A specialty corner of the code your clients are starting to ask about.

What is happening

Employer-provided child care credits used to be a footnote: small numbers, narrow eligibility, almost nobody claiming them. That changed with recent federal legislation, which materially expanded the credit and added a path for an intermediary to sit between the employer and the licensed care provider. New York and a few other states have layered state-level credits on top.

The result is the first situation in many years where some employers can actually structure a serious child care program and recover a meaningful share of the cost. We expect this to surface in client conversations over the next several quarters, especially among closely held businesses with parent-aged employees in New York.

Why coordinate with a specialty shop

The mechanics are straightforward in principle and finicky in practice. The arrangements typically involve:

• A written contract between the employer (or an intermediary) and one or more licensed child care providers, satisfying specific structural requirements.
• A written child care plan that satisfies fairness-of-access requirements whose specific contours are still being clarified.
• Coordination with related provisions covering employee-side exclusions, so the same dollar is not getting double-counted in a way that creates a problem on either side.
• State-level overlay where applicable, with conformity questions that vary by jurisdiction.

Doing this once for a single employer is a meaningful project. Doing it ten times is a practice. We have built the templates, contracts, and provider relationships that make it run cleanly, and we coordinate with your firm rather than competing with it.

How we work with CPA firms

• Referral. You send us a client who has asked about this. We do the structuring, plan documents, and provider contracting. You retain the tax engagement and prepare the relevant returns and forms.
• Co-servicing. We work jointly through the structuring phase, with your firm in the lead on the client relationship and on tax positions taken on the return. We document our side, you document yours.
• Background support. If a client has already designed something internally, we can review the structure and documentation against current best practice without taking the relationship.

Referral economics are flexible and disclosed. We know the rules around CPA referral fees and the relevant ethical guidance, and we stay on the right side of them.

What we are not

We are not a CPA firm. We do not give individual tax advice. We do not sign returns or take positions on your client's tax filings. We do the structuring, the contractual work, the provider network, and the compliance documentation. The tax engagement stays with you.

Important: this page is informational, not advice for any specific client situation. Specific facts, entity structure, and jurisdiction drive the answer, and the rules are still being clarified by the relevant authorities. We will tell you in plain English what we are confident about and what we are not.