I’ve written continuing education full time since 2017: more than 200 courses and 400 credit hours for CPAs, enrolled agents, attorneys and financial advisers, approved by the IRS, NASBA, CTEC, the CFP Board and state boards of accountancy. Before that I taught graduate tax, auditing, business law and forensic accounting at East Texas A&M, from 2012 to 2017.
Earlier, I was general counsel and director of operations for a long-term care consulting firm, then did forensic and valuation work at Deloitte and CBIZ: multinational FCPA investigations, and compliance plans for companies dealing with the OIG or expecting to be soon. That work also meant a lot of fighting over pennies per square foot in a commercial lease, helping companies sue each other better, squeezing out more for this side versus that, when the whole thing needed to be rethought from the ground up. Like a matted dog: sometimes you just shave him down and start over. I pretty much always took the projects nobody had a model for, the ones with no plan to follow.
Before any of that, comparative literature at Brown, where I learned to read Proust and Faulkner closely, and more than once. I also TA’d three computer science courses, one of them in assembly language, which is its own kind of close reading. Law school and business school trained the same muscle on different texts. It’s the one I still use on the tax code and the rest of the law.
Every course here comes back to one question: what can you actually do? Most of us learned the rules as a list of ways to get in trouble. The same rules are why clients pay for your time, and why you can ask for the documents, decline the engagement, refuse to sign, and tell a client what the law requires and have it stick. Each course starts where you are, with a client’s facts in front of you, and works from the rule itself, named so you can go read it.
Sometimes the answer is that you can’t use the tool, or shouldn’t keep the client, or need to send the matter to someone else. That’s a professional answer, and the courses treat it as one. More often the answer is that you have more room, and more backing, than anyone in the room has told you. The signature is yours, and so is the judgment.
Kensho has no investors and sells no subscriptions, and every course is built for the person who has to sit through it, year after year. In the courses I write, the research, the argument and the voice are mine, and I make the infographics myself (mostly in Canva).
Every image on a course is there for a reason: the covers are licensed photographs and public-domain paintings, chosen to say something about what the course teaches, and the point is to keep human work in the picture.
Then I use AI to make all of it better. AI finds where an explanation loses the reader and where a point needs an example from real practice. I ask it how to make the dry stretches less dry without subjecting you to gimmicks.
AI also tests whether each chapter delivers what its objectives promise and whether the review questions test what the chapter taught. It stress-tests my arguments for the weak step and checks every authority a course cites against what the course says it says.
Working this way keeps me fluent in the tools, and that matters here: anything in the catalog that touches AI explains what the tools actually do and where they break, so you can use them without being replaced by them. None of it pitches a tool or sells you a magic “tech stack” or a list of prompts.
AI doesn’t do the teaching. The teaching is one person explaining something to another, and every course carries a licensed practitioner’s name as the person who answers for it.
When I bring other people in, for reviews, recorded explanations or the work behind the scenes, I pay them fairly for their work. Part of the reason Kensho exists is to have real work ready for experienced people whose jobs are next in line to get “automated.”
Everything here is meant to say one thing: the people making this know what your time is worth.
Kenshō (見性) is Zen for seeing your own nature, a first awakening. Rinzai Zen is named for Linji, a ninth-century Chinese master best known for shouting at his students until they woke up, and for telling them to quit deferring to masters. Including, presumably, him.
Nobody here is going to ask you to meditate, and nobody made me the one who gets to shout. But the work you do runs on public trust, whether it comes with a license, a credential or a PTIN, and that trust is what lets you say no, ask what the rule actually says, and decide what goes out under your name.
None of us has been asleep, exactly. The job just keeps handing you reasons it’s not your call: the client wants it, the software produced it, the partner already promised it, the deadline is tonight. It’s your call. That’s the job.
Nobody is getting enlightened over Schedule 1-A, and I’m not claiming otherwise. But there’s a person on the other side of everything you sign: their money, their case, their retirement, and their faith that whoever signed it knew what they were doing. All of it is riding on whether you’re awake.
IRS: Kensho Professional Development LLC is an IRS-approved continuing education provider. Completed hours are reported to the IRS under your PTIN.
Coming next: Texas and Illinois CLE, with each course submitted for accreditation on its own. CPE for CPAs through NASBA, investment adviser representative CE, and CFP Board credit will follow as the catalog grows.
Questions about courses, accreditation, or technical issues: admin@kenshopro.com