Business valuations post-DOGE

Last week at the Texas Forum on International Tax (TFIT) in Dallas, I had the chance to do something I always enjoy: Pull back the curtain a bit.

My session introduced the audience to the #IRS Engineering & Valuation (E&V) program: What it does, how it works, and why it’s quietly one of the most important technical units inside the Service. Many tax practitioners have heard of E&V, but few have seen how central it is to estate, gift, and closely held business valuations. A huge thank-you to the TFIT organizers for inviting me to speak, and to the professionals who stayed afterward to dig deeper into the topic.

As many of you know, the rapid restructuring of federal agencies by #DOGE is already reshaping the landscape for tax professionals, especially those of us who work in #BusinessValuation. While the headlines focus on budget cuts, the deeper story is how the rapid loss of technical staff and critical institutional knowledge within the E&V program is changing the valuation landscape in real time. Not with new regulations or court cases, but through absence: Fewer specialists, the loss of invaluable expertise and experience, and the reduction of enforcement.

And that makes it even more important for practitioners to anchor their work in strong methods, clear documentation, and ethical judgment.

I have my own predictions of what to expect (aside from lower audit coverage, of course):

1. Valuation by “fiat” could soon replace true technical review. As expertise inside agencies disappears, bureaucracies may have to fall back on rule-of-thumb shortcuts, e.g., standardized discount caps, asset-specific method mandates, and narrow lists of “acceptable” data sources. The result isn’t market-driven convergence, but administrative convergence. A resource-strapped IRS may increasingly default to pre-approved numbers just to keep up with volume (assuming enforcement takes place at all).

2. In this new tech-driven automation environment, advisory work moves from defending positions to designing and planning. With fewer human reviewers, the real value lies in a professional’s ability to engineer tax returns and valuation reports so they’re resilient to algorithmic screening. Clients will pay more for advisors who understand how to optimize for #AI and avoid automated red-flag triggers by algorithm or large language models (LLMs). Clean data becomes the new compliance.

What are yours?