Most tax relationships start with a backward look. A business owner calls an accountant sometime in the first quarter, brings over the documents from the year just ended, and waits. The work flows in one direction: into the past. For a significant portion of the industry, this handoff defines the service.
AE Tax Advisors is organized around a different premise.
The firm, headquartered in Billings, Montana, begins every new client engagement with what it calls a 3-Year Tax Lookback. Before any forward plan is built, the advisory team reviews three prior years of returns to identify missed deductions, incorrectly classified expenses, unused credits, and structural gaps. The output is a baseline rather than a new return: the accurate picture of where a client actually stands, so that whatever strategy follows has something real to build from.
Christina Nortman, the firm’s managing partner for the Northeast region, is a CPA with a background at PwC and CohnReznick, two firms where systematic review and documentation are the foundation of every engagement. She holds a Bachelor of Science and Master of Science in Accounting from the University of Baltimore and leads the East Coast practice from Maryland. The discipline of starting with what already happened before proposing what should come next is, in her professional world, the baseline assumption.
AE Tax Advisors draws a sharp distinction between preparation and planning. Preparation, on the firm’s framing of the industry, is a calendar event. A return gets filed, the conversation closes, and the cycle repeats a year later. Planning is continuous. The firm works with clients on a quarterly check-in schedule and runs mid-year projections, so that decisions about entity structure, retirement contributions, or depreciation elections get made when there is still time to act on them, rather than documented after the window has closed.
The annual advisory fee is $7,800, which covers year-round access, quarterly reviews, and ongoing monitoring of tax law changes. Cost segregation studies are priced separately. The work involves an engineering-based analysis of a commercial or residential property that reclassifies building components into shorter-lived depreciation categories under federal tax law. According to the firm, it has completed more than 500 such studies. A companion service involves Form 3115 filings, which allow property owners to claim catch-up depreciation for prior years without amending individual returns.
The firm runs three regional practices. Mark Simonsen, CPA, leads the Mountain West operation from Billings. Nortman heads the Northeast from Maryland. Adam West, an IRS Enrolled Agent based in Macon, Georgia, handles the Southeast, focusing primarily on tax compliance and IRS representation. Behind the three practice leads is a team of tax strategists, a research analyst, and operations and client experience staff.
All advisory work is delivered virtually. AE Tax Advisors says it currently serves clients in 47 states. The firm describes its model as one that coordinates with clients’ existing CPAs, attorneys, and financial advisors, making sure recommended strategies are implemented and filed in the relevant jurisdictions rather than remaining as proposals.
Entity structuring occupies a substantial share of the firm’s client engagements. Whether a business operates as an LLC, S-Corporation, C-Corporation, or through a holding structure affects annual federal tax treatment, how the owner’s compensation is structured and documented, how retirement plan contributions interact with business income, and what the tax picture looks like if the business is eventually sold. AE Tax Advisors treats these as connected parts of a single plan. Retirement plan design sits in this same framework. The choice and sizing of a vehicle, whether a solo 401(k), a defined benefit plan, or a cash balance arrangement, gets worked through alongside entity decisions rather than in isolation.
Earlier in 2026, the firm published the first four volumes of its Entity Tax Strategy series. Each book covers a different structure: partnerships, S-Corporations, C-Corporations, and real estate investing, in that order. Every volume runs 13 chapters, written in plain language for business owners who want to understand the categories before or during an advisory relationship. The titles are available at partnershiptaxbook.com, thescorptaxbook.com, ccorptaxbook.com, and therealestatetaxbook.com.
The advisory board the firm assembled includes Jacob Simany, Esq., who heads Simany Law and advises on IRS dispute resolution and tax controversy, and Michael Zara, Esq., a business attorney with an accounting background who holds a J.D. from the University of Denver Sturm College of Law and a B.S. in Accounting from Arizona State University. Zara is licensed to practice in Colorado, Arizona, Georgia, and North Carolina.
