Why some of our team is overseas

The world is shrinking, especially when it comes to business. These days it's not uncommon to have branches of your company exist outside the US. We’re no exception. In recent years, we’ve employed a group of tax professionals in India to support us in various tasks. 

That said, we get why this might be a topic of concern. After all, when you’re dealing with something as intimate as people’s taxes and accounting, they want to know that all that data is being handled with the utmost care and security. They might even be curious about why we would choose to employ a team overseas. So let’s answer some questions you might have. 

Who is employed by Kaizen overseas?

Our team in India consists of highly-vetted, credentialed professionals. Several are chartered accountants, who have taken the international CA exam and are fully capable to perform any and all tasks we ask of them. The Chartered Accountant designation is akin to the CPA designation here in the US. 

This isn’t some temp agency – we consider each member of this team to be a full-fledged member of the Kaizen team.  You can have the same confidence in our international team of accountants as you do in any of our trusted CPAs.

What kind of tax work do these overseas employees do?

When we service your accounts, we want our focus to be on growing your business. Often that means our accountants on THIS side of the ocean have to focus on bigger picture items. Our team in India provides invaluable support to us – here are just a few of the ways that they might work with us.

• Admin support
• Organization
• Initial reviews of tax returns
• Research
• Keying in tax returns
• Manipulating spreadsheets and recording data
• Entering info into an accounting system

How secure is our overseas team? Is it trustworthy?

It's natural to wonder about the security of information when working with an international team — and just know that we don't take that lightly. We're serious about data security and we understand the risks associated with data breaches. To protect against these risks, our organization runs regular data security measures, including regular software updates, data backups, employee training on security protocols, network monitoring, and access controls. We use encryption to protect sensitive data, and we have implemented multi-factor authentication to prevent unauthorized access. You can rest assured that your data is safe with us. 

In terms of communication, like we said: our India team is just like any other team in our firm. We have a US ops team that meets with our India team once a week. Our US managers meet with their assistant managers as frequently as daily. Additionally, we have a US partner travel overseas to the India office regularly. When we say that they’re a part of Kaizen, we mean it. They’re onboarded the same way as our US staff. The bookkeepers go through bookkeeping training, tax preparers go through tax return training. While some firms might outsource this work to a third party, we’ve purposefully homegrown ours so we know they have been trained exactly how our team in the US has. 

Why we have an overseas team

The answer is simple: they’re good and we have a need! Unfortunately for us, the talent pool for accountants is shrinking. The average age for an accountant is actually getting close to retirement age. Is AI an option? Unfortunately not, as it's currently behind the curve of the talent shrinkage. While it does exist, we can’t recommend it in its current state. On the other hand, our team in India has years of experience in accounting.

We trust our team in India implicitly and are so happy with the work that they do to keep our clients happy. They allow the accountants in the US to communicate regularly with our clients, help them plan bigger picture business growth, and STILL know that the basic monthly accounting tasks are on a rock solid foundation.

Want to learn more? Check out this article written by our team that explains even more about why we prioritize communication with our clients.