AICPA Council Approves 12-Point Plan to Do F*ck All to Solve the Accountant Shortage
Last week, the AICPA released a revised pipeline acceleration plan, the goal of which is to get more young people into accounting to save the profession from extinction. To save you a click, I’m putting it here. At its spring meeting in Washington this week, the AICPA’s governing body (“Council”) approved this plan. Yay. Cue […]
Here’s the AICPA’s Revised 12-Point Plan to Herd Students Into Accounting
Good news, everyone! The AICPA released an expanded pipeline plan today. If you assumed the plan would revolve around an aggressive effort to bully firms into paying people what they’re worth, you’d be wrong. “The detailed plan features input from a significant set of stakeholders and calls for those stakeholders to work together to […]
I Love Accounting. So I Had to Leave.
At its core, accounting is a challenging career that requires growth and learning and can usually pay pretty well. There’s lots to do, and it requires developing expertise and finding ways to solve puzzles. Organizations need folks who can understand broad frameworks and rules and interpret that to produce all sorts of things they need. […]
What Would the Accreditors Say About AICPA’s ELE Program?
By Sharon Lassar, PhD, CPA (Florida) John J. Gilbert Professor and Director of the School of Accountancy, University of Denver Last week I raised the question of whether it is ethical to promote an educational path to CPA licensure that is (highly) susceptible to cheating. The AICPA’s pipeline acceleration plan proposes an Experience, Learn & […]
Local Man Offers Terrible Advice to Desperate New Mexico Taxpayers
Today is March 31, meaning there are 18 days left to file (198 days if you followed your CPA’s recommendation to kick the can down the road with an extension) and it is not the time to be shopping for a tax preparer. Add to that — and this bit is for any taxpayers who […]
Want to Do Your Part to Help the Accountant Shortage? Here’s What You Can Do Right Now
As accounting firms dig deep into their pockets to raise starting salaries and the profession’s biggest egos brains figure out new and exciting ways to ease the accountant shortage, there are things that you, as an accountant, can do right now to make a difference. Although it may not feel like you can make a […]
MNCPA to Educators: “We Do Not Need New CPAs Who Have Additional College Credits; We Need More CPAs, Period.”
Minnesota Society of CPAs has sent a message to educators in the state regarding legislation that would introduce an alternative pathway to CPA licensure and the message to these stewards of the next generation of accountants is clear: no one is trying to eliminate MAcc programs. As you should well be aware, MNCPA wants to […]
Why NASBA Can Be a Bully and What CPAs Can Do About It
By Sharon Lassar, PhD, CPA (Florida) John J. Gilbert Professor and Director of the School of Accountancy, University of Denver Going Concern previously reported on bits of an interview with Ken Bishop, President and CEO of NASBA, published in Journal of Accountancy. A cut out in the article includes this quote, “Should any state or […]
Integrating Experience and Education is One Way to Ease the Accountant Shortage at Least a Little
There’s a contentious battle raging over the 150 unit requirement for CPA licensure as we speak and in the meantime we have to figure something out to ease the accountant shortage that has a bit more immediate impact (and doesn’t involve paying people more because clearly the firms are not down with that idea). Wherever […]
We Asked Twitter What’s the Second Most Important Issue in the Accounting Profession Right Now, Here’s What They Said
Bored of writing and talking about the dire accountant shortage and the consequences it could have on the entire financial system as we know it, the other day I tweeted a question to find out what else folks think is plaguing accounting. Thanks to everyone who chimed in, I know sometimes Twitter feels like shouting […]
What You Should Know About Changing the 150 Hour Rule Before You Debate For or Against It
All-around awesome person Byron Patrick tweeted a bit of a manifesto on the 150 hour rule today and I want to share it as a movement to lower the CPA licensure requirement of 150 units to ease the CPA shortage is currently underway. Minnesota just introduced a bill to add a 120 units/two years of […]
Minnesota Throws TPTB the Finger and Introduces Legislation to Offer an Alternate Pathway to CPA Licensure
It was only a couple days ago that the Journal of Accountancy published an interview with NASBA CEO and President Ken Bishop in which Bishop sternly warns states against even thinking about lowering the CPA licensure requirement to 120 units, something something mobility blah blah. To save you a click, here’s a relevant snip of […]
The Accountant Shortage Isn’t Bad Enough For NASBA to Entertain Dropping the 150 Hour Requirement
When we talk about why no one wants to be an accountant anymore, a handful of things come up in every thread. Let’s quickly get them down in case an alien who just landed on Earth this morning Googles “accountant shortage,” arrives on this article, and wishes to learn more about the causes. Salaries — […]
Accountants Are the Referees of Business, Says Guy Who Would Know
There’s another article about the accountant shortage today and this time it’s in Insider. There’s nothing in there you don’t already know — enrollments are down, boomers are retiring, the process of becoming a CPA is extra and sucks, kids need to be convinced that accounting is great, blah blah — but they did get […]
KPMG Vice Chair Hopes All the Tech Layoffs Will Scare College Kids Into Accounting
KPMG Vice Chair Greg Engel has been having trouble sleeping lately. It isn’t climate change or social justice or the price of eggs keeping him up at night, like most accounting leaders he is consumed by the talent shortage. No really, that’s what he told CFO Dive. Not to worry, Engel has hope. Hope that […]
Let’s Start the Year Off With Some Doomsaying Predictions For the Profession in 2023
2022 was not exactly a banner year for accounting but if you don’t count the collapse of FTX, it wasn’t terrible for public perception either. Oh wait, there was that whole EY cheating thing. And a big IRS raid tied to tax incentives. That’s it though right? IDK, if I missed something big let me […]
Even People Who Majored in Accounting Don’t Want To Be Accountants
Pay extra close attention to accounting firm press releases this year, they will be packed with claims of record applicants, excess hiring, and huge numbers of incoming interns. Why? Firms have a vested interest in acting as if teams are fully staffed and everything is OK because were they to admit things are decidedly not […]
Wall Street Journal Addresses the Accountant Shortage, Suggests a Recession Could Fix It
I made my entrée into accounting way back in 2007, at the time my job involved a three-hour roundtrip journey across four Bay Area counties and back and I was looking for something a bit closer to home. Shortly after starting in CPA review, I started seeing more and more “For Sale” signs on the […]
This One Chart Shows Just How Boned the Accounting Profession Is
Perusing The CPA Journal as one does when one is tasked with the onerous burden of reporting on happenings in a profession in which so few things happen, I saw this discussion on CPA Evolution by Nina Terranova Dorata, PhD, CPA and Vincent J. Shea. In it, questions are tossed out about how accounting education […]
The Accountant Shortage Makes One Office Get Really Desperate
You know how if you’re on Tinder for a while and you’re not getting many matches because your standards are too high so you widen the net a bit and start overlooking things like “if you can’t handle me at my worst, you don’t deserve me at my best” in people’s bios? Well that’s pretty […]
The Accounting Talent Shortage is Not New, You Guys
Although the accounting talent shortage seems like something that just popped out of nowhere and couldn’t possibly have been predicted, oh, a decade ago, I feel compelled to remind everyone that we here at Going Concern saw this coming. I don’t say that in a “hurr durr I’ve been talking about this for ten years […]
College Accounting Programs Are Taxpayer-Funded Training Programs for the Big 4 and Other Such Muckraking
Ed. note: the following is penned by Bob Jennings CPA, EA for his Taxspeaker.com newsletter. Bob has given us permission to reprint in full and we are enthusiastically doing so in the hopes it will spark much-needed conversation about one of the profession’s most significant issues: the Big 4 oligopoly. According to the SBA, small […]
We’re Going to Solve the Accounting Pipeline Shortage With 2013 Buzzfeed Quiz Results, You Guys
With the accounting pipeline drying up, the profession is throwing all kinds of things at the wall to recruit young people hoping just one of them might stick. One such venture is Accounting+, a Gen Z-ified recruiting site brought to you by the Center for Audit Quality that might give young people the impression that […]
Accounting Firms Can No Longer Hold Sadistic Survivor-y Competitions For Talent, Says Guy Who Sounds Disappointed About That
There was an article in the Denver Post last week about the accountant shortage and in it, the Post talks to a professor who suggests that business students once fought over coveted, well-paid positions at accounting firms. This must have been before my time because in 2007 Big 4 firms were paying $50k starting salaries […]
Hear Me Out, Extend the CPA Exam Window to 24 Months
It has now been more than a decade since the AICPA observed — and worried about — a growing gap in the number of accounting graduates and the number of those graduates who pursue the CPA exam. In the time since, that gap has only widened and much effort has been expended to figure out […]
Letters to the Editor: CPAs Give Their Perspectives on Why No One Wants to Be an Accountant Anymore
Last week, we published a letter written to Fortune by a former CPA who pivoted to driving 18-wheelers and found far more career happiness than he ever would have in accounting (good for him). It seems his words resonated with a few people who felt compelled to reach out and offer their own perspectives. Here […]
In 2019, Academic Researchers Tried to Answer the Question ‘Is Accounting a Miserable Job?’
Stumbled across this interesting paper by authors Paul Madsen and Jeffrey Piao today and thought it worth sharing despite its age (2019). Misery in accounting is timeless after all. Plus it’s relevant given the ongoing accounting pipeline problem and concerns about accountant shortages as the paper talks about how the stereotype of “the miserable accountant” […]
PSA: Do NOT Take a Pay Cut For the ‘Privilege’ of Working Remotely
In the coming weeks and months, you’re going to see lots of headlines warning that the workers’ market we are blessed to experience today is shifting back to one that favors employers as the economy starts circling the toilet. You already have seen these headlines, I’m sure. Here’s one: some HR clown who works for […]
Why is the Accounting Profession Scaring Everyone Away?
Saw this on our Twitter timeline, thought I’d throw it to the sharks and see if anyone has some thoughts: Accounting industry. We all agree there numerous issues & major changes are needed. The ultimate question is even with all the issues, why are ppl not willing to overcome all of them & either enter […]
[UPDATED] KPMG Will Pay Audit New Hires to Study for the CPA Exam
Ed. note: update at the bottom, our hopes have been dashed. Second update includes a statement from KPMG As I’m sure you’ve heard by now the profession is having trouble recruiting future CPAs. Accounting student numbers aren’t critically low yet but fewer and fewer graduates are taking the CPA exam, an issue that keeps AICPA […]
Are Auditors Becoming as Hard to Find as a PS5?
Alternate title: If You Are an Accounting Student, Expect to End Up In Audit When You Graduate Ever since early 2020 we have been forced to learn how to go without, not always an easy task in our always-connected, on-demand, two-day-delivery world. I don’t know about you but if I have to wait longer than […]
4 Reasons Why the Profession Is Struggling to Convince Students to Become CPAs, #4 Will Not Shock You
I buried the link I’m about to share with you all in Footnotes last Friday; however, since its author intended for it to spur a conversation about the profession’s pipeline problem, I thought it best to highlight it in its own post should any of you feel like discussing it. “In my view, the future […]
State of the Accounting Profession 2022 Via the AICPA Trends Report
As I snarkily mentioned last week, the AICPA has finally released its much-anticipated 2021 Trends in the Supply of Accounting Graduates and the Demand for Public Accounting Recruits (or Trends, for short) report [PDF here], a behemoth data dump of accounting industry stats first released in 1971 and released every two years since 2009. We’re […]
A Pair of Senators Are Trying to Get the Kiddos Hooked on Accounting In Grade School
Do you guys remember those after-school specials of the ’80s that made it seem like drug dealers hiding around every corner offering free drugs was going to be something one would have to be concerned about as we got older? I imagine I’m not the only one who was tremendously disappointed to find out there […]
Is Accounting an Obsolete Major?
Is accounting an obsolete major? That’s the question posed by John “Jack” Castonguay, PhD, CPA, in the August/September 2021 CPA Journal. He writes: Accounting — at least as an independent field of study — is becoming obsolete in today’s technology- and analytics-focused world. Its value lies in its interdisciplinary applicability and position as a foundational […]
The CPA Credential and the Profession Are in a Race For Relevance, Says ICPAS CEO Todd Shapiro
Interest in the CPA credential has been down significantly since at least 2016, and we have discussed this issue to death so I don’t need to link you to the evidence (but here’s some anyway). The problem here is that talking about it isn’t solving it, thus we will continue talking about it and hope […]
PwC Manager Believes Associates and Senior Associates Are Going the Way of the Dodo Bird
Hey, I don’t know if you’ve heard but there’s a pipeline problem in public accounting right now. Seems some people finally got the memo that long hours and low pay isn’t worth the prestige of putting “worked at [INSERT BIG 4 FIRM NAME]” on their resumes anymore. And then there’s that other problem: those who […]
What Exactly Is the Profession’s ‘Pipeline Problem’ and Why Should You Care?
I realized the other day while halfway through typing out a rambling sentence that barely had anything to do with accounting in a separate post that I’ve written about the profession’s pipeline problem several times over the last few months but hadn’t ever really defined it. I’d reference back to things here and there but […]
The Accounting Profession Is Running Low on CPAs, But There’s an Obvious (and Completely Ignored) Fix For That
Soooo not sure if you heard but there’s a pipeline problem. This website has been around since 2009 and I’ve been loitering out here on the periphery of the accounting profession like a stalker in the bushes since I started in CPA review way back in 2007, so suffice to say we’ve seen some shit […]
Is There Really a Shortage of Entry Level Accountants?
There is if you believe this post by Buffalo Business First (subscription, sorry): Freed Maxick CPAs P.C. is the region’s largest accounting firm. It has continued to hire new graduates every year since the recession, but lately there seems to be a “talent shortage” for entry-level positions, said recruiting director Shawn Frier. “People are just […]
Now’s Your Chance to Tell NASBA How You Really Feel (About Extending the CPA Exam Window)
The following message is for current and aspiring CPAs: it isn’t often that anyone asks your opinion unless it’s a client trying to get free work out of you but there is an issue in need of your immediate attention and feedback. NASBA is soliciting comments on a proposal to extend the CPA exam window […]