Requests for small business startup support from Hispanic neighbors are increasing, and I expect that to accelerate. Likewise, requests for more complex tax problem resolution are increasingly coming from individual Spanish-speaking folks as well. Hispanic students are the largest group in our local public school systems. My estimate from the most recent district reports to NJDOE for the year ended 2024 puts countywide public school enrollment at roughly 55% Hispanic, against a county population figure closer to 35%. That gap is the forecast. Those students will be the business owners and employees I serve over the next fifteen years.
A majority of the workers in the industries I serve, which are farming, contracting, and fishing, also appear to be Hispanic based on surnames in the payroll records I process. That is an impression rather than a count. Language matters most in that setting, because payroll and benefits communication has to reach every employee, not just the owner who hired me.
I think the local conversation goes wrong by treating this as one problem. Many Hispanic families here are long established, fully bilingual, and English dominant. When I fail to connect with a business owner in that group, language is rarely the reason. The reasons are that nobody in the family has paid for advisory work before, that the trades run on cash and the records are imperfect, and that my fee is a real number against a thin first year. Those are trust and pricing problems. Translating my engagement letter does not touch them. For more recent arrivals, the language barrier is genuine, and translation is necessary but nowhere near sufficient.
The standard answer is to bring bilingual young people into the profession. I believe in it and yet I cannot fund it. My estimate from the last interns I hired is roughly two years of negative cash flow, and I rarely keep an associate longer than that. I would love to see tighter integration of education and internships, but the current system seems ineffective for my industry. A few years ago I tried working through the NJCPA to find an internship for a student interested in working with a CPA firm and the closest opportunity was an hour’s drive north of Cumberland County. The NJCPA is heavily involved in recruiting for the accounting industry, but internship opportunities are lacking in this region.
My current workaround is communicating through a client’s family member, meeting face to face to pick up non-verbal communication, and speaking slowly. This works, but it carries a risk. Family interpreters soften hard news, and some folks lack the vocabulary for a full understanding of the legal issues. The exposure from that gap stays with me.
Many suggest leaning in to translation technology. I am skeptical based on limited past experience, and on the fact that the legal or technical words I need to get right in tax and benefits work may not have reliable equivalents in another language. I will test some new tools this month rather than argue about them, and will welcome discussion on what I find with neighbors and peers.
Over the longer term, I hope to pursue a co-engagement with an established bilingual bookkeeper, where that person controls intake communication and I handle the technical work.
