For accounting firms using AI · 5-day fixed scope

CPA Firm AI Practice Audit — The AICPA Question Your Firm AI Isn't Answering

AICPA ethics standards, state board requirements, PCAOB peer review, and IRS Circular 230 all now apply to AI-touched work product. Your clients are asking about AI use in advisory relationships. E&O carriers are updating malpractice questionnaires. Your tools don't answer these questions. This audit does.

$2,500 USD · small firm tier · 5 days
Start the audit What's included

Independent by design

Every AI vendor your firm uses has a story about their SOC 2 posture and audit trail. Some are good. Most are marketing. A firm relying on the vendor's own account is in the same trap as an auditor relying on management's own representations — the vendor cannot, structurally, produce the third-party attestation your PCAOB peer reviewer, state board, or sophisticated client wants. Same reason firms hire outside counsel for professional-standards review: independence is the value.

What you get

Six deliverables. Five business days from data handoff.

The audit

  • AI-use inventory — every AI tool (TaxDome, Karbon, Ignition, Botkeeper, Silverfin, Auditoria, Trullion, Blue J, Vic.ai, MindBridge, DataSnipper, Klarity), mapped to every service line and partner
  • Reproducibility posture per tool — model versioning, output-of-record, cache determinism, audit trail availability
  • AICPA + state-board + PCAOB compliance map — where the firm's AI use satisfies or gaps professional-standards + peer-review requirements + Circular 230 due diligence
  • Client-facing defensibility statement — drop-in for engagement-letter addenda + client outside-consultant AI-use questions
  • E&O carrier answer sheet — drop-in for annual malpractice-renewal AI-use questionnaires
  • 30 / 60 / 90-day roadmap — specific closes for identified gaps, ranked by peer-review + malpractice exposure

You provide

  • List of AI tools the firm currently uses (best guess is fine; we'll surface gaps)
  • Service lines + partner map (tax / audit / advisory / CAS)
  • Any active peer-review finding, state-board question, or client AI-use question that triggered the engagement (if any)
  • 30-minute kickoff call w/ managing partner OR CTO / innovation partner OR firm risk officer

The three surfaces where firm AI-use goes wrong

Cross-tool drift
Most firms use 4-6 AI tools (TaxDome for practice management, Karbon for workflow, Trullion or MindBridge for audit, Vic.ai for AP, DataSnipper or Klarity for docs). Each has its own PHI/PII retention, log format, audit trail (usually poor), and configuration state. When peer-review or a state board asks for "the AI record" for a specific engagement, the record is fragmented across vendors that don't coordinate.
Silent version drift across engagements
MindBridge on Q1 audit runs on one underlying model. Same client, Q3 audit = different model, different failure modes. Two audit workpapers side-by-side in peer review show different-shape AI reasoning that the firm can't easily reconstruct. If Q1 audit is challenged, the firm can't easily produce the exact model version it used.
Confident-but-wrong that survives partner review
Not the obvious hallucination (partner catches most). The subtle transaction classification that misses a subtle GAAP treatment. The tax-position memo that reads clean but drops the disclosure requirement. The CAS-produced financial statement that has AI-drafted commentary partner didn't inspect line-by-line. Peer reviewer + state board find these in retrospect.

Pricing tiers

Fixed-scope, fixed-price. No hourly billing.

Small firm (5-30 CPAs)
$500-$2,500
Focused audit · 2-5 days · core deliverables
Mid firm (30-150 CPAs)
$7,500
Full 6-deliverable audit · 5-7 days · walkthrough call
Large firm / PE-backed roll-up
$15K-$25K
Multi-office + multi-service-line audit · 2-4 weeks · PE-diligence-friendly

Start the audit

Mid-firm tier ($7,500) or small-firm ($2,500) - depending on CPA count. If your firm has an active peer-review finding, state-board question, or upcoming E&O renewal w/ AI addenda in flight, say so on the kickoff call.

Buy the audit — $2,500

Prefer a 15-minute qualification call first? Email luddy.kevin@gmail.com.

Why me

Kevin Luddy. 35 years shipping production software. 24-year CTO at Oculearn. Not a CPA — a technologist auditing the AI your compliance program depends on.

The audit surface is technical (model versioning, output retention, log-of-record, cache determinism, tool traces) crossed w/ regulatory (AICPA ethics + state-board rules + PCAOB peer-review + Circular 230 + E&O carrier questions + client outside-consultant guidelines). Neither pure compliance consultant nor pure engineer produces a defensible cross-disciplinary artifact. contrarianAI does — independent, technical, and calibrated to the specific questions your firm's peer reviewer, state board, and sophisticated clients will ask.