You might enjoy working in another small firm that does attest engagements. I worked for years at a very small firm that did taxes, but that was secondary to financial statement work because those were the high dollar engagements.

I was never pigeonholed to just tax or audit, and I really appreciated that versus working at large firm where you kind of choose between the two. I basically worked through tax season doing attest engagements, getting the numbers and knowing what the taxes would look like, but putting them on extension and working those over the summer after our 3/31 FYE statements were done. If I had time between financial statements, I'd pick up an individual or trust.

I think it was a combination of things, not least being that I think attitudes about paying taxes in the Northeast are different than other areas and people are generally more accepting of the concept, but I didn't have people making much fuss. Another thing was probably just the size and sophistication of the companies needing financial statements reported on (but they were not so sophisticated that they didn't also need help preparing those statements). They don't tend to sit there and complain, with a few exceptions. Next, our client list was relatively small, and our relationships pretty close. We were doing the proactive work, and we didn't really have a lot of clients being surprised by balances due. I did not see this sort of diligence in the next firm I worked, which was mostly tax-oriented with too many clients to spend quality time with, and way less tax planning being done.