Jasmine DiLucci, the owner of the Dallas, Texas-based DiLucci CPA Firm, has built a strong following on social media, particularly due to her content around tax law. If a CFO has finance team members who are looking up finance and accounting content online, DiLucci has likely come across their feeds and reels. She has over 200,000 followers on Instagram and nearly 400,000 subscribers on YouTube.
DiLucci’s style of calling out bogus financial influencers from across social media has helped her build her brand and grow her business, but now she’s also focusing on creating niche long-form video content. Her most recent video dives into the tax qualifications around the material participation rule.
In an interview with CFO.com, DiLucci shared her experience with exploring a new format, insights into the production process, how CFOs may be overlooking tax benefits, her strategy for developing and motivating young finance talent and more.
Jasmine DiLucci
Tax attorney, principal and owner, DiLucci CPA Firm
Notable previous positions:
- Tax staff, EY
This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
ADAM ZAKI: Why did you choose the topic of material participation for your new video?
JASMINE DILUCCI: Real estate is one of the hottest topics right now. Many people who are in business, or who are employees, either own or are interested in real estate. We hear about the tax benefits in real estate, but typically that’s where the advice stops. Many of the details required to implement real estate tax benefits are glossed over.
I wanted to explain an area that protects a critical tax benefit for most people in real estate: material participation requirements. Whether you’re a real estate professional or investing in a short-term rental, one of the biggest hurdles is meeting those requirements. I went a little niche here on one of the requirements: travel time. But that’s because every real estate owner has it and almost everyone online is giving the wrong advice.
Lots of finance leaders and business owners don’t really understand this stuff because they haven’t spent the time to fully look it up, and I thought it would be interesting if I did, so I went and pulled up the tax law. Although we don’t have clear guidance from the IRS, we do have a lot of court cases that provide us a clear answer on when travel time counts as a part of your material participation log.
How much prep work goes into doing a video in this format?
DILUCCI: About 30-40 hours of research prep, so I end up working around the clock most of the time. But I love it. I do my regular work during the day, and then I take time to research at night and on weekends. Research takes the most amount of time; the recording itself isn’t that hard because by that point, I am prepared and know what I want to say. I usually spend most of the time rewriting and synthesizing the tax research since the most important part is to make the tax law understandable to people who do not have a foundation in tax.
Do you think there are tax benefits like material participation that CFOs across industries may overlook?
DILUCCI: Yes. While the topic of material participation often applies to business owners, CFOs of companies who qualify for these benefits would be interested as well. For material participation, it’s important to determine whether the activity is passive or non-passive, which can change the tax benefit. It’s about knowing the rules when determining tax benefits. In this instance, it’s not only making sure the type of travel being done is the right type of participation but also making sure the business keeps the right documentation to support the tax position.
What advice would you give to a CFO who steps into a mid- to large-size company and says, “I want to collaborate and get more involved with my tax team, but I don’t know how?”
DILUCCI: I think, first off, they have to understand a bit about tax law, because if you don’t understand it, it is going to be very difficult to delegate. This goes beyond something like material participation; this happens all over the tax side of business. As an example, if the tax team says the material participation was active and they put it on the return, and the CFO goes along with it because the tax team said so, that can cause serious issues if the IRS comes in and makes them prove they meet the requirements — and the CFO says, “Wait, what’s the rule exactly?”
In a typical business, I don’t think many companies are keeping sufficient support on file for these types of areas like material participation. I’ve had clients with really expensive attorneys and great CFOs, but sometimes the tax support gets overlooked and isn’t found until an audit.
To your knowledge, are there any types of technology that can track and determine what types of tax benefits an organization is qualified for based on its business and operational data?
DILUCCI: Not off the top of my head, but I imagine it couldn’t be that hard. I would think it would be easy to pull information from emails or calendar information and bring it to a summary of activities. Most companies now just keep a time log or a calendar and rely on tax professionals to determine the benefits.
Based on your findings within your business and social media development, are there any improvements in the waning interest in finance and accounting among younger people?
DILUCCI: In my own firm, yes. I don’t believe it’s that people don’t want to be accountants; I think it’s that people want to be valued and spend time on work that’s meaningful. Accounting firms often keep more traditional operations — working around the clock with very repetitive work with little meaning — so if the firm does not know how to create a positive environment and find meaning in the work, then today someone who is an accountant can easily go somewhere else, which is often out of the profession.
“I’ve had clients with really expensive attorneys and great CFOs, but sometimes the tax support gets overlooked and isn’t found until an audit.”
Jasmine DiLucci
Principal and owner, DiLucci CPA Firm
In my firm, I have been fortunate to find amazing talent and I think it’s because of how we operate. It’s not that the next generation doesn’t want to work as hard; it’s that they want to enjoy their work. They know they don’t need to stay somewhere they hate for years. They have options.
I think larger companies struggle with this because leadership says, “Well, it’s just accounting.” If you give young people a mission where they can help grow the business, and they can add value at a higher level where they aren’t just plugging in numbers but actually impacting the business, I think it’s easier to attract young people and keep them in the profession. But if young accountants continue to have bad experiences and work in roles that aren’t fulfilling, they may think, “I hate accounting” or “I hate tax,” and not pursue the field, when they could have enjoyed it with a better work environment.
At my firm, we are the opposite of that. We are on a mission to educate the world about real tax law so we can provide better services to our clients and greater opportunities for our employees. I think a big part of this is also educating my employees. I love doing that just as much as I love creating content because I want them to learn and grow in their own careers just like our viewers. I think that’s how we are driven as humans — we are motivated by progress and fulfillment. When you come to that realization, it makes developing culture that much easier.
