News
What Puts Your Healthcare Staffing Deal At Risk?
June 2026
I spend a lot of time inside travel healthcare and locum tenens organizations, usually when the stakes are high.
A deal is on the table. A lender is asking tougher questions. A partner wants liquidity. An IRS audit has been initiated. Or someone says, "We should probably clean this up before diligence starts."
What consistently surprises leadership teams isn't that there are questions, it's where they come from.
The business is often performing well. Revenue is strong. Margins make sense. Recruiters are producing. Clients are happy. On the surface, everything looks exactly the way it should.
Then someone starts pulling threads.
They ask why a particular entity exists and what it actually does. They ask how contractor classification decisions were made five years ago and whether the documentation still holds up. They ask why state tax filings look different from the way leadership thinks the business operates. They ask how compensation structures flow through the tax return, not how they look operationally, but how they're reported.
And that's usually when I hear: "We've always done it this way."
In healthcare staffing, that answer is incredibly common and increasingly risky.