If you are running a small or mid-size CPA firm, you have probably had some version of this thought in the last year: Everyone seems to be offshoring. The big firms are doing it. Your peers are doing it. The statistics keep getting quoted at conferences. And somewhere in the back of your mind, you are wondering whether you should be doing it, too.

You are also probably wondering whether any of it is even true. Are the talent gains, the margin gains, the turnaround time gains real or just polished talking points? And if they are real, how do you actually make any of it work at a firm your size? Maybe you tried it once, got burned, and quietly wrote it off. Maybe you have not tried it at all because the stories you hear are mixed, and you do not know who to trust. Either way, you are stuck in the same place: intrigued by what offshoring could do for your firm, unsure whether to believe it, and unsure how to make it work even if you did.

You are not alone. And the reason you are stuck is not what most people will tell you.

The real reason offshoring is broken for small firms

The conventional wisdom is that offshoring works at scale. You need a big team, a big budget, a global operations function. Small firms cannot afford it, so it does not work for them.

This is not true. The reason offshoring is broken for small and mid-size CPA firms has nothing to do with your size or your budget. It has to do with the fact that honest, objective education about offshoring does not exist for firms your size.

Large firms do not figure offshoring out by accident. They pay expensive advisors six-figure retainers to keep them current on the right models, the right destinations, the right hiring structures, the pitfalls to avoid, and how things are changing as AI reshapes the work itself. That kind of guidance is built into how large firms operate. It is invisible to outsiders but central to their success.

Small and mid-size firms have no equivalent. You are left to figure it out from sales material, vendor pitches, podcast episodes, and conversations with peers who are working off the same incomplete information. The advice that large firms pay heavily for is not available to you, and most of the time, you do not even know it exists.

There is a reason for this. Offshoring was not invented by accounting firms. It was built decades ago by large technology companies, and the playbook was later adapted for large accounting firms. The operators, advisors, and content that grew up around the practice all followed that audience. When those same operators wanted to grow into smaller firms, they repackaged the brochure but did not redesign the product, and they certainly did not build an education layer for the firms they were now selling to. Ninety percent of CPA firms in the United States, the small and mid-size ones, were left out of the knowledge ecosystem entirely.

This is the real gap. Not budget. Not scale. Not readiness. Access to honest, objective education.

How the education gap may have broken offshoring for your firm

If you have offshored before, the cost of this education gap is probably familiar. Even if you have not, you have likely heard these stories from peers. Here are four situations you may have lived through, or are at risk of living through. In every case, the problem was never you. It was the absence of basic education that would have changed your decisions before you made them.

1. You decided to offshore and hired an agency in India. The work was okay, but the time zone was a constant struggle.

You waited overnight for files. You explained things twice because the conversation was always asynchronous. You found a vendor who offered overnight shifts, but the quality dropped, and you felt guilty knowing someone was pulling all-nighters to match your hours.

Here is what you probably did not know: You can offshore to Argentina. Same time zone as the U.S. Real-time collaboration. No overnight shifts, no guilt, no waiting 12 hours for a reply. Argentina has a strong accounting talent pool, western business culture, and English fluency that rivals India and the Philippines.

Almost no one talks about this with small firms. Most offshoring operators are not set up in Argentina because the volume is smaller and the margins are different. So Argentina stays invisible to the firms that would benefit from it most. If you had been given honest education when you first started exploring offshoring, Argentina would have been on the table from day one, and the time zone problem would never have happened.

2. The quality was inconsistent. Some weeks the work was great. Other weeks it was unusable.

This is the single most common complaint about offshoring, and it has a structural explanation. In most agency-driven models, the person doing the work changes. Sometimes there is internal turnover at the agency. Sometimes your account gets reassigned.

Sometimes one person handles your work this week and a different one next week, because the agency staffs flexibly across clients.

You did not get inconsistent quality because offshore talent is unreliable. You got inconsistent quality because no one told you that you can ask to interview the actual person who will do the work. Not the account manager. Not the agency owner. The person.
If you had been told this on day one, you would have asked. You would have built a relationship with one specific human being. You would have noticed if they were replaced. The quality would have stabilized because the person did.

3. You wanted to offshore, but you put it off because you assumed your clients would never sign the 7216 consent.

This is one of the most common reasons small firms hesitate. It feels like a real obstacle. The truth is that firms who actually offshore see 85 to 90 percent of their clients sign the 7216, even the hesitant ones. The number of firms that lose meaningful client business over this is very small.

What clients actually want to know is not whether to sign the form. They want to know three things: Are you outsourcing or offshoring, why are you doing it, and how are you protecting their data. If you and your team have clear talking points for those three questions, the 7216 conversation becomes a non-event.

No one teaches this to small firms. The 7216 fear gets passed around as a reason not to offshore, when in reality it is a fear that early education would have eliminated.

4. You wanted more control and transparency, but you settled for a black box agency model because you assumed direct hiring was only for large firms.

You wanted to know who was on your team. You wanted to train them, integrate them, manage them like the rest of your staff. But every conversation you had pointed you back to an agency arrangement, where you got a resource but never really got a teammate.
You probably assumed direct hiring required scale: a big team, a registered entity overseas, a legal and HR function you do not have. None of that is true. You can hire one direct offshore employee. You do not need to register an entity. You can use an Employer of Record or PEO to handle local compliance, payroll, and employment law. The person becomes your employee in every meaningful sense, fully integrated into your team, trained by you, accountable to you.

Small firms are doing this today. Most just do not know they can.

What the MACPA is doing about it

The MACPA has partnered with an offshoring expert to host free virtual "office hours" for members.

The format is intentionally simple. No slides. No presentation. No sales pitch. Members bring their own questions, and the expert answers them live. Whether you have been burned, are considering offshoring for the first time, or are running a team that is not performing the way you hoped, you can ask anything.

The point is to give Maryland CPA firms access to the same kind of independent, experienced guidance that large firms have been paying for behind closed doors. At no cost.

Offshoring is not broken because of you. It is broken because no one has built honest education for firms your size. That is what these Office Hours are designed to change.

Office hours details

• Date: July 14, 2026
• Time: Noon to 1 p.m. ET
• Format: Virtual (Microsoft Teams), live Q&A
• Cost: Complimentary for MACPA members
• Register: Offshoring Office Hours for MACPA and VSCPA | Meeting-Join | Microsoft Teams