Year-End Close: These Are the Most-Read Stories of 2024

Posted on by Going Concern News Desk
Dog at a newsstand

With just a day and a half remaining before the clock ticks over to a new year we better hurry up and get to looking back on the most popular reads of 2024. ICYMI, or ICYOOTL, here are those posts in ascending order according to traffic analytics.

10: Accountants Will Go Extinct in the Next Decade, Says Guy (May 17)

Some guy on Twitter said that “AI and offshoring are going to wreck the accounting profession in the next decade” and called this a “sad prediction.”

Jeremy Wells (who’d probably just come off of another awful busy season) had a different take:

We’re still waiting.

9: PwC Announces It’s ‘Aligning Its Organizational Structure’ and Using Fewer BS Words in Job Titles (April 18)

In April, PwC announced it was changing things up in a way that made us think business might not be so great over there, an assumption that was proven true when the firm did a significant round of layoffs in early October (late October for Tampa employees who’d been impacted by Hurricane Milton).

As part of this “agile” aligning, PwC trimmed leadership job titles down from many words to fewer. Job titles prior to June 30, 2024:

PwC leadership screenshot with unnecessarily long job titles

And after:

Ten years ago we wrote about an analysis that determined “Consider the Environment” notices at the bottom of everyone’s emails (look it up, kids) potentially create 27,000 gigs of useless data per day, data that ends up on servers that of course need power to function. So in the end, it was a very green choice of PwC to nix all those unnecessary words from job titles. See also: Your “Consider the Environment” Email Signature is Actually Inconsiderate to the Environment

8: Layoff Watch ’24: Deloitte’s Busy Scaring People with Business Update Meetings (August 28)

At the end of 2023 Deloitte was in the news for some fantastic AI use case that they swore would save jobs by helping them reallocate staff from poor-performing service lines to the ones making more money. Naturally, we called bullshit. See: We’re Not Buying This ‘Deloitte Using AI to Avoid Layoffs’ Story

Sucks when we’re right.

7: Mother Pens Letter Calling Out EY After Her Overworked Daughter Suddenly Passed Away at 26 (September 17)

After a 26-year-old Chartered Accountant working for EY India died in July, her mother accused the firm of basically working her daughter to death in a letter to EY India Chairman and Regional Managing Partner Rajiv Memani. A small excerpt:

Anna would retum to her room utterly exhausted, sometimes collapsing on the bed without even changing her clothes, only to be bombarded with messages asking for more reports. She was putting in her best efforts, working very hard to meet the deadlines. She was a fighter to the core, not someone to give up easily. We told her to quit, but she wanted to learn and gain new exposure. However, the overwhelming pressure proved too much even for her.

Everything was new to her-the organization, the place, the language and she was trying very hard to adjust. You should show some consideration to new employees, Instead, the management Took full advantage of the fact that she was new and overwhelmed her with both assigned and unassigned work This is a systemic issue that goes beyond individual managers or teams. The relentless demands and the pressure to meet unrealistic expectations are not sustainable, and they cost us the life of a young woman with so much potential.

The letter quickly went viral and prompted a federal inquiry by the Ministry of Labour into the conditions at EY. That investigation and any actions by the government of India are ongoing.

6: Another KPMG is Merging With KPMG (August 15) and 3: KPMG Merges With KPMG (May 18)

We’re lumping these two stories together because they’re essentially about the same thing (duh) just involving different KPMGs, none of which are ours in ‘Murica. From the #3 story:

KPMG’s getting married. To itself. KPMG UK’s 833 equity and salaried partners and 17,239 employees will be joining forces with KPMG Switzerland’s 2,603 employees and ?? partners to form a $4.4 billion MechaKPMG.

They’re doing this because according to them:

“In a fast-paced, globally focused business environment driven by new technology and increasing regulatory complexity, clients’ needs have also evolved. To meet these, both firms will bring their complementary strengths and technology solutions together to enhance the range of services offered across audit, tax and legal, and advisory. With a wider geographic coverage, the new firm will be able to expand its service and sector expertise complementing the already deep local market understanding for its national and international clients.”

The #6 story involved KPMG Saudi Levant and KPMG Lower Gulf doing the same. Why so many people cared about this is beyond us but we started seeing US firms doing their own international mergers and expect more as we enter the age of private equity “consolidation” so perhaps it was relevant after all. See also: RSM to Merge With RSM and Grant Thornton Merges With Grant Thornton.

5: BDO Is in Damage Control Mode (July 2)

Ahead of the PCAOB releasing their inspection report for 2023, BDO USA put out a press release titled “BDO Strengthens Audit Quality Commitment with Addition of Second Independent Member on Audit Quality Advisory Council.” The press release made it pretty clear that the inspection was going to be hot garbage and it was (See: BDO Aced Its 2023 PCAOB Inspections! JK, It Was F**ked).

TLDR: “We sucked but we’ll get better, we promise.” OK.

4: Deloitte Partners Tragically Hit With “Improvement Required” Performance Ratings For Backdating Workpapers (March 25)

In one of our favorite headlines of the year, partners involved in a backdating scandal at Deloitte Canada were thoroughly wrist-slapped by CPA Ontario, the regulatory body up there in charge of dispensing justice to naughty chartered accountants.

This would normally be a nothing burger but in this case CPA Ontario specifically mentioned the five partners getting their performance ratings downgraded by the firm (presumably because backdating workpapers is not in fact exceeding expectations, at least getting caught doing it isn’t).

Example:

Nancy Ewings, with Deloitte since 1995, was the deputy leader of its private audit practice for Ontario at the time and remains a partner today.

The regulator says Deloitte lowered her quality rating for the 2019 fiscal year – a performance metric used in part to determine incentive pay – to “Meets Expectations” from “Exceeds Expectations,” resulting in a reduction of $56,000.

This guy who backdated nearly 200 workpapers really got it:

Stacy Levac, with Deloitte since 2016, worked in audit in the Ottawa office exclusively for privately owned companies.

Deloitte lowered his quality rating for the 2019 fiscal year to “Improvement Required” from “Meets Expectations,” eliminated his incentive compensation and reduced a discretionary bonus by $10,000.

Deloitte Canada was ordered to pay $1.59 million ($1.1 million USD) in fines and costs for breaches of the CPA Ontario Code of Professional Conduct related to its auditors changing their computer clocks to bypass engagement management software limits that prevented backdating.

2: PwC Joins Deloitte, KPMG, and Mazars in the Cheater Hall of Fame (October 16)

The highlight of this article was Adrienne photoshopping clogs onto the PwC Chad.

Dutch flag with PwC Chad wearing wooden clogs

Seriously though, all the big firms in the Netherlands are getting busted for “cheating” and this behavior earned KPMG Netherlands the largest PCAOB fine handed out to date when they got caught sharing answers in 2023.

We wrote:

The TLDR is PwC Netherlands caught its people cheating. On their wives? No. On their taxes? Also no. The firm discovered that their people were sharing answers to e-learning, a phenomenon that happens at every large accounting firm all the time but one that regulators — particularly our regulator in the US — like to clutch pearls about as if this thing is unconscionable and unique to the firms they catch doing it. On its face, cheating on exams isn’t a great look for a profession that’s supposed to protect the public and holds itself out as a bastion of ethics. But come on.

…

PwC Netherlands said they are “engaging in a root cause analysis to identify and interpret the underlying causes of improper answer sharing.” Maybe, and I’m just spitballing here, it has to do with the intense pressure of Big 4 grind culture and a lack of fucks given on the part of overworked staff forced to sit through checkbox trainings? “The results of this analysis will be finalized after completion of the investigation and used to strengthen the measures already taken and introduce any new measures as appropriate,” said PwC. Can’t wait.

1: The IRS Is Ready to Strike the Fear of God Into Anyone Who Took ERC (February 29)

The biggest story of the year, and by a large margin at that, was this February piece on the Employee Retention Credit. More specifically, the IRS being pissed off by how many people tried to cheat it and trying to scare people into voluntarily coming clean.

Based on the comments that article got, we think the reason it got so many eyeballs is because normies who have ERC among their list of interests in their Google advertising profiles were exposed to it.

After that article, we published a few more ERC stories:

These are most-read stories 11-20 if you’re craving more. Nothing surprising here.

We leave you with the above-mentioned cringe:

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