About the firm
The Donovan Company is a small, long-running CPA practice in Irvine, California. The firm has carried the Donovan name since 1986 — same focus, with most of us here for years.
Our history
The practice traces back to Simonis Moreland Accountants Inc., where Tom Donovan joined as a staff accountant in 1979 and was promoted to tax manager in 1981. In 1986 Tom purchased the firm from its previous owners, and it became The Donovan Company.
The firm worked from Newport Beach until 2008, when it relocated to Irvine — first to another office in Irvine, then to our current facility at 9930 Research Drive in October 2013. We’ve been there ever since.
Who we serve
Most of our work is for individuals, real estate investors, healthcare professionals, and small business owners. Our typical client has been with us for years, sometimes decades, and the relationship spans tax preparation, planning, entity decisions, and the occasional notice from the IRS or FTB.
New client work is by referral. We’re a small office and we keep our client load at a level where the person who signs your return is the same person who knows your circumstances.
What we don’t do
It’s as useful to know what a firm doesn’t do as what it does. We don’t perform financial-statement audits or other attest engagements. We don’t market aggressive tax-shelter products or strategies that depend on opinion letters from out-of-state promoters. If you’ve been pitched something that sounds too good to be true, we’re happy to give you our honest read — but we won’t implement it for you.
How we work
We went paperless in 2004 and have run on a custom-built workpaper system ever since. That’s where the substantive work of preparing your return happens; the completed workpapers feed into Lacerte, the professional tax software most CPA firms use, which handles the calculations and produces the final forms. Documents move to and from clients through a secure ShareFile portal.
Most of the firm’s internal tooling — document management, the workpaper system, internal automation — was built by Tom, who is a programmer as well as a CPA. He’s actively extending those systems with AI to handle routine internal work, so the people on the team can spend their time on the parts of a return that need human judgment rather than on data entry and routine processing.
A note on AI and your data. We use AI tools as part of our internal workflow — some running on hardware we own and operate in the office, others provided by outside services under written enterprise agreements. The right tool depends on the task; both are used when appropriate.
Wherever AI is used, the same protections apply: our written agreements with outside providers prohibit the use of our data to train public AI models and require enterprise-grade security and data-handling safeguards that aren’t available with consumer AI products. And every AI-assisted result is reviewed by the responsible CPA before it reaches a return or a client — the same professional judgment and quality control we apply to the rest of our work.
Our office
We’ve been at 9930 Research Drive in Irvine since October 2013. Normal hours are Monday through Friday, 8 AM to 4 PM, with longer hours during the busy season and a few summer Fridays worked from home. The phones are answered by people in this office, not a service.
Thomas G. Donovan, CPA owns the firm and has practiced continuously under the Donovan Company name since 1986. The firm is licensed by the California State Board of Accountancy.