Enrolled Agent and founder
Mike Isaac, EA
Enrolled Agent and founder of TaxMap Advisors. From Stoneham, I lead a firm that works with owner-operated businesses and the companies they grow into, across Greater Boston and from coast to coast.
- Enrolled Agent (EA)
- Formerly at one of the country's leading CPA firms
- Stoneham, Massachusetts, with clients across the country
Most people who look at your numbers have seen them from one side. I have seen them from three: as the bank analyst deciding whether to lend against them, as the accountant building them by hand every month, and as the reviewer who had to sign off before a return went out the door.
Those three jobs disagree with each other more often than you would expect. The disagreements are where owners quietly lose money, and closing them is most of what I do now.
Reading statements from the lender's side
From 2015 to 2019 I was a loan analyst at a commercial bank. The job was credit risk: read a business's financial statements, work out whether its cash flow could carry the debt, write the credit memorandum, then monitor the portfolio and find out who had been right.
You learn to read a statement for what it is not saying. Cash flow that cannot support the payment. Receivables that never turn into money. A profitable year on paper and an owner who cannot make payroll. That is still how I read a set of books: not what does this say, but what would I doubt if my own money were at risk.
Keeping the books by hand
In 2019 I moved into a public accounting practice in Massachusetts as a staff accountant, and for three years I did the unglamorous half of this profession myself. Full-charge bookkeeping. The monthly close. Bank and credit card reconciliations. Payroll tax filings. Massachusetts sales, meals and excise returns.
None of it was handed to somebody else, which is why I can usually tell quickly whether a set of books was kept or merely synced. Those are not the same thing, and only one of them survives a hard question.
Reviewing everyone else's returns
From 2022 to 2026 I was a senior accountant in business advisory at one of the country's leading CPA firms, ranked among the twenty largest accounting firms in the United States. I prepared and reviewed federal and state returns across the range, Forms 1040, 1065, 1120-S, 1120 and 990 among them, for individuals, pass-through entities, corporations and nonprofits. I built tax projections and estimated payments, resolved IRS and Massachusetts Department of Revenue notices, and supervised and trained junior staff.
Reviewing other people's returns for four years is a particular education. You stop seeing individual returns and start seeing patterns: the same handful of mistakes, made the same way, year after year, and nearly all of them preventable months before anyone opened the software.
Why I started TaxMap Advisors
Almost everything I was correcting in review had a cheaper answer six or eight months earlier. Finding that answer means knowing the client during the year rather than meeting the file in February. That is the practice I wanted to run, so I built it.
TaxMap Advisors is built around contact through the year and continuity on your file, from the bookkeeping through the return and into whatever the IRS sends afterward. I review and sign every return, and that is the standard the firm is built to keep as it grows. I hold a bachelor's degree in accounting and business administration, and I am sitting for the CPA examination.
What an Enrolled Agent is
Three kinds of professional may represent a taxpayer before the IRS without limits: attorneys, certified public accountants and Enrolled Agents. Attorneys and CPAs are licensed by a state. An Enrolled Agent is admitted to practice before the Internal Revenue Service under a federal credential, earned by passing a three-part examination on individual tax, business tax, and representation, practices and procedures, and kept by meeting continuing education requirements every year. The IRS maintains a public directory of credentialed preparers where you can confirm any Enrolled Agent's standing.
The difference shows up when something goes wrong. Anyone with a preparer number can put a return together. Far fewer people are permitted to stand in front of the IRS afterward and argue for the position taken on it. As an Enrolled Agent I am federally licensed to represent taxpayers before the IRS on any tax matter, before any IRS office, wherever the client lives.
It also means the whole credential is tax. Not audit, not financial reporting, not general consulting. That is a reasonable thing to want in the person handling yours.
The first thirty days
The first week is reading. Send last year's returns, business and personal, and give me access to your books, whether that is QuickBooks Online, QuickBooks Desktop or something else. I read the return for what was missed and the books for whether the return could have been right in the first place. You get that read, in plain language, before you commit to anything.
Weeks two and three are the record. If the books do not reconcile, that is fixed first, because every projection built on unreconciled books is fiction. Payroll, sales tax and entity registrations are checked against what was actually filed. If a notice is open, a power of attorney goes on file and I take over the correspondence.
By day thirty you have a projection built from your actual numbers, an estimated payment schedule sized to it, a written list of the decisions with a deadline attached, and a monthly close date on the calendar. After that, cadence matters more than deliverables. Books close every month. Estimates move when the business moves. And when something changes, a hire, a purchase, a partner, a sale, the call happens before the paperwork rather than after it.
One file, one point of accountability
Every client has one file and one point of accountability for it. I review and sign every return that leaves this firm. The bookkeeping, the projection and the IRS correspondence run through that same file on the same monthly rhythm. As the firm adds people, that is the rule they join: senior-led from the first call to the signed return, with an Enrolled Agent responsible for the work.
The rest of it
The practice keeps Saturday hours, ten to three, because owners are not free on a Wednesday afternoon. That is the entire reason.
I am still sitting for the CPA exam, which is a strange thing to take on while building a firm. I would rather be the accountant who is still studying than the one who decided he was finished learning. And when you call the number on this site, you reach the firm directly, and today that is usually me.
Bring last year's return. We will tell you what we see.
The first thirty minutes are free, and the most useful thing you can put in front of me is the return somebody else prepared.