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The AICPA Wants Your Thoughts on What the Future Holds for CPAs

Now is your chance to tell the AICPA exactly where you think the industry is headed in the future. CPAs don’t get many chances to be this candid about their chosen profession, so please make it count.

CPA Horizons 2025, coined “the profession’s effort to anticipate and plan for the future,” is a short survey that seeks to get professionals’ opinions on where the industry is going and the challenges it faces to get there. Participants are faced with the following directive:

Growing global competition, rapid technological development and increasing regulation are impacting the CPA profession today and will continue to in the coming years. As a result of the changing environment, how can the profession remain competitive? Will services being requested of the profession change? Will the profession’s core values, core services and core competencies remain the same or need to change to allow the profession to continue to best serve its clients and employers?

CPA Horizons 2025 is about your future and the future of your profession. It’s about forging a path to ensure both remain competitive in a rapidly changing world. Your participation in this profession-wide endeavor is vital in helping shape our collective future.

We are soliciting the thoughts of thousands of CPA’s along with other voices via this interactive survey, online discussion forums, in person forums and direct outreach to AICPA committee members, leaders in the profession and beyond. We ask for 15 minutes to help map out the next 15 years. Your 15 minutes will be on a limited # of questions that is a subset of a larger group of questions which will serve to identify what is on the Horizon impacting the profession. Your participation is important. What may the future hold? Help tell us.

Beyond answering simply yes or no questions based on pre-determined criteria, you will have the opportunity to write in your answers regarding trends, opportunities and challenges facing the profession. You will also get an entire box to fill in what you think the profession should do to remain relevant, a huge opportunity for those of you who feel the current food chain just isn’t doing it for you.

And then you get to watch a video. Frankly I’ve got to say this video was pretty depressing, showing how the U.S. is falling behind in the global scheme of things, continuously getting spanked by India and China when it comes to science, math and the economy. Ouch.

Take the survey here.

Despite Being a ‘Wreck of a Man,’ Allen Stanford Managed to Fire Another Attorney

Things are not going so well for the Stan as he awaits trial in H-town.

For starters, he managed to fire another lawyer, which is not going to go over well with Judge David Hittner. Judge Hittner warned Stan about his Steinbrenner-ish ways last month, “You’ve had 10 attorneys attempt to enter this case on your behalf. I will not entertain any further substitutions.”

And secondly, Al doesn’t seem to be very good at making friends:

When Mr. Stanford surrendered to authorities, he was a healthy 59-year-old man,” Stanford’s Houston-based lawyer, Robert Bennett, wrote in a brief on which Harvard Law Professor Alan Dershowitz consulted.

“Mr. Stanford’s pretrial incarceration has reduced him to a wreck of a man: he has suffered potentially life-impairing illnesses; he has been so savagely beaten that he has lost all feeling in the right side of his face and has lost near-field vision in his right eye,” Bennett said.

Naturally, AS’s lawyers want him out and placed on house arrest ASAP since his trial doesn’t start until January but so far no one is convinced that Al won’t bolt the second he gets outside the prison walls.

“Savagely beaten” Stanford asks to be freed [Reuters]