Hey. Can someone please tell me why it’s still 90 degrees outside? I’m beyond ready for fall already. ICYMI: An Accountingfly client is looking for people with seven or more years of accounting experience to help train the robots that will eventually replace you, give the listing a look and see if you’re interested.
Anyhoo, a bit of news…
In this news brief
Grant Thornton Explains Why They Can’t Suck
Grant Thornton had to defend its honor in Financial Times. That’ll surely silence the private equity critics.
Grant Thornton’s chief executive has hit back at critics of private equity ownership who warn that pressure for financial returns could lead to sloppy audits, arguing that it has sharpened the focus on quality.
Malcolm Gomersall said a majority investment in the UK’s sixth-largest accountant from European buyout group Cinven in 2024 had heightened scrutiny and the need to preserve the firm’s value for future buyers.
“At some point [Cinven] will exit and then we will go and have a different ownership. That involves a sale. You cannot sell something which has an awful reputation for quality because nobody will want to buy it,” he told the FT.
I mean, it happened once.
Another Banger From Paul Griggs
Bloomberg host asks PwC’s Paul Griggs about AI job losses. Can’t embed the video so here, have a transcript:
Host: Help me understand uh the impact that you see this happening on the the labor market. And so I look at there kind of being two poles here. One is, look, a lot of people aren’t going to lose their jobs. It’s going to help them do their jobs better. The other is inspired by more fear that we’re going to have AI replacing a lot of the work that we do day to day. That’s going to lead to more job losses. Jury’s still out on that or are you seeing a kind of any real notional impact here when it comes to the labor market?
PG: We put something out, David, and this is probably a month, month and a half ago on uh the AI dividend and the study, you know, looking at, you know, a billion job postings across the world, you know, studied to determine where do we see AI having an impact as it relates to jobs that are being created or jobs that are being, you know, ultimately eliminated in the process. And so there is professionalization of jobs and there is democratization of jobs as well. What what we see is that the professionalization element is and and when we stare at companies that are most exposed to AI, number one, you see the acceleration of productivity, but you also see those companies hiring more people. And so think about that. Companies exposed, most exposed to what AI can do are accelerating productivity, revenue per professional, and they’re hiring more people. I think that says something.
Host: You’re not immune to this, of course. Um what effect is it having on your business, your staffing when you look at the role of AI?
PG: We have 75,000 people in the US, 370,000 people globally. So so think of the scale of our business and in that regard. Um and our team is AI first, AI enabled or certainly that’s the intention and everything we do. There’s not a there’s not a piece of work that we do for our clients that does not take advantage of and apply and deploy the benefits that AI enables. You look at our business year over year, just in the US, we added 5,000 people year over year. The shape of that workforce does does change. So we have more engineers, more data scientists, you know, more more machine learning experts that we’re deploying inside teams. This two in the two in the box motion around an engineer alongside a business architect who understands the practical nature of how business gets done, that’s an effective model.
Host: So the reports of uh consulting being doomed by AI greatly exaggerated.
PG: I think anything as it relates to doom is exaggerated. And so inside our business, there is amazing opportunity for people. We are active on campus and we continue to add both at the entry level point, but also experience hires in in our business model.
What about offshoring tho?? No one thinks AI is taking their job…yet.
Clients Truly Are the Worst
Meanwhile, the DC office is feeling pressure from clients:
AI is resetting assumptions about how quickly professional services firms should move, and consulting clients are getting impatient.
“I am seeing clients ask for our help in delivering outcomes at a more rapid pace” compared to this time last year, Jeanelle Johnson, PwC’s managing partner for the Washington DC area, told Business Insider.
“Something that we might have said takes eight to 10 weeks; the expectation is probably half of that. The shelf life is half,” Johnson said.
It’s a Brave New World Out There
If you had asked us where the PCAOB’s most dissenting dissenter would have ended up after the PCAOB, we wouldn’t have guessed it’s signing audit reports for a tech-based startup but here we are. CFO Brew has the scoop:
PCAOB member Christina Ho made waves when she resigned from the audit oversight board in January 2026. A frequent dissenter, Ho, as the Wall Street Journal pointed out, “voted against more potential auditing rules than anyone in the PCAOB’s two-decade history.”
Now, she’s hoping to reshape the audit profession in a different way: by joining a startup, Oath Verified, that aims to use AI to make audits more accurate, effective, and, yes, cheaper.
As a regulator, “I was very passionate about speaking about how auditing can be reimagined because of technology and how it can be made so much better,” Ho told CFO Brew. At Oath, she said, “I get to help not only build the platform but build a methodology that is foundational” to it.
Other auditing startups purport to do the same thing, but Oath Verified is not just a SaaS company; it’s also a licensed CPA firm. Ho has signed her first report and plans to sign an audit opinion later this month, she said, and is gearing up to serve clients for the FY 2026 audit season.
Oh You’re Still Doing That Huh?
India is still on that “hey, let’s make our own Big 4 thing.” ET reports:
The push to build Indian accounting firms capable of taking on the global Big Four — Deloitte, PwC (PricewaterhouseCoopers), EY (Ernst & Young) and KPMG — is entering a more consequential phase.
The Institute of Chartered Accountants of India (ICAI) is preparing changes to the Chartered Accountants Act that could alter how Indian firms combine, raise capital and offer professional services, ET has reported today.
The move follows a year in which the government and ICAI have already tried to make consolidation easier, open global networking and create more opportunities for domestic firms. What is emerging now is less a plan to simply create four large audit firms than an attempt to build Indian professional-services groups with enough scale to compete globally.
An ICAI official said a proposal should be ready in two months. Alrighty then, we’ll be here waiting.
The Human in the Loop at KPMG
KPMG lead technical architect Justin Johnsen talks to Business Insider about what his job looks like now compared to six years ago when he started at the firm:
A lot of what I do now is AI. AI is incredibly capable, but it’s really only as good as its context. Much of my work is gathering the information needed for AI to generate valuable assets and artifacts, then spreading those outputs across client deliverables and software applications.
And that’s that. Give us a holla via email or text if you have a tip or story. Byyye.
