Business Innovators Radio - Interview with Scott Blackley Founder, Trucess Tax Advisory Discussing Find Where Tax Dollars Are Leaking

Episode Date: October 14, 2026

Scott Blackley, CFP®, EA, ABFP®, APMA®, AWMA®, CRPC®, LUTCF® Founder, Trucess Tax Advisory LLCScott Blackley is the founder of Trucess Tax Advisory LLC, a proactive tax planning and advisory firm built for successful business owners, high-income professionals, and affluent families who want more than a tax return filed on time—they want a strategy designed to reduce their lifetime tax burden and help them keep more of the wealth they’re building.Scott’s perspective on tax strategy comes from a background that extends well beyond tax preparation. As both a CERTIFIED FINANCIAL PLANNER™ professional and an Enrolled Agent, he works at the intersection of tax planning, financial planning, retirement, investments, and wealth management. His advanced training is reflected in his ABFP®, APMA®, AWMA®, CFP®, CRPC®, EA, and LUTCF® designations.He founded Trucess Tax Advisory on a simple premise: tax planning has to happen before the return is filed—not after the opportunities to act are gone.Traditional tax preparation looks backward, reporting what has already happened. Trucess works the other direction. Scott and his team evaluate a client’s full financial and tax picture proactively, looking for inefficiencies, missed opportunities, and strategies that may never have been considered.Depending on the client’s circumstances, that analysis can span business and entity structure, retirement plans, real estate and cost segregation, income and deduction planning, Roth conversions, charitable strategies, investment taxation, and other advanced planning opportunities.But Scott believes a strategy should never be implemented simply because it creates a tax deduction. It has to make financial sense first.Every recommendation should have a clear purpose, a measurable potential benefit, and a place within the client’s larger financial plan. Scott believes clients deserve to understand not just what they’re doing, but why they’re doing it and what the strategy could actually mean for their financial future.That philosophy shapes how Trucess operates. Every engagement begins with an evaluation of the client’s current position to identify meaningful planning opportunities. If Trucess doesn’t identify a solution, there is no cost for the initial evaluation.For Scott, tax planning isn’t about chasing loopholes or simply lowering this year’s tax bill. It’s about coordinating taxes with the decisions that build, protect, and ultimately transfer wealth—and looking several moves ahead.Learn more: https://trucesstax.com/Investment Advisory Services are offered through Rossby Financial, LLC, a Registered Investment Adviser. Rossby Financial, LLC and Trucess are not affiliated.Securities transactions cannot be conducted via email or voice messages. Any related requests, or requests for distributions, must be confirmed live with the client.Rossby Financial, LLC does not offer tax or legal advice.This email transmission and any documents, files or previous email messages attached to it may contain information that is confidential or legally privileged. If you are not the intended recipient, you are hereby notified that you must not read this transmission and that any disclosure, copying, printing, distribution, or any action or omission of this transmission is strictly prohibited. If you have received this transmission in error, please immediately notify the sender or return and delete the original transmission and its attachments without reading or saving in any manner.Influential Entrepreneurs with Mike Saundershttps://businessinnovatorsradio.com/influential-entrepreneurs-with-mike-saunders/Source: https://businessinnovatorsradio.com/interview-with-scott-blackley-founder-trucess-tax-advisory-discussing-find-where-tax-dollars-are-leaking

Welcome to influential entrepreneurs, bringing you interviews with elite business leaders and experts, sharing tips and strategies for elevating your business to the next level. Here's your host, Mike Saunders. Hello and welcome to this episode of influential entrepreneurs. This is Mike Saunders, the authority positioning coach. Today we have back with us Scott Blackley, who's the founder of Truces Tax Advisory, and we'll be talking about finding where tax dollars are leaking. Scott, welcome back to the program. It's great to be back. I think this is through your mic, so we got a streak going.

Yeah, we do. I'm loving talking through your proprietary process called the Before Method. And we're now on the E, the Expose. We want to find where tax dollars are leaking. And I love that word picture that it brings up. It's like a bucket of water that's your business profits or your retirement accounts or whatever. We don't want holes in. water leaking out of that. We want to plug up as much as possible. Now, we know we can never

eliminate taxpaying taxes. We've got to pay taxes, but we do want to pay the most smallest amount legally possible. So let's jump into this and talk through when you're sitting down with a business owner for the first time. What are some of the low hanging fruit where you're finding some of those tax dollars leaking? What does that look like mostly what you're seeing? Yeah, Mike, and I want to start too before, you know, in the before method, the E, and you brought it up, it means exposed. So exposed means discovering and labeling the issues, not pretending that every issue is money already saved, right? So we've got to find it, we've got to label it, then we've got to test it, and a risk is not a savings opportunity. So what we start with is the five areas, how the owners are paid, whether the retirement plan still fits,

legitimate expenses paid personally and never reimbursed, timing of purchases, and income. And whether the record support the deductions being taken. Sometimes we find a true misdeduction, sometimes we find a compliance risk, and sometimes it's just simply a tax payment problem. But we expose the problem, we expose what it's about, we identify the issues honestly before deciding what to do. So we want to take a look at everything. We want to expose it.

And depending on how we expose it, we want to come up with a plan or a strategy. So when we're looking at this, just remember the five areas, how the owner's paid, whether the retirement plan still fits, is it a legitimate expense paid personally and never reversed,

the timing of the purchase and income, and whether the record support the deductions being taken. Yeah. You know, when you were mentioning that, it made me think of, you know, you've got, hey, I hate to say this, but these deductions that you've been taking, they're kind of incorrect. It's a compliance issue. We need to stop that. And then there's the other side of the coin, which is, hey, I notice some opportunities you're not taking advantage of. From your experience, what would you

guesstimate? What percentage of the time are you having to say, hey, these are incorrect versus, hey, I found some missed opportunities? I think when you've been doing anything long enough, and you can say 100% of the time, I'd never say 100%, but 95% of the time, you can find something wrong, or maybe not wrong, but you can find some of the maybe could have been done

a little bit more efficient, right? Or in a different way to save some more money. And, you know, a lot of times, I don't discuss this enough, but a lot of times tax professionals are worried about what they can save you this year or maybe even what they can save you next year, right? But this problem with that is, is sometimes saving you money this year or next year causes a huge tax problem in 15 or 20 years.

And so I think because a lot of tax preparers get slapped on the back by how much they're saving now, they're not worried about what it looks like in 15 years when that blows up. And with the amount of tax professionals getting out of the industry in 15 years, they probably won't even be able to be around to discuss it. They've already sold their business or got out. And so when we're looking at returns, that's just something to look at is, hey, what are the prior returns, what are the people doing, what are the financial statements, are the payroll details, the retirement documents, entity records, projections for the year?

like what are they missing? What have they seen? What are they going for? And then we want to hear about the owner's planning and then what the tax preparer said they're going to do or what they've been doing. And sometimes even if they've left their tax professional or if they're going to sever that relationship, we'll call and ask that tax professional in a nice way or shoot an email or ask a client to what were they thinking and not in a bad way. but what outcome were they trying to accomplish by doing it this way or by not doing this tax deduction? Yeah, you're getting the full picture because sometimes when you understand where they were headed with that, like we've said previously and just communication styles, then it's like, oh, I see where you're going. Okay, what we need to do is.

You know, I think that's a big, big piece of that puzzle. So when you're looking at business owners returns, what do you look at that? a return preparer usually does not have the time to look at. Like from the historian, you know, fill in the blank, you know, tax prep kind of approach, you're taking the proactive approach, the strategist approach. What are you seeing that, you know, are missed opportunities that maybe they didn't either know to address or they didn't have time to address? You know, I think all in all tax professionals, whether they're just filing returns or

doing something else. Everybody's trying to do the best with what they know at the time that they have the information. Yeah. Right. And if your tax professional is in the business of filing returns, they're not in the business of tax advising. And there's two different people, right?

So tax return people get, they get paid by how many tax returns they do, right? They don't get paid by advisory or saving somebody money. They get paid by, oh, if I can get this out of the door very quickly. So what they're asking typically is just the information they need to do the taxes correctly. That's it. They're not trying to find loopholes. And then when they look at it and you're sitting down in front of your tax professional, had somebody come in the office the other day.

And they bring their taxes, two years with the taxes, and they throw it down. And they go, man, I sat down in front of my tax professional. And he told me how much I owed. And I looked at him. And I said, well, could we not have done anything? He said, well, yeah, we probably could have done this and this and this. Well, if you know. then why aren't we doing it? And the reason they aren't doing it is either one because

they don't, they don't want to take the time to do it. Sometimes it's a little bit more risky when you're, when you're actually doing those, it has to be tracked and the paperwork, the paper trail has to be a little bit deeper than it is just following the returns, right? And so sometimes they don't want to take the time or even have the risk. And so when we're looking at things, you know, we want to see the prior returns, we want to see the current financial statements, the payroll details, the retirement plan documents, entity records. What is the projection for this year? What is the projection for next year?

And so we want to see all the different stuff, but we want to see is the owner compensating his self right? So we're asking a lot more questions. I just don't need your pay studies so that I can do your returns. We need to know about you and we need to know about your business so that we can put you not in the best position this year, the best position next year, but the next position throughout your life. And it's a different plan.

when you're planning for somebody's life and you're just planning to follow the return for what happened last year. Yeah, because you've got to stand behind those decisions. And that kind of brings me to another point where we're talking about finding out where tax dollars are leaking. What's the difference between a leak and maybe trying to plug that leak but creating a little bit more risk than is necessary? So talk a little bit about leak and risk.

I would say a leak is a legitimate benefit or an opportunity that may be going unused. So let's say that business expenses are paid personally without a reimbursement process, right? Oh, yeah. A risk is something that could create a problem, like an S corporation owner taking a deduction while paying an unreasonably low salary. So if your profession is paying an average of 140,000 a year and you own a business that's netting 100,000, a million dollars a year and you're paying yourself 60,000, that's probably not going to fly, right? A timing issue is different again.

So perhaps the owner owes a lot in April because nobody adjusted the reserve. So I like to label each finding so that we don't confuse like possible savings with a compliance fix. So it's very important, right? Like you said, a leak is a legitimate benefit or an opportunity that may be. going unused so that we can use it now, now that we know that it's out there and aware of it. And we want to say that business expenses are being paid personally. And if they are, then we need to reimburse and we need to have a process in place and a paperwork trail that says,

yes, we paid for this personally, but we did a reimbursement. Yes. It's almost like remember back watching cartoons growing up and you saw the one with the little ancient, angel on one shoulder and the devil on the neck and it's like, no, do this and make sure you don't do that. It's almost like you need to have the little person on your shoulder going, is this going to be okay? Is this going to cause problems? And that's a good thing because it's like, you want to keep that finger on the chest piece before you make the final move. Is this going to cause problems now or later? And many times also, you've probably come up with something where you have mentioned an opportunity to a business owner like, oh, hey, let's take a look at, fill in the

like, you know, whatever the opportunity you're thinking of. Is there ever been a time where you've investigated some and it just didn't turn out to be an opportunity for that business for a variety of reasons? Like, oh, hey, we can do R&D credits. Let's explore that. And then it turns out to be like, oh, that doesn't apply to you because. Talk a little bit about some of the opportunities you're watching for and how, you know, maybe you don't even tell the business owner yet because you don't want to get their hopes up. Yeah. I mean, there's the Augusta rule.

Another one that we use, and I talk about later, but it's a cost segregation is a good example. It's just accelerating a depreciation of a rental. It can look fantastic on paper, but if the owner has a high W2 income and passive loss rules, they may keep new deductions from offsetting income. and the immediate or the now benefit may be limited. So the deduction may be suspended rather than lost. And so that means we don't want to do something now that could hinder a benefit later. But that is very different from the sales pitch, right?

We have to look at the owners taxable or the tax situation and the future sell, not just the size of the deduction. So cluster segregation is a good example. There are others, but just because something's good on paper and a lot of people are using it, doesn't mean it's right for you. It just means that it's right. Yeah. Yeah.

I mean, so many times we've mentioned in our conversations, there's never one solution for every single person. And it's not a cookie cutter. It's individual. We need to see what works for everyone. And in this stage, this expose stage, you're talking about uncovering. and discovering not necessarily going immediately to the fix. Why is it that you want to just really, really expose this and get everything out before you start making recommendations?

I would say because finding a possibility isn't the same as proven it works. Yeah. So we need to still check the eligibility, right? we need to calculate the total tax effect. We need to consider the cost, and we need to see how strategies interact. And also, expose creates a list of candidates, right? So a foundation fixes, the underlying structure, orchestrate determines the candidates, and if they deserve action.

Otherwise, we're just selling ideals. We're just grabbing the shotgun approach. You talked about sales later, but, you know, we're just grabbing a handful of stuff and see if it sticks against the wall, right? We're not making pasta and thrown it on the ceiling to see if it sticks. We're not doing the shotgun approach. We want to make sure that whatever we're doing is going to provide the outcomes that the people want because finding a possibility isn't the same of proving that it works.

Yeah. It's kind of like you want to stress test it, you know, before you implement. You want to just double check and it makes sure everything is looking. correct before you move to the execution phase, right? Yes, that's right. And, you know, I think everybody should, before you execute anything, right, you should make sure that it's going to work and not just work for today, that it's going to be working in the future and it's something that you can stand on, right?

And tax laws changes. So we need to make sure that moving forward is going to be the best for the person that's sitting in front of us and the best for them long term and for what they want to see with their business. Yep, 100%. You know, when people are thinking about, okay, we want to expose and discover where tax dollars are leaking, you mentioned a whole bunch of documents that people need to, you know, be prepared to bring in. What are some of the main things that the owner needs to gather up before you do this deep dive? I would say the easiest, usually, thing to start with is bring two or three years of your personal and your business returns.

So recent profits and loss statements, balance sheets, maybe payroll returns, retirement plan information, entity documents, how's it set up? How are you following? In these details of like the major purchases or planned transactions, also bring your questions and your goals. So if you should have some questions of yourself. Right. I know you're coming to us for answers, but you probably have some questions. And a lot of times you feel like you can't ask the questions because you're going to sound juvenile or you don't have enough experience to ask the questions or you're just here for help. But your questions matter because the way that you ask, the way that you ask those questions may tell us what you really feel and what you're really looking for and what the concerns really are. And if the books aren't perfect, that's okay too. So we need to know that too. The purpose is to understand what's really happening.

I make the joke and I use the analogy a lot. Mike, have you ever had, you ever paid anybody to clean your house? You ever tried that? No. No. All right. So if I ask some people that have had their house cleaned, right? I'll say, you ever had anybody to clean their house?

And they're like, yeah, I had somebody, you know, I said, did you clean your house before they showed up? And the funny thing is, is more times than not, people try to clean up their house before the service gets there to do the house cleaning. Yep. And one. They don't want to look too bad. Yes. It's funny, right? It's not an accurate representation of what it is.

And then sooner or later, they're going to bring you on. And then they're going to give you a price maybe that's less than what it should have been. So they're going to have to ask for a little bit more later. And then in a month or two, they're going to know how you live anyway. So a lot of people don't want to get started because they're afraid of what things look like. But, you know, in business, Mike, one of the best things that you can do is act and step forward and get it done. And so I would say, just bring it in the way it is. Don't try to fix it because it's never going to be right.

It's never going to be perfect the way you think. And you know what? You could have had three or four decisions by the time you try to get that fixed and bring it to us that we could have said. saved you a ton of money on by making a better decision. So to answer your questions, like I said, bring two or three years worth of personal and business returns, your profit and loss statements, your balance sheets, payroll reports, retirement plan information, any entity documents that you have, or details for maybe major purchases, or huge planned transactions that you have coming up. Yeah, that's a great point. And, you know,

think of think of this it made me wonder when you were describing that of previously you know hey is there an example of a business owner you worked with that came in almost you know kind of proud like oh here's this area that i am saving some money or or we got this right off but the full picture showed that the decision was costing them more you mentioned that there's some decisions that could work fine now but then down the road end up costing more what would be a an example or two of what that could look like. I really don't want to twist, you know, the financial side and the tax side, but they kind of do mix. And I had a business owner that came to us and they have been doing what they were told, right?

The easiest way to save money is to dump money into a tax-deferred investment through your business, right? Never got to pay taxes on that thing now. I'll just put as much as you can in it and then later in life when you get ready to work, you'll stop working. You'll need less money. You'll live off less money. And then so you'll pay less taxes, right? Yep.

And it's been my school of thought, Mike, that if you're living off a less than you were when you were working, it probably wasn't a very good retirement plan. And when I ask people, you spend more money on Saturday or Wednesdays, Mike, what would you say? I would say Saturday. Yeah, well, when you retire, they're all Saturdays, right? Yeah. And so what happens is, even if you have all that money and it's tax deferred and you've got millions of dollars saved up, you know, and you're going to pull that out as you needed,

and it's all been qualified. So that means you hadn't paid taxes on it, right? You deferred taxes on all this money, all this, all long. And let's say you didn't need it. Well, what happens when you turn 73, depending on your age, and now you get the R&D, the required minimum distribution? Well, that's one of those things we talked about earlier. where the tax professional says, let's save you money now, and they don't think about 15 or 20 years later.

Well, now the government says, hey, whoa, whoa, whoa, you've never paid money on this, Mike. So now you have to pull out this much money every year whether you needed or not. And what if that money takes you into a different tax bracket, right? A higher bracket than you were in when you were working. What if your spouse passed away and now you're making more money that you have to pull out of that qualified account, right, than you did. when your spouse was alive and now you're paying it on a single person's income bracket versus a couple. How does that feel? Wow.

You know, you just kind of, it's almost like you're watching TV and this drone video coverage is going up two, three, four, five hundred feet and showing the full picture. What you just described there goes so far beyond just asking good questions from the tax intake and making a proactive, strategic decision. And now this brings up the fact that the tax person needs to be in lockstep with the financial retirement planning strategy because one domino can topple another domino and they do impact each other. So that is something that really, really you're bringing into your clients because you've got both the tax questions, but you're glancing over the barrier there looking at the wealth side of things to go. Let's make sure it's not going to negatively impact that side. Right. That is, that's, that's true. And it's so important. And even, and I'm not an attorney, there's my disclosure, right? But even having an attorney make sure that your wills and your power of attorney and your durable power of attorney, even your estate planning, that is all super, super important. And things that people don't feel like they have to, they have to do until, you know, they get older. And the fact is, you know, I had a buddy that owns a business that passed away this last month, you know, and he was young, 43 years old. And he had a business, a successful business.

But guess what? He didn't have everything lined out, right? And, you know, you talk to somebody. I mean, my brother even passed away at 43. So you talk to people and you tell them that this stuff should be done. and this goes beyond tax. This just goes making sure that no matter what happens to somebody that we're helping, Mike,

we want to make sure that whoever's left when the worst day of their life happens and somebody passes in their family, that their life may be without that person, but financially and stability-wise, their life doesn't change. And they don't have to go, live with them in law or move out of the house because everything in their estate was set up properly with their finances and their taxes and their attorney.

You know, that just gives some peace of mind right there. That is awesome. Well, Scott, this has been so enlightening to make sure that we are covering all of these aspects and covering up leaks. So if someone is interested in maybe having a second opinion or having you look at their situation to uncover and plug up some of these leaks, what's the best way that they can reach out and connect with you? Yeah, sure. If they're looking for somebody to help find the issues and to fix the foundation that they rest on,

they can find us at truceStax.com, T-R-U-C-E-S-T-A-X.com, and depending whether they want to work with us as a referral partner or whether they want to have us look at them come up with some strategies to see if we're a good fit for them. They can go to truceesttax.com. And once again, Mike, it's always a pleasure being on here. And thank you for taking the time and allow me to come on here and discuss this with you.

Thank you, Scott. It's been a pleasure. You've been listening to Influential Entrepreneurs with Mike Saunders. To learn more about the resources mentioned on today's show or listen to past episodes, Visit www. www. influential entrepreneurs radio.com.