. Attorneys and enrolled agents sit in the same rulebook on the same terms, so the answer here has nothing to do with which letters follow your name.
If you read “practice before the Service” as meaning a signed power of attorney, the boundary above is drawn too tightly. The definition takes in preparing and filing documents, corresponding with the Service, and rendering written tax advice on an arrangement with a potential for tax avoidance. A thorough post about a planning technique is closer to that line than it looks.
State board overlays are not sharded into the pack yet, so a claim like “#1 CPA firm in the county” is flagged for review rather than blocked, and the pack says so rather than implying coverage it does not have. Anything your board bans that the pack does not, you enter in Brand Hub, and it gates exactly like a pack rule.
Everything above, traced back
Phrases in italics are the rule's own words. The rest is plain-English restatement, which is not the same thing as the rule, and your counsel is the one who applies it to your firm.
Three pages that pick up where this one stops
Two rulebooks. One gate, on every draft.
Seven days, every feature unlocked, one click to cancel. Name your board during setup and the first draft is written against the Code and Circular 230 together.
Validated against the AICPA's and Treasury's published rules. AI-researched and operator-reviewed. A person at your firm still presses publish.