With Greg Rozdeba (Co-Founder & CEO, Dundas Wealth) & Martin Ochwat (COO, Dundas Wealth)
It's the single most common thing incorporated business owners say when they first hear about corporate-owned life insurance. And it's a completely legitimate question. You trust your accountant. You've worked with them for 10, 20, sometimes 30 years. They know your numbers better than anyone.
In Episode 4 of Keep What You Build, Martin Ochwat sits down with Greg Rozdeba — Co-Founder & CEO of Dundas Wealth — to answer that question honestly, without throwing accountants under the bus. The short version: your accountant staying quiet on these strategies usually isn't a competence problem. It's a scope problem.
Your accountant handles the meat and potatoes — financials, compliance, keeping you onside with tax deadlines. Most great ones are overworked. Insurance-based tax strategies simply aren't the lane they live in day to day, and the more technical they get, the further they sit outside an accountant's core work.
"At the face of it, your insurance advisor talks to you about insurance. It's like the doctor example — your family doctor can tell you how your knee works, but they're not going to operate on it. When it comes to the specifics, a specialist usually makes more sense."
Greg's own background makes the point: he has a finance and accounting degree, and insurance never came up once in his entire time in school. Not because it isn't important — it's just not the scope of the work accountants are trained and built to do.
Good accountants are slammed — many aren't taking new clients. These conversations aren't billable, so they sit on the periphery of an already-full plate.
Insurance is a different domain. There are even specialties within insurance itself — and within corporate-owned life insurance specifically. High-level familiarity isn't the same as implementing it.
Most accountants aren't licensed to position insurance products. They can flag that you "should look into this," but they generally can't build the strategy or take you through underwriting.
Proposing a product outside their scope creates exposure their professional coverage may not protect. Smart CPAs stay in their lane — not because they don't care, but because crossing it creates risk.
The encouraging part: this is changing. Veteran accountants who've watched wealth transfer across generations tend to understand how powerful life insurance can be — and the best ones keep a trusted insurance advisor on speed-dial for exactly these conversations.
Because of the gap, there's a whole category of tax-efficient strategy that never comes up organically. Greg breaks down the four that most often fall through the cracks:
Tax-sheltered growth inside the corporation, with the death benefit flowing to your family through the Capital Dividend Account. The single most overlooked one.
The family-cottage problem: a property bought decades ago triggers a large capital gain on transfer. Life insurance pre-funds that bill so the next generation isn't forced to sell.
Insured Retirement Programs and Individual Pension Plans can supplement retirement income — powerful for the right business owner, but rarely surfaced without a specialist.
The agreement exists; the funding often doesn't. This one's more intuitive for accountants — "how do we fund it?" — which is why it comes up more than the others.
"You don't go to an accountant with little context and say 'how do I save money on tax?' It's the same with insurance. Tell me about yourself, your business, your plans. Everything is context-dependent — what fits a 30-year-old won't fit someone in their 70s."
Here's the counterintuitive move: if you've got retained earnings building up and you want to explore corporate-owned life insurance, don't start with your accountant. Start with a specialist who can run a proper needs assessment and build a concrete proposal — then put that proposal in front of your accountant to scrutinize.
It comes down to how everyone's compensated. The accountant bills by the hour; the advisor's legwork to put a solution together doesn't cost you. Let the advisor do the heavy lifting, then bring your accountant in to pressure-test something concrete — not pie-in-the-sky.
And accountant pushback is a good sign. As Greg puts it, he's far more concerned when an accountant doesn't push back — because that means nobody's critically examining the plan. A good accountant drilling you on the cons is exactly where you want to be.
If you're an accountant, this isn't about replacing you — it's about complementing what you do. Your client stays your client. When a question comes up, everything traces back to one thing: what problem are we actually trying to solve? If a client brings you something half-baked, it's fair to be skeptical. But if you have a reliable insurance advisor to lean on, hand it to them, let them do the needs assessment, and bring back something concrete.
Dundas Wealth keeps reference material for accountants and runs educational webinars for CPAs that can qualify for CE credits — the goal being to become a one-stop resource for life-insurance questions across Canada.
If you've got meaningful retained earnings inside your corporation and you've never had this conversation, the move is to have it — without committing to anything. Sometimes a 15-minute call surfaces a gap that's been quietly costing you for years.
You can book a free strategy call with Dundas Wealth below. We'll review your corporate structure, tell you honestly whether these strategies fit, and — if it makes sense — put a concrete proposal in front of you and your accountant.
Book a free strategy call with Dundas Wealth. We'll review your corporate structure, show you where the gaps are, and give you a straight answer — then put a concrete proposal in front of you and your accountant if it makes sense.
Book Your Free Strategy CallFree. No commitment. Bring your accountant if you'd like.