- CPA firms that join the Due Diligence Project typically see their practice valuations increase 5x — not by working more hours, but by finally having access to peer-reviewed advanced tax strategies their best clients have always needed.
- 18% of Fortune 500 companies pay zero taxes. Alex Sonkin built an infrastructure to give elite CPAs access to the same strategies — peer-reviewed by practitioners with 10,000 to 50,000+ hours of tax and audit experience.
- The Due Diligence Project community has facilitated over $300 million in charitable gifts, supporting more than 400 families through the Mitchell Thorpe Foundation — a downstream result of the planning strategies it enables.
- Alex’s seven-year partnership with Influential Advisor Media maps directly onto the Authority Operating System: a book, annual summits, podcast presence, and now AI-native infrastructure — each pillar building on the one before it.
- A platform with 20 years of results still needs a book — not because the book replaces the work, but because it makes all of that work searchable, shareable, and waiting for the right CPA at the right moment.
Alex Sonkin is the founder of The Due Diligence Project, a peer-reviewed tax strategy community that has spent two decades vetting and distributing the most effective advanced tax mitigation strategies in the country. We started working together in 2018, and I have had a front-row seat to how a platform this good gets the attention it deserves.
A year into that partnership, in 2019, I had Alex on The Influential Advisor Podcast for the first time, when the Due Diligence Project was already one of the most sophisticated communities serving elite CPA firms in the country.
We recently sat down again for a new episode of The Influential Advisor Podcast. What struck me this time was not what Alex had built — I had watched that unfold up close across seven years. It was the specificity of the results. The CPA firms whose practices look unrecognizable compared to when they joined. The business owners whose tax bills dropped by 60%, 90% on a sale. The hundreds of families whose medical bills got paid because a planning strategy Alex’s community helped design generated a charitable gift none of those families expected.
That is what this platform actually does. And it starts with a gap in the profession that Alex identified 20 years ago and refused to stop closing.
The Question Most CPAs Can’t Answer Honestly
Here is something Alex has said that has stuck with me. He asked: if you call yourself a proactive planning CPA, if you pride yourself on bringing great ideas to your highest-value clients, where are those ideas actually coming from?
For most CPA firms, the honest answer is: nowhere good enough.
The best CPA firms in the country are spread impossibly thin. They are producing hundreds of tax returns, managing financial statements, handling audits, staying current on a tax code that now exceeds 150,000 pages. Their highest-net-worth clients expect sophisticated planning — the kind that can reduce a tax bill by 60% or more on a major liquidity event. But completing rigorous due diligence on an advanced tax strategy requires access to peer-reviewed research, thought leaders in narrow specialty areas, and a community of tax-focused CPAs with deep audit and tax court experience. Almost no CPA firm has built that infrastructure on their own.
The consequences for the CPA who stays stuck are real. The CPA who does nothing loses the client to an advisor who will surface the gap. The CPA who refers the work out loses the relationship to whoever they referred to. Neither outcome is acceptable. And yet, for most CPA firms, there has been no third option. Until now.
The CPA is not the problem. The network behind them is. That gap is what Alex set out to close — not by building another network of specialists chasing CPA referrals, but by building the infrastructure that lets the CPA be the hero: the one with access to the best ideas, the confidence to recommend them, and the peer-reviewed backing to sign the return.
What Happens When a CPA Joins
When a CPA comes into the community, they download what Alex calls the “hot sheet” — the current top-ranked strategies, peer-reviewed and ranked by the community the way Netflix surfaces its top shows. That peer review is done by tax-focused CPAs with at least 10,000 — often 50,000 — hours of experience in audit and tax court. Not popular opinion. Earned expertise.
The CPA does not have to start from scratch. They do not have to cold-call specialists and hope they are credible. They step into a facility that has been built and refined for 20 years.
What that facility produces is specific. A client selling a company faces a capital gains bill. The CPA, plugged into the Due Diligence Project network, brings in a strategy that eliminates 90% of that tax. The client saves millions. The CPA charges a planning fee that is a fraction of the value delivered — and earns it. That business owner tells two partners at their country club. Both of those partners call the CPA.
The community now also supports elite financial advisors — “lead advisors” — who want to bring tax planning ideas to their clients, work alongside CPAs, and add real value without being the tax specialist themselves. The platform has grown beyond its original CPA-only model to reflect how the best advisory relationships actually work.
The Results That Don’t Show Up on a Balance Sheet
Alex is competitive. Coaching his kids’ flag football teams to championships and coaching CPA firms to completely different practices come from the same place in him. He wants his teams to win. And the way he defines winning is specific: “When you deliver massive value to another human being and they show you their heart with appreciation — that is just fun. That’s a win.”
But what he described next was not a number on a spreadsheet. It was the Mitchell Thorpe Foundation — a Southern California charity that supports families with critically ill children, covering medical bills and giving families the financial breathing room to focus on their kids. Over the years, as Alex’s community has helped business owners design charitable planning strategies around major liquidity events, a portion of those gifts have gone to the Foundation.
Alex also supports a church in Pakistan — a 99.9% Muslim country — that has grown to two buildings under his sponsorship. The pastor there won a humanitarian award for what the congregation has done in one of the poorest communities in the world.
This is not a sidebar to what Alex does. It is the reason he does it. The tax strategies are the mechanism. The planning fees are the measure of value delivered. But what gets created downstream — for families whose bills get paid, for communities that get supported, for CPA firms whose entire professional identity changes — that is what keeps Alex building.
Seven Years, Five Pillars
Alex is one of the longest-standing partners of Influential Advisor Media. What we have built together maps closely onto the Authority Operating System — not because we were following a template, but because the same logic that makes the AOS work kept revealing itself in what Alex needed next.
The Due Diligence Project book is the foundation everything else rests on. It names the mission, documents the system, and exists permanently as a searchable, citable, shareable asset. Before the book, the platform lived in conversations and summit presentations. After it, CPAs could read the entire system — the peer-review model, the three value buckets, the virtual family office framework — before getting on a call. They arrived already oriented.
The annual virtual summits are the COI Referral Engine at work. Every year since 2018, the Due Diligence Project has brought together member CPA firms and the leading specialists in advanced tax strategy. New strategies get introduced. Existing ones get pressure-tested against what the IRS is doing now. CPAs considering joining get to see the depth of the platform firsthand. Every CPA firm that attends becomes a more active advocate. Every specialist who presents becomes a referral source.
The summits build depth inside the community. The podcast presence extends reach outside it. Alex has appeared on The Influential Advisor Podcast across seven years — in 2019, in a second appearance featuring the audiobook, and now in Episode 098. He has also guested on many other podcasts and built his own show with our support — adding channels that reach CPAs who would not have found the platform on their own.
The book, the summits, the podcast episodes, and the AI-driven marketing infrastructure Alex is now building create a body of content that search engines and AI systems can index and cite. When a CPA asks an AI assistant about peer-reviewed due diligence for advanced tax strategies, the Due Diligence Project should be the answer they get. A platform with 20 years of results still needs a book — not because the book replaces the work, but because it makes all of that work searchable, shareable, and waiting for the CPA who needs it at 11pm.
Alex was one of the earliest voices in this space to articulate what AI would mean for advanced tax planning. His community’s CPAs already use AI to run preliminary due diligence and identify weak points in strategies before bringing them to specialists. Alex is now building an AI-native infrastructure for the platform itself: a website with AI facilities built in and marketing systems that extend the community’s reach without requiring additional headcount.
The Bottom Line
When I first sat down with Alex Sonkin in 2019, I recognized something clearly: here was a person who had built something genuinely world-class and was still largely unknown outside the community he had personally built. The expertise was exceptional. The system worked. The results for member CPAs were real. What was missing was the authority infrastructure that would carry all of it to the CPAs who had never been in the room.
What I know now, seven years later, is that the results were even more significant than I understood then. CPA firms whose valuations have climbed 5x. Business owners whose tax bills on major sales were reduced by 90%. More than $300 million in charitable gifts flowing to families and communities because a planning strategy made that kind of generosity possible. That is not a platform description. That is a track record.
If you are a CPA and you recognize the gap Alex described — if you know your best clients are paying more tax than they should and you do not yet have the infrastructure to change that — the Due Diligence Project is worth a close look. What Alex has built is not a product. It is a community with 20 years of peer-reviewed work behind it, designed specifically to give you access to what your clients have always needed.
Frequently Asked Questions
Alex Sonkin is the founder of The Due Diligence Project, the leading peer-reviewed advanced tax strategy community for elite CPA firms and virtual family offices in the United States. He is the author of The Due Diligence Project: How Open Source, Peer-Reviewed Due Diligence Is Supercharging Elite CPA Firms and Family Offices While Disrupting a Multi-Trillion Dollar Industry, published through Influential Advisor Media. A University of Michigan Business School graduate and former options floor trader, Alex co-founded Go Macro, a nutritional brand generating nine figures in annual revenue, and has spent more than two decades building the infrastructure that gives elite CPAs access to the most effective advanced tax mitigation strategies in the country.
- Alex Sonkin’s story started with a platform, grew through annual summits, and reached a new level when it had a book behind it. If you’re a financial professional ready to build authority infrastructure that works while you sleep, the Authority Operating System shows you how. Explore the Authority Operating System
- The Short Book Formula helps financial advisors, CPAs, and life insurance producers write and publish their book in as little as six weeks — and use it as the foundation for every other pillar of their authority. Grab the free audiobook to get started. Get the free audiobook of The Short Book Formula
