Key Takeaways
- New Tax Goddess clients begin with a one-hour review of old returns, followed by a review that spans more than 900 separate line items.
- Tax Goddess ranks legal strategies against each client’s stated risk appetite rather than offering a single standard plan.
- Tax Goddess pricing is available in three fixed tiers ranging from $10,000 to $350,000, quoted in full before any work starts.
When prospective clients come to Tax Goddess, the process starts with a one-hour consultation. The team reviews earlier returns, looking for opportunities where the owner may have paid more tax than necessary. If no significant opportunities are found, the team says so transparently. Once a client signs on, the relationship opens with a review that spans more than 900 separate line items. It takes in income, business entities, property, and whatever the owner intends to do over the next decade. What comes back is a picture of the client’s finances through a tax lens, with each element positioned like a piece on a chessboard.
Shauna A. Wekherlien, CPA, MTax, CTC, CTP, CTS, opened the practice in 2004. Over those years, her team has documented client savings of more than $2.35 billion, alongside an average client tax rate of 6.92 percent. By the firm’s own reckoning, results like those rank her inside the top 1 percent of tax strategists. Of the 660,000 CPAs working in the United States, she is among the 15 who hold her designation.
Reengineering the Traditional Accounting Model
Years of preparation preceded Shauna’s opening a firm of her own. A Master of Taxation followed her CPA license, along with a run of specialist designations. She put that education to work at major accounting and consulting firms, including KPMG. Her own practice grew out of those years into a consultancy shaped around entrepreneurs. Today her client list runs to wealthy families nationwide, described in the trade as High-Net-Worth (HNW) and, at the upper end, Ultra-High-Net-Worth (UHNW).
One principle sits under the rebuild. Compliance work means filing returns after a year has already closed. It can do no more than report a bill the owner has finished creating. Planning done while the year is still open moves that bill. The same reasoning carried into how the firm charges, and hourly rates gave way to fixed prices.
That pricing took effect in July 2026, coinciding with the firm’s 22nd anniversary. Owners now pick their level of involvement at the start. Foundation Strategy, at $10,000, suits larger businesses that want to handle much of the execution themselves or need savings quickly. Custom Build, at $65,000, covers three years of direct strategy work and implementation. It is aimed at established owners with taxable income above $1 million. Empire, at $350,000, is built for UHNW founders with net worth exceeding $50 million. There the questions turn to layered income and estate planning, meant to hold wealth together as it passes down. Every figure is quoted before the engagement begins.
The Chessboard, the Dragon, and the Eight Out of Ten
Each candidate strategy lands somewhere on the firm’s Aggression Scale™. Down at zero, in Shauna’s telling, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) has no reason to call. Only a random audit would pull the file. A nine is what she calls Al Capone territory, where someone bends the rules and gambles on never being noticed. Ten ends in prison. Owners name their own number anywhere from zero through eight, and no plan the firm writes goes past eight. An eight sits comfortably inside the law, though holding that position means documenting every step well enough to survive scrutiny.
“Extreme tax savings are never one-size-fits-all,” Shauna explains. “I sometimes call myself a red-headed fire-breathing dragon sitting on top of a pile of gold coins, where each gold coin is a strategy that we can utilize to help a client in the appropriate situation with the appropriate facts and circumstances.”
Structural Engineering for the Top 1 Percent
Shauna separates her practice from the newer tax outfits she describes as spending heavily on advertising and lightly on technical work. Against them, Tax Goddess sets 22 years of continuous training and a working catalog of more than 1,800 active strategies. Breadth of that kind, the firm argues, is what lets a plan be fitted to one client’s circumstances rather than pulled off a template.
Tax work at this level resembles structural engineering more than accounting. It draws on corporate law, trust law, property law, and partnership law. Those rules are then applied across several business entities that may be located in different states. Custom Build and Empire clients see that as advanced entity structuring. Familiar pieces include 831(b) captive insurance companies, which let a business insure its own risks through an insurer it owns. Others are optimized gift trusts and full use of Section 1202, the provision that can shield gains on Qualified Small Business Stock (QSBS) from federal tax.
Forbes and Entrepreneur have both carried Shauna’s thinking to national readers. Her latest book, The 6% Life: 7 Strategies That Successful Entrepreneurs Use to Reengineer Their Life to Consistently Pay Less Than 6% in Taxes, lays the method out at length. Teaching continues past the page as well. The firm hosts webinars, hands out reference guides at no charge to business owners and property professionals, and funds a scholarship for students. Behind all of it sit 22 years of practice, a team working across borders, and that $2.35 billion in savings.
About Tax Goddess
Guided by the mission to CRUSH YOUR TAX BILL: Tailored Tax Solutions for Successful Business Leaders, Tax Goddess is led by Shauna A. Wekherlien, CPA, MTax, CTC, CTP, CTS. Nationally known as the Tax Goddess and featured in Forbes and Entrepreneur, the firm specializes exclusively in advanced, proactive income and estate tax planning for business owners and High-Net-Worth individuals. With over two decades of experience and more than $2.35 billion in documented client savings, Tax Goddess focuses on legally aggressive tax mitigation, entity structuring, and long-term wealth preservation. For more, visit: https://taxgoddess.com/
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