Education & Training
- CICA In-Depth Tax Course, Parts I & II
- Corporate Reorganizations (In-Depth)
- iBBA (Honours), Schulich School of Business, York University
"Let's talk, plan, and optimize — your tax position today, and your family's wealth for the years ahead."
Mariya Honcharova, CPA, CA
Professional Profile
Mariya is a senior Canadian tax professional with 15+ years advising complex, multi-jurisdictional private businesses, family offices, and private equity firms. A former Partner at RSM Canada with Big 4 roots at Deloitte, she brings deep technical expertise alongside a demonstrated ability to navigate sensitive family, ownership, and C-suite dynamics with clarity and discretion.
Trusted by owners, CFOs, legal counsel, and family advisors, Mariya translates complex tax positions into clear, actionable advice — managing competing stakeholder expectations through estate transitions, M&A events, and major business decisions.
Why a Boutique Practice
Large firms develop extraordinary expertise. The people are excellent, the technical depth is real, and the reputation matters. But the model carries trade-offs that become visible over time.
Clients who pay for senior-level advice don't always receive senior-level attention throughout an engagement. Projects accumulate coordination overhead. Billing rates reflect the cost structure of the firm rather than the value of the advice. And in the middle of managing a large practice, the conversations that matter most — the ones that happen before a decision is made, while there's still room to plan — get crowded out.
The clients who feel this most acutely are owner-managed businesses. The work they need isn't identical to what a much larger company requires — but an estate freeze, a reorganization, or a sale structure has to be designed by someone of the same calibre regardless of the size of the business behind it. Get it wrong at ten million and the consequences are proportionally just as severe.
Yet these owners sit below the threshold where a national firm's service model is built to serve them well. So they either pay rates calibrated to a different kind of client, or they work with advisors who handle compliance capably but reach for the phone when a freeze or a section 85 rollover comes up.
For a business that represents most of an owner's net worth, neither is a good outcome. This practice exists to close that gap.
Career
Areas of Expertise
Approach
The most valuable advice a tax advisor can give happens in the conversation before the decision — not in the memo that explains what already happened. That's the standard this practice is built to meet.
The client base is intentionally focused. Every client works with Mariya directly — no handoffs, no junior staff managing the relationship. Questions get answered by the person who understands the file.
Much of this work sits at the intersection of tax, family, and business. Estate transitions and business sales are rarely purely technical exercises; they involve people with different interests, different information, and different levels of comfort with what's being proposed. Translating complex positions into plain language — and managing competing expectations honestly — is as much a part of the work as the structuring itself.