Art of Accounting: Lessening compression oppression [Accounting Today] A big problem for almost every accounting practice is the tax season workload compression. It is what it is, but it doesn’t have to be. Here are some suggestions on how to pull work out of tax season and push it into November and December to better handle the extra work.
KPMG partners’ pay falls as audit reforms and fines bite [Sky News] Sky News has learnt that Bill Michael, KPMG’s UK chairman, circulated a memo on Friday afternoon in which he disclosed that total average pay per partner in its most recent financial year was £629,000, down from £682,000 12 months earlier.
The Magic Chaos of Music’s Golden Age, as Told by Mick Jagger’s Accountant [Rolling Stone] “I’m not going to be singing rock & roll when I’m 60,” Mick Jagger told his accountant 50 years ago, matter-of-factly, when he was merely an ex-economics student who’d started a rock band. Jagger’s dogged defiance of his own proclamation — the frontman turned 76 earlier this year and the Rolling Stones wrapped a major three-year tour last month — became a source of lifelong motivation for that very accountant, Laurence Myers, who’s now publishing a memoir about his own zig-zagging career in the music industry.
PwC Pledges US$3 Billion to Digitally Upskill its Employees [Nearshore] Professional services firm PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) has set aside US$3 billion to improve the digital skills of its 276,000 employees. In the months to come, thousands of the company’s staff will be taught as to how they can use data analytics, robotics process automation, and artificial intelligence in their work. “There is a growing mismatch between the skills people have and those needed for the digital world,” stated the company, announcing its upskilling program called ‘New world, New skills’.
Deloitte’s demo day showcased how AI and data are key to keeping up with an unprecedented change in the tax industry [Business Insider] A perfect storm driven by three forces is transforming the tax industry at an unprecedented pace, including a shifting global regulatory landscape, like the US Tax Reform and EU’s General Data Protection Regulation, technological innovation, and the difficulty of finding and retaining professionals.
Hackers ‘are no longer winning’, says KPMG cyber chief [IT Pro] Hackers are ‘no longer winning the cyber crime war’ following years of public and private investment and cross-industry collaboration, according to KPMG’s global head of cyber futures David Ferbrache.
EY Law Jumps to Top Spot in Global Brand Recognition Index [Bloomberg Law]
The U.S. tax system is “a new engine of inequality” [CBS News] The U.S. tax system, once viewed as a model for sharing the nation’s bounty, is today a “new engine of inequality,” said Gabriel Zucman, one of the world’s leading experts on the rising gap between rich and poor. Zucman, as detailed in his new book, “The Triumph of Injustice,” written with fellow University of California at Berkeley economist Emmanuel Saez, found that the 400 richest Americans now pay a total tax rate of about 23% — that’s lower than the bottom half of U.S. households, who pay a rate of about 24%.
