Hey. Everyone have a nice holiday? Scored some decent Black Friday deals? Ready for another week of work? Good. Email or text if you have a tip or story and please enjoy this taste of news to get you going.
A large UK firm talks to The Times about how it’s training up the next generation in “Young accountants will be sent to pull pints to learn people skills.”
If there is one thing that pulling pints and waiting tables is good for, it is building strong people skills. Now one of Britain’s largest accountancy firms wants to take lessons from the hospitality sector.
The boss of Azets, which has 64 offices across the UK and employs more than 4,000 people, is looking to work with hotel, pub and restaurant chains to offer secondments to trainee accountants.
“We’ve got some very early conversations ongoing with some national hospitality businesses. I just feel that hospitality is a fantastic move,” said Peter Gallanagh, the international firm’s UK chief executive.
“Historically, the focus was on financial accuracy and compliance. I’m not saying we lose any of that, but that’s now being done by AI and automation. We need to move towards a more front-end, front of house, hospitality-type relationship,” he said.
So I guess that’s what we’re doing now.
New York Times asks what counts as pornography for IRS purposes related to No Tax on Tips (heh) since pornography is excluded from the rule:
President Trump’s promise for “no tax on tips” has raised important practical questions for the Internal Revenue Service. What is the exact definition of a tip? Who typically receives them? Are photos of bare feet a type of pornography?
Then we get to the meat:
Tax professionals also wonder how a restriction on “pornographic activity” would actually work. The I.R.S. has not yet elaborated on which activities it would consider “pornographic.” It is unclear, for example, whether strippers could claim the tips deduction. There is plenty of activity that an accountant or tax lawyer could argue is merely titillating.
“Where’s the line?” said Katherine Studley, an accountant who counts many OnlyFans creators among her clients. “Just because you’re on OnlyFans, that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s pornographic. You could have a cooking channel or a yoga channel.”
Oh man, this is going to get messy (not a pun I assure you):
Whether or not the I.R.S. tries to come up with its own definition of “pornographic activity,” enforcing the exclusion would most likely still involve auditing taxpayers who report tips from sources like OnlyFans. An I.R.S. agent would have to view a taxpayer’s content, decide if it was pornographic and then deny the deduction for tips, which is capped at $25,000.
Fort Worth Inc. profiles Whitley Penn CEO Nathen McEown. Here he explains his path to accounting:
McEown has bachelor’s and master’s degrees in accounting from Texas Tech. A native of Rockwall, McEown went to college with an eye on computer science.
“That was the hot thing,” he says of computer science in the late 1990s. “I think it was the highest paying major at Tech. That’s how I picked my degree, which is a terrible way to pick your degree. I had no passion or interest in it, and soon as I started programming, I realized this wasn’t for me.”
His objective turned to doing something that offered job security.
“I decided I needed to go somewhere where there’s always going to be work,” he says. “And accounting was that. It definitely was the right option for me. Then I got into the industry and just fell in love with public accounting.”
FT tackles the topic of graduate salaries in “Top consultancies freeze starting salaries as AI threatens ‘pyramid’ model“:
Job offers sent by firms including McKinsey and Boston Consulting Group for 2026 show that pay for graduates is being held at the same level as this year, according to Management Consulted, which coaches students through the interview process, and people familiar with the offers.
“There are real productivity improvements from AI implementation inside firms,” said Namaan Mian, chief operating officer of Management Consulted, adding that the ability to wring more value from fewer junior employees “is putting downward pressure on salaries”.
EY asks an important question: Can AI be governed before it governs us?
In today’s data-driven economy, trust is the new currency. Organizations that embed responsibility into their AI models stay ahead of evolving regulations and make long-term impact. Findings of the 2025 EY Global Responsible AI Pulse survey of 975 C-suite leaders across the world, reveal that nearly every company in the survey has already suffered financial losses from AI-related incidents, with average damages conservatively topping US$4.4 million. With great power comes great responsibility. Today, that power belongs to AI. However, are we responsible enough to tame it to a point where it becomes a competitive advantage rather than a risk-inducing cost center?
OK I have to…
That’s a wrap for this, the first Monday morning news brief of December. Now go out there and count your little butt off, you.
