A Direct Response to Hardball with Hitchner Issue 65/66
James Hitchner’s March/April 2026 issue of Hardball with Hitchner, which opens with what it calls Myth 39, devoted a substantial part to criticizing my article “Unimpeachable Substance and Principles: Business Valuation Standards and the Substance and Principles of USPAP,” published in NACVA QuickRead on March 12, 2026. I appreciate the attention. Criticism from a visible platform is an opportunity, and I intend to use it fully.
James Hitchner’s March/April 2026 issue of Hardball with Hitchner, which opens with what it calls Myth 39, devoted a substantial part to criticizing my article “Unimpeachable Substance and Principles: Business Valuation Standards and the Substance and Principles of USPAP,” published in NACVA QuickRead on March 12, 2026. I appreciate the attention. Criticism from a visible platform is an opportunity, and I intend to use it fully.
Let me be direct about what this reply is and what it is not. It is not a defense of my word choices. It is not a personal attack on James Hitchner, whose contributions to business valuation education over decades are real and worthy of acknowledgment. And it is emphatically not a retreat from the argument I made. This 26th article in the Unimpeachable Neutrality Series is a methodical demonstration that Hitchner’s rebuttal did not engage with the argument I actually advanced, and that the technique he employed—lifting sentences from context to construct a target easier to attack than the actual article—is a technique this profession should recognize and call out, regardless of who employs it.
My goal in writing the article, Unimpeachable Substance and Principles, was to end the unnecessary standards hierarchy debate by grounding it in analysis rather than advocacy. If that goal produces an article that Mr. Hitchner disagrees with, the professional and intellectually honest response is to engage the analysis. He did not.
The Deposition Transcript Problem
Every experienced expert witness has encountered this in the crucible of cross-examination: opposing counsel reads a single sentence from your report—lifted cleanly from its surrounding context, stripped of qualifying language, separated from the analytical foundation on which it rests—and asks you to defend it as though it existed in isolation. The technique works in courtrooms because juries sometimes cannot see what is happening. It should not work in professional discourse, because practitioners can read the source material themselves.
Hitchner quotes three passages from my article and labels the central one “the most egregious paragraph.” Let me reproduce that passage in full, exactly as it appeared in the article, and then reproduce the analytical context Hitchner omitted:
The passage Hitchner quotes reads, in relevant part:
“The ‘substance and principles’ framework establishes USPAP in a position of regulatory primacy. USPAP is the reference point against which all other standards are measured. That is an accurate description of the regulatory architecture, and it is the strongest regulatory position a standard can occupy.”
Hitchner calls this “wishful thinking” and “nonsense.” What he does not tell his readers is what the article said immediately before and after that passage, and what the phrase “substance and principles” was explicitly defined to mean within the article.
The argument was not that USPAP is methodologically superior to SSVS, ASA standards, or NACVA standards. The argument was architecturally specific and narrow: that within the federal regulatory framework established by Treasury Regulation §1.170A-17 and Treasury Circular 230, USPAP occupies a reference position that conforming standards must address to derive their legitimacy in federally regulated contexts.
The article further argued—at length—that the profession’s established practice of complying with the “substance and principles” of USPAP, rather than its form, is both legally defensible and professionally sound.
That is a regulatory architecture argument. It is not a general declaration of USPAP supremacy across all contexts. It is not a dismissal of SSVS, ASA standards, or NACVA standards as inferior. It is a description of how federal law is structured and what that structure means for practitioners working in federally regulated engagements.
Hitchner’s rebuttal to this regulatory architecture argument is his personal experience drafting SSVS, during which the AICPA task force reviewed standards from New Zealand and Canada and found them superior to USPAP in certain respects. That is not a rebuttal. It is a redirect.
Whether Canada’s standards are better crafted than USPAP is a legitimate and interesting professional discussion. I have engaged it myself in prior installments of this series. But the quality of international standards relative to USPAP is categorically irrelevant to whether §1.170A-17 and Circular 230 establish a federal framework that practitioners in tax-related and federally regulated contexts must navigate. Those are two separate questions. Conflating them—or substituting one for the other—is not analysis. It is a sleight of hand that this profession should be equipped to identify.
To be surgically precise, Hitchner does not cite §1.170A-17. He does not cite Circular 230. He does not engage the qualified appraisal requirements under §170 of the Internal Revenue Code. He does not address any of the federal regulatory text on which the article’s central argument rested. He says the argument is wrong because he spent seven years on a task force. That is an appeal to authority. Appeals to authority are not arguments. In the expert witness context, they would not survive Daubert scrutiny, and they should not survive professional scrutiny either.
What I Actually Argued, In Full Context
For readers who want to evaluate this exchange on the merits rather than on the authority of either party, here is the full architecture of the argument Hitchner was responding to.
The “Unimpeachable Substance and Principles” article argued that:
First, federal law—specifically §1.170A-17 and Circular 230—establishes requirements for qualified appraisals and qualified appraisers in which USPAP is expressly referenced as a standard against which conforming standards are measured.
Second, the profession has developed, over decades of practice and IRS interaction, an established framework for satisfying those federal requirements through compliance with the “substance and principles” of USPAP, rather than requiring USPAP compliance in its strict form. This framework exists precisely because SSVS, ASA standards, and NACVA standards each embody the substance and principles, even where they diverge from USPAP in form.
Third, and this is the point Hitchner most completely ignored, acknowledging USPAP’s position in the regulatory architecture is not the same as arguing that USPAP should govern all business valuation contexts. The article explicitly distinguished federally regulated contexts from the broader professional landscape. It acknowledged that in litigation, financial reporting, and other non-tax contexts, USPAP’s regulatory position is substantially different.
This is not a complicated argument. It is a careful one. Careful arguments require careful responses. Hitchner did not provide one.
My Position, My Credentials, and Why They Matter Here
I raise my professional background not to win an argument by credential, which would be precisely the argumentative vice I am criticizing in Hitchner’s response. I raise it because it is directly relevant to the question of intent and to the question of whether this series has an agenda.
I served on the NACVA Standards Board for a decade. I served as its Chair from 2018 to 2020. I currently serve on The Appraisal Foundation’s Appraisal Standards Board, the body that promulgates USPAP itself. I participate in NACVA’s AI and Machine Learning Commission. I have been retained in more than 3,000 expert engagements since 2011. I have written more than 25 installments of this series, each of which is publicly available and each of which can be evaluated for consistency, for methodology, and for whether it reflects the kind of advocacy Hitchner attributes to me.
Someone whose agenda was to elevate USPAP over NACVA standards would not spend a decade on the NACVA Standards Board working to strengthen those standards. Someone whose goal was to marginalize SSVS or ASA standards would not write articles arguing, as this series has consistently argued, that the profession’s multiplicity of standards reflects a healthy evolution that practitioners should understand rather than fear. The record of this series is the record. It is available for scrutiny. That is the nature of published work, and it is why the deposition transcript analogy is apt: when opposing counsel reads your sentence out of context, the remedy is to ask the finder of fact to read the full report.
I am asking Hitchner, and every reader of this article, to read my full article, free to the public; click here. I cannot provide a link to Mr. James Hitchner’s article, as it requires a subscription to obtain access.
A Pattern Worth Noting: Criticism Without Actionable Solutions
This reply would be incomplete without addressing something broader than Myth 39, because Myth 39 is not an isolated event. It reflects a pattern in Hitchner’s commentary that the profession should examine critically.
Consider the long-running debate over calculation engagements. For years, Hitchner has used Hardball with Hitchner to raise serious questions and pointed criticisms about calculation engagements; suggesting they create marketplace confusion, carry litigation risk, and produce results that may be misunderstood by unsophisticated users. These are not unreasonable concerns to raise. But ask yourself, across all of that commentary, has Hitchner provided practitioners with a clear, actionable framework for assessing when a calculation engagement may or may not be appropriate, how it should be scoped, what disclosures adequately manage the risks he identifies, and how a practitioner should explain the limitations to a client or a court? If you have been waiting for that framework, you have been waiting a long time.
The pattern is consistent: identify a contested issue, frame it as a myth or a problem, criticize existing practice or existing published work, and stop short of the actionable guidance that would help practitioners do their work better. The effect—whether intended or not—is to generate professional anxiety and subscription-worthy controversy without resolving it. Myth 39 follows this pattern exactly. Hitchner asserts that my article is misleading. He does not provide practitioners with a clearer or more useful analysis of the regulatory architecture questions the article addressed. He does not tell them what the federal framework requires. He does not explain how they should approach USPAP compliance questions in tax-related engagements. He tells them my article is wrong and moves on.
I do not raise this to be uncharitable. I raise it because the business valuation community deserves to evaluate what it is reading with clear eyes. A publication that brands itself “No bias. No agenda. No nonsense” should be held to that standard; especially when it uses that platform to criticize the published work of a practitioner who has no comparable distribution mechanism to reach the same audience. That asymmetry creates professional responsibility, and professional responsibility is the subject of this series.
A Public Invitation
I have significant respect for the forum that Hardball with Hitchner provides and for the work of the MythBusters group. The profession benefits from organized critical reviews of published work. It benefits even more from genuine debate conducted on the merits, transparently, in front of the professional community that must ultimately evaluate the arguments.
I am therefore extending a direct, public invitation to James Hitchner to engage the regulatory architecture argument on its merits. Cite the statutes. Engage §1.170A-17. Address Circular 230. Tell practitioners specifically what is wrong with the analysis; not the title, not a word choice, not a biographical credential, but the analysis. If the argument is wrong, demonstrating that with regulatory precision will be a genuine service to the profession and I will acknowledge it immediately and publicly.
If the argument is right—or partially right, or right in some contexts and not others—then the profession deserves that acknowledgment too. We are not adversaries. We are both, ostensibly, trying to help practitioners do their work better. The way to do that is to follow the argument wherever it leads, even when it leads somewhere inconvenient.
That is, after all, the definition of unimpeachable neutrality.
What I Stand Behind
I stand behind the regulatory architecture argument in “Unimpeachable Substance and Principles.” I stand behind the narrow, specific claim that federal law creates a reference framework that practitioners in tax-related and federally regulated engagements must understand and navigate, and that USPAP occupies a defined position in that framework regardless of how one feels about USPAP’s relative methodological quality.
I stand behind the title of this series. Unimpeachable neutrality is not a boast about any article. It is an aspirational standard for expert conduct, a standard this series has examined from every angle across nearly 10 years of installments. It means following the evidence. It means acknowledging when the analysis leads somewhere professionally uncomfortable. It means not adjusting your conclusions to accommodate your audience or your platform.
And it means responding to criticism in exactly the way I am doing here: directly, on the merits, in public, with the source material available for verification.
The record of this series stands. I welcome scrutiny of it. I welcome a response.
Zachary Meyers, CPA, CVA, is the managing member of C. Zachary Meyers, PLLC, specializing in litigatory accounting and valuation services. He has been retained in over 2,900 matters since 2011, as a testifying expert, consulting expert, or neutral/court appointed expert qualified in forensic accounting, business valuation, pension valuation, and taxation. Mr. Meyers has held multiple influential roles on national and international standard setting bodies, where he has made significant contributions to the financial disciplines at the highest levels of the National Association of Certified Valuators and Analysts (NACVA), Global Association of Certified Valuators and Analysts (GACVA), and The Appraisal Foundation (TAF).
Mr. Meyers can be contacted at (304) 690-2619 or by e-mail to czmcpacva@czmeyers.com.
