Front page story in today’s Wall Street Journal, A Tax Man Takes Account of His Life: CPA Lives Better, Works Less Thanks to Art of Deduction, by Laura Saunders:

In the thick of tax season, most CPAs are chained to their desks grinding out returns. Doug Stives, a CPA from Red Bank, N.J., went skiing in Utah.

“I always dreamed of coming here for peak conditions,” he said in mid-March between runs at Snowbasin Resort. The trip is among the many perks that have accrued from his decision, in 2006, to become, in effect, The Most Tax-Efficient Man in America. The experiment has led to a new career, frequent travel and obsessive documentation of expenses, such as a $6 hot dog he recently bought in the Philadelphia airport.

The “aha” moment came to him, he says, after a college approached him about a teaching gig and he realized he could put into practice many of the tax strategies he had learned over the decades.

Step One was to change jobs. Mr. Stives had been a partner for 36 years at The Curchin Group, an accounting firm. By accepting an offer to teach tax and accounting courses full-time at the Leon Hess Business School of Monmouth University in New Jersey, he was able to tap into a broad array of tax-free employee benefits not available to him at the firm.

Step Two was the formation of Doug Stives LLC, the separate consulting business to which he attributes an impressive array of expenses. In general, people who are employees and have side businesses are often in the best position to maximize the tax code’s benefits, say experts. Mr. Stives calls this “the best of all worlds.”

The result, says Mr. Stives, is that while he earns less than 75% of his earlier pay, he takes home almost 90% as much. And he says he reaps another $40,000 a year in tax-free benefits from his college gig. Among other things, the school adds to his 401(k) contribution and provides tax-free, discounted health plans for Mr. Stives and his wife, plus disability insurance. As a partner in the accounting firm, he had to fund such expenses himself. …

The Schedule C form, used to report profit or loss from a business, is key to his strategy. On this form goes all of his income and expenses from his consulting work—advising clients, preparing returns, helping write textbooks and conducting continuing-education seminars that CPAs need to maintain their licenses.

Mr. Stives chooses the locations for his seminars, most of which are sponsored by accounting groups. Often he opts for vacation destinations like Hawaii or Yellowstone Park. “People learn better when they are relaxed,” he says.

Tax rules allow him to work for only three days of a 11-day trip and write off the airfare and a majority of other costs, he says. “To deduct the airfare, you have to spend more than half your working days on business, but travel days don’t count, and neither do weekend days you wouldn’t work anyway,” says Mr. Stives. “So I can leave on a Friday, teach for three days midweek, and return the following Monday.” …

Students say they especially enjoy his creative-deduction exercises. His latest challenge: “Say you have a friend who is a client and you charge him about $500 a year. You’d like to spend $2,000 on a big night in New York for two couples—limo, dinner, Carnegie Hall concert. What would allow you to take a deduction?”

The answer: “The client has a rich father who just died and you may get estate work.”