The season you cannot police
Tax season is when a fake letter in a firm's name is most likely to be believed and least likely to be questioned. A client who has just been told to pay something has no way to tell your letter from someone else's.
How we did it
We only looked at what anyone can see.
We did not contact a single firm, log into anything, or touch an account. Everything below comes from public information, the same information a prospective client or an AI assistant would find without asking anyone.
Who they are
The 80 firms on a list of certified public accountants published by New Hampshire Business Review, read on 3 September 2026. We name none of them and we never will. Their results are kept out of search on purpose.
What we could read
Some checks look at settings that are public for every business. Others need to read the website itself, and 27 of the 80 sites could not be read properly by anything other than a person. Those counts are shown out of the 53 we could read, never out of 80.
Worth saying plainly: a firm scoring badly here is not a badly run firm. Most of these are careful, long established practices. What the check measures is how much of that care is provable to someone who has never met them, and the answer for this profession turned out to be almost none of it.
The grades
No A. No B. No C either.
Nineteen firms scored a D and sixty one scored an F. The spread is narrow because the same handful of doors were open on nearly all of them, and none of those doors is one anybody was ever told to close.
- A0 of 80
- B0 of 80
- C0 of 80
- D19 of 80
- F61 of 80
What was open
A profession built on trust, with no way to prove any of it.
This is the part that stopped us. The whole product of an accounting practice is that a client can rely on what it signs. Every one of these firms has a licence, a professional body behind it, and years of clean work. None of that is checkable by anything except a phone call.
- 80 of 80
had no way for a client to confirm the firm's licence without ringing someone and asking. The licence is real and current. It simply cannot be checked by anyone who has not met them.
- 80 of 80
had no way to prove that an invoice, a letter or an engagement email really came from the firm. A fake one in their name would look exactly as convincing as a real one.
- 80 of 80
had not switched on the free setting that stops their web address being quietly pointed somewhere else. Five had nothing at all in place, and seventy five had part of it.
- 61 of 80
could still have email sent in their name that lands in a real inbox. Nineteen had this properly finished. The rest had started the work and stopped before it counted.
Being found
Somebody is answering the question they should be answering.
A business owner looking for an accountant now asks an assistant first, and the assistant answers from what it can read. Of the 53 sites we could read, here is what it would have found.
- 40 of 53
gave an assistant no way to reach the firm that a person did not have to answer. Not one of the 53 had a way that worked without a human on the other end.
- 50 of 53
never said what an engagement costs in a form anything but a person can read. An assistant asked to compare three firms on price has nothing to compare.
- 46 of 53
had nothing written for the assistants their clients now ask before they call anyone.
- 30 of 53
never said what services they actually provide in a form a machine can read. A person sees a services page. A machine sees decoration.
What it means
Nobody here did anything wrong.
Every firm on this list did what it was told to do. Get a website. Keep the licence current. Answer the phone. None of that was wrong. It stopped being enough quietly, over about two years, and nobody sent a letter about it.
The referral that never arrives
When someone asks an assistant which accountant to call, it recommends what it can read and confirm. You never see the client you did not get. There is no missed call to return.
Both are fixable
Every item on this page has a fix that takes minutes rather than months, and most of them cost nothing. The hard part was never the work. It was knowing the door was open.
Your clients already trust you. Now a stranger can check why.
The same check we ran on these 80 firms is free for yours. It takes about a minute and tells you exactly which doors are open, in plain words.
No spam. One email with what we find and how to fix it.