Monday Morning Accounting News Brief: PwC Concentrates New Hires in a Handful of Offices; Accounting as STEM Bill Gains a New Fan | 2.9.26

Fresh from Business Insider, PwC has slashed the office options for consulting new hires.

So far it’s only consulting, per BI.

The Big Four firm has limited hiring for new associates in the advisory division to 13 offices [from any of PwC US’s 72 offices], Yolanda Seals-Coffield, chief people and inclusion officer for PwC US, told Business Insider in an interview.

“The idea is that we want to bring people together in a connected way for those first couple of years,” she said. If that’s true then why so many people in India hmm.

Will other firms follow suit? Are we well and truly cooked, chat?

Here’s another recent one from BI: PwC is rethinking how to train workers in the Al era, and it’s betting on ‘skills, not titles’

Two EY India partners have been promoted to global jobs, reports India’s Economic Times:

EY Global has elevated two senior partners from the EY India practice to global leadership roles within the past week, highlighting the firm’s rising influence within the global EY network at a time when consulting-led growth, cross-border deals and the firm’s workforce in India are expanding at a rapid pace.

London-based Ram Sarvepalli, who earlier headed EY India’s consulting business and was most recently EY Global vice chair-consulting, has been appointed deputy global managing partner-client service at EY.

The other person is Ajay Arora, who used to run M&A for EY India.

The AICPA supports a bill that would classify accounting under STEM.

We of course are skeptical that this will benefit accountants on the ground in any appreciable way, as per usual.

JofA:

Two senators have introduced the Accounting STEM Pursuit Act, which would establish the accounting profession as a science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) career pathway, allowing students greater access to accounting programs.

The bill, introduced Thursday by Sens. Susan Collins, R-Maine, and Jacky Rosen, D-Nev., also would amend the Every Student Succeeds Act to allow K-12 grant funding to be used for accounting education programs.

“Accounting is a technology-powered profession, and STEM recognition simply reflects today’s reality,” Mark Koziel, CPA, CGMA, president and CEO of the AICPA, said in a news release. “Accounting today sits at the intersection of data, technology, and critical thinking — and that’s exactly what STEM is all about. Recognizing accounting as a STEM pathway will help schools introduce these skills earlier, expand access for students in every community, and build a stronger pipeline of future CPAs and finance leaders. This is a practical step to ensure the profession continues to serve the public interest and power economic growth in an increasingly digital world.”

Tampa Bay Business Journal wrote a fluff piece about KPMG’s Tampa MP Todd Webster “tackling the Big Four burnout problem.”

The TLDR is Covid made everyone realize there’s more to life than grinding away for a public accounting firm that will fire you the minute business gets tough so they are trying to spread out the hours.

Since Covid, people are more focused on work-life balance. We as a firm recognize that. We’ve made changes to our service delivery model to reduce overtime. But you’re still going to have overtime. That’s what I tell my daughters, including one who’s getting ready to graduate and look for a job. To be successful in any career, whatever it is, you’re going to have to work and put in the time, and it might be outside normal working hours.

But we recognize that public accounting can be a big burn; the January to March time frame could have hundreds of hours of overtime. We’ve changed, though, to spread that out over the year to get rid of those peaks and valleys and create a more predictable, manageable schedule.

I liked this quote: “That’s what people are asking for — a more predictable work-life balance. Nobody wants to work 80- or 90-hour weeks. It’s inevitable in public accounting, but we can minimize that,” he said.

Why must it be inevitable? Hey, at least we can dump all the busy work offshore now. That seems to be working really well.

A county in Ohio is warning citizens about property tax scams, specifically scammers cloning official websites and directing taxpayers to pay at these fake sites.

The Summit County Fiscal Office is warning property owners about fraudulent tax websites that use artificial intelligence to impersonate official government sites during property tax collection season.

Mike Migden, the Chief of Staff for the Summit County Fiscal Office, said scammers are creating fake websites designed to look like the county auditor’s office.

“Basically, trying to be the Summit County auditor. And we want to inform taxpayers and homeowners to be mindful of this fraudulent website,” Migden said.

*sigh* Can’t trust anything these days.

Shell has ditched EY and run into PwC’s arms

The change came about after a small kerfuffle about the old auditors not rotating audit partners like they were supposed to:

Shell has chosen PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) as its next auditor after a tender process, with PwC set to replace EY from 2027, the oil major said on Friday.

Britain’s Financial Reporting Council said in December it had opened an investigation into EY’s audit of Shell’s 2024 financial statements over potential breaches of audit partner rotation rules.

The situation led to Shell amending its annual reports for 2023 and 2024.

Japan’s new prime minister wants to hit the ground running with tax cuts, reports Reuters:

Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi renewed a pledge on Monday to cut a sales tax on food, after a historic election win brightened chances for stimulus measures that have rattled financial markets.

Takaichi’s ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) romped to victory in Sunday’s poll, helped by a pledge to ease household living costs by suspending for two years the tax of 8% on food, a move she has called a “long‑cherished dream”.

“Responsible, proactive fiscal policy is at the core of the … policy transition,” Takaichi told a news conference, promising “the earliest date possible” for the tax suspension, while ruling out fresh debt issuance to achieve it.”