Hey and good morning. Got a little news for you, just a little.
We’ve been following this, um, situation? Development? Thing that may or may not happen? Whatever, we’ve seen and shared several stories over the last year or more of India wanting to make its own Big 4 firm. Not Big 4 India, but a conglomerate of some of India’s 90,000+ home-grown accounting firms that they think could compete with the real Big 4.
Anyway, they’re getting one step closer to trying it. According to Economic Times, the Prime Minister’s Office will meet on September 23 to discuss. Hey, isn’t that the day the Rapture starts?
The Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) has convened a meeting on September 23 to deliberate on regulatory changes and other necessary steps that would be required to facilitate the creation of domestic audit and consultancy firms comparable to the so-called ‘Big Four’, said people familiar with the development.
The meeting-to be chaired by Shaktikanta Das, principal secretary-2 to the Prime Minister-signals the government’s concerted move to enable domestic firms to scale up and grab a slice of the $240-billion global auditing and consultancy market.
As we’ve been saying all along, you didn’t think they’d be content to do our grunt work for pennies forever did you?
Interesting this coincides with a proposed 25% tax on outsourcing and that H1-B thing they’ve been freaking out about for days which we haven’t written about yet because it happened on Friday.
We told you when we first spotted this potential happening that it was worth keeping an eye on. If only because it could be really, really funny if offshoring and H1-Bs collapse while India dumps whatever’s left of Big 4 work and tries to glue a bunch of domestic firms together to make their own competitor.
Andersen is going public and doing quite well for themselves, reports Reuters:
Andersen Group reported a 12.4% rise in revenue for the first half of 2025, the professional services firm disclosed on Friday in its U.S. initial public offering filing, setting the stage for a rare listing by a consulting firm.
From the ashes of one of the greatest accounting disasters of all time rises…a tax firm.
Andersen plans to list on NYSE as ANDG.
In What Does the AICPA Do Besides Spam Me Insurance Offers news, America’s most powerful accounting trade body is prodding the IRS to modernize estate and trust forms, reports JofA:
The AICPA recommended in a letter that the IRS improve several tax forms used by estates and trusts, in keeping with an executive order mandating that federal tax payments and refunds be processed electronically.
The forms that need improvement, the AICPA said in the Sept. 12 letter, are:
- Form 1041, U.S. Income Tax Return for Estates and Trusts (2024);
- Instructions for Form 1041 and Schedules A, B, G, J, and K-1 (Rev. Jan. 14, 2025); and
- Form 1041-A, U.S. Information Return Trust Accumulation of Charitable Amounts (Rev. September 2018).
“These outdated forms and paper filing should be revised as we suggested, particularly as they pertain to the filing of complex tax issues like foreign investments and charitable deductions,” Eileen Sherr, CPA, CGMA, director–Tax Policy & Advocacy for the AICPA, said in a news release. “These recommendations will simplify filing for taxpayers and practitioners and will help reduce the administrative burden on the IRS while also improving processing efficiency.”
BDO Australia recommends that firms not double up on auditors for regular audits and sustainability reports, reports Accounting Times. Over there, certain entities are only allowed to have one auditors while other entities have no restriction.
Recent guidance published by ASIC has clarified that under the Corporations Act 2001, registrable superannuation entities (RSEs) can only have one auditor, meaning their sustainability reports must be audited by the same individual as their financial reports.
No such restriction exists for other entity types, meaning companies and registered schemes can engage multiple auditors across different reports.
“Companies, registered schemes and retail corporate collective investment vehicles (CCIVs) can choose to appoint different auditors for the financial and sustainability reports,” wrote BDO Australia BDO Australia national leader in sustainability reporting, Aletta Boshoff in a recent insight.
“Nevertheless, there are consequences for entities adopting this approach, and we do not recommend it as a practical and viable alternative. Mainly, it will result in entities incurring significant additional costs because of the additional time investment and duplication of work effort.”
A law firm in Toronto had a bit of an ongoing embezzlement problem, reports CBC. Look, the cost of living is obscene in Canada OK.
A boutique Toronto law firm at the centre of a $7-million embezzlement case appears to have passed a financial spot check by the Law Society of Ontario years after the managing partner admits she began stealing client money to fund a lavish lifestyle.
In the summer of 2022, when the Law Society of Ontario (LSO) did a routine financial check-up on Cartel & Bui LLP, it didn’t raise any red flags — even though the firm’s bank statements showed nearly $140,000 of client money had been withdrawn from the firm’s trust account in just one month for payments to American Express, while another $2,090 was paid to a child-care centre.
The CBC article goes on to quote a client who lost $200,000 that the law firm was holding onto in trust after they helped with her divorce. Then they found a forensic accountant/lawyer to say NOT SO FAST, that wasn’t Law Society of Ontario’s job.
But David Debenham, a lawyer and forensic accountant who has sued other lawyers for fraud, says the bigger problem is that, even though the LSO’s auditors will specifically ask for a law firm’s bank records, the spot checks on trust accounts aren’t designed to catch embezzlement.
“They just want to know if you have the documents,” he said. “They presume honesty. They’re really trying to catch people who can’t do accounting and are making bona fide mistakes … It does not catch fraud, and it happens all of the time for millions and millions of dollars.”
We’re just stupid Americans so we don’t know what the Law Society of Ontario even is much less what it’s supposed to do, all we know is that people get confused about the true function of audits all the time and then get all incredulous when audits don’t uncover elaborate schemes. Though it sounds like this particular scheme was anything but elaborate.
Asked what, if any, routine verifications are done on the trust accounts of lawyers to protect the public against potential theft, Debenham answered succinctly: “Sweet f–k all.”
David, you can sit with us anytime.
That’s it for this news brief, we’ve got to hurry up and write up that H1-B fee news and reaction to it that poured out over the weekend. As always, dear reader is welcome to email or text anytime, anonymously, if you have a tip, a link we should check out, or some general pithy observation about the accounting profession. Bye.