Did everyone have a nice Labor Day? I slept in until 11 am so it was a banger for me. I don’t expect we missed much news. Speaking of, here you go…
Evidently Deloitte uses Canva. Consulting.com.au explains that Deloitte has “struck up a ‘first-of-its-kind’ strategic alliance with Canva” but it’s unclear what that actually means from the article because they’re using too many of those meaningless buzzwords.
Deloitte said that in delivering consistent and unified branding and content, the alliance would enable seamless collaboration across client’s different business units to boost both productivity while also reducing costs.
According to Canva’s own research, over 90 percent of employers now expect their employees to have design skills and knowledge, with visual communication having become “the status quo across every industry and profession.”
“We’re very excited to be entering into this Australian-first alliance,” said Deloitte CEO Adam Powick. “The enterprise landscape is more complex than ever with productivity pressures and technology advances in key areas like GenAI. In this environment, business leaders need to rethink how their teams work, collaborate, and communicate to get the full benefits of new technology.”
And:
Canva has been widely praised for simplifying the design process, and now attracts almost 200 million active users worldwide.
Among those active users, according to Powick, are the teams from Deloitte…
“The alliance will see Canva’s single solution platform combined with Deloitte’s digital transformation expertise to provide whole of business solutions and benefits focused on improving productivity and lowering operational costs,” said Deloitte.
Journal of Accountancy has published “Rewriting accounting’s employment narrative,” an article that has been written many times before but this one has the words moved around.
Disappointing employee experiences are harming the image of the accounting profession, the National Pipeline Advisory Group (NPAG) report concluded. To reverse the narrative, starting salaries must increase to become competitive with other professions looking for top talent, and employers must make workloads more manageable, work more interesting, and career paths and rewards clearer.
Well good, at least they aren’t suggesting the narrative is wrong.
Other incentives that promise to attract more high school and college graduates to the accounting profession are work experiences that offer career stability, work/life balance, positive environmental impacts, and a culture that embraces diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging, according to the NPAG report.
They just won’t let this go, will they? The answer is right before their faces:
Starting salaries that are not competitive are among the biggest contributors to the talent shortage in accounting. NPAG’s national survey identified raising starting salaries as the most effective tactic to encourage people to choose an accounting career — 84% of professionals and 85% of students agreed.
Notice how articles like these always use the word “perception.” Common perceptions exist for a reason. Young people don’t mistakenly believe the hours in accounting are long because they saw a TB4A meme about it, TB4A makes memes about it because the hours are long.
Relatively low starting pay is one thing. Relatively low starting pay for long hours is worse, which, unfortunately, is the common perception of the profession. But accounting firms are also taking steps to tackle the overtime. Increasingly, they are trying to tame the busy season in an effort to counter the idea that accountants must work excessive overtime to meet tax and other deadlines.
“The idea.”
EY’s parading out its attitude toward neurodiverse talent again. Writes Fortune:
Neurodivergent workers have often been overlooked as a key source of talent, but more employers are waking up to how important that talent pool is. One company has been investing in its neurodiverse employees for nearly a decade—and it’s proving to be a huge business win.
Karyn Twaronite, global vice chair of diversity, equity & inclusiveness for EY, tells Fortune why accessing and supporting neurodivergent workers became a huge focus of her inclusivity and talent acquisition efforts.
“My first rationale was, I wanted to have the greatest access to the talent pool and technology skills. I wanted to expand our access beyond what we had,” she says. “They happen to be a very highly underemployed population around the world. The primary benefit was that I wanted greater and better technology skills within the EY workforce, and this has afforded us that.”
Allow me to leave this here:
Excerpt from that first-person essay about one person’s experience at the EY Neuro-Diverse Center of Excellence:
We were treated like a monolith kindergarten class.
We were forced into the same stereotypical accommodations whether we requested them or not, whether we needed them or not. We were made to work in a segregated office space. There were the regular HR rules and other unwritten rules we learned by getting caught out, like spending too much time in the mini conference room or asking too many questions.
And when our program managers weren’t choosing to infantilize and isolate us, they went the other way and paraded us around, selling the program and those of us in it like a circus act, on display, forcing us to identify ourselves by the program and therefore our diagnoses, too (which violated our rights to medical privacy.)
India’s audit regulator may no longer go soft on violators, according to Mint:
New Delhi: When India’s audit regulator imposed a fine of ₹10 crore on Coffee Day Enterprises Ltd’s auditor last month, it was among its highest so far—a fraction of global penalties.
As India’s National Financial Reporting Authority enters its seventh year, the extent of penalties for audit failures could shoot up particularly in instances of repeated non-compliance, said a person with knowledge of NFRA’s penalty regime.
“Penalties ordered by NFRA have been on the lower side in comparison to that of its global peers because it is early years for the independent regulator in India, and it is expected that compliance will improve and a situation doesn’t arise where NFRA also has to consider penalty at par with the level seen globally,” this person said, declining to be identified.
₹10 crore is about a million bucks.
Counterpoint from that article: “We should keep in mind the big differences in per capita income and earning potential in India and in the developed markets when examining the penalties to be imposed,” said a senior auditor, who spoke on condition of anonymity. “The audit regulator should handhold, do more inspections of audit firms, give them time for remediation of the deficiencies, and only after that consider penalties.”
From Kiplinger: A Private Equity Fund Bought Your Accounting Firm: Now What?
What’s in it for firm leadership?
The payday and the promise of more. When PE firms focus on a sector and start competing for acquisitions, earnings multiples to buy a company in the space tend to rise sharply.
It’s hard to get a clear picture of the exact EBITDA multiples PE firms are paying to buy into accounting firms, but the liquidity opportunity from this wave of acquisitions is widely considered to be more robust than the industry has seen before.
Alternatively, for owners who have been looking to grow their firms, PE firms tend to love founders who stay and drive investments in new acquisitions to complement their existing firm. There can also be synergies from outsourcing, technology and cross-ownership of accounting and wealth management firms.
Professional services firms have also long struggled with succession, and PE can play a big role in that. As owners of these firms age out, PE firms are more than happy to provide capital to allow for generational succession where younger members of the firm buy out older members’ partnership interests.
A managing director at an employee-owned firm thoroughly answers the question “Is employee ownership right for my firm?” in Accountancy Age:
Employee ownership can be a powerful tool for succession planning, particularly in accountancy firms where the alignment of stakeholder interests is crucial. For firms like ours, an EOT offers a solution that preserves the firm’s independence while ensuring that those who contribute to its success are directly rewarded.
However, the suitability of an EOT for your firm depends on several factors. For instance, firms operating as partnerships or LLPs would need to transition to an incorporated entity to fully leverage the tax benefits associated with an EOT. Additionally, firms involved in regulated activities, such as audit services, face specific regulatory challenges, as registered auditors must be owned and controlled by qualified auditors. This could necessitate restructuring certain aspects of the business, which may not be feasible or desirable for all firms.
Beyond the structural considerations, the financial health of the business is a critical factor. Firms that require significant capital for growth or investment might find the EOT structure limiting, as raising external funding can be more complex under this ownership model. It’s essential to weigh these considerations carefully before making the transition.
An ex-director who went out on her own and ambitiously tried to poach her former firm’s clients found herself in an Australian court:
A Victorian accounting firm has won a temporary injunction to prevent a former employee who set up a rival practice from poaching their clients.
Mount Waverly-based Oakwood Partners told the Federal Court it could face irreparable injury unless accountant Manlin Li was barred from soliciting long-term clients offering them cheaper tax services.
Li resigned at the end of January and by February, she was all up in that Rolodex soliciting clients.
Affidavits showed that she told clients she could prepare tax returns for “half price” and that “she would do a better job” than Oakwood.
Grant Fraser, an Oakwood client, deposed that “Ms Li offered to provide him with accounting services at a 20 per cent discount on what Mr Fraser was currently paying for services”.
Li argued that Oakwood’s clients were her personal intellectual property and that without her, the firm “was only a shell”.
In what appears to be a thinly veiled ad for a local accounting firm in a news site focused on a particular area of Wales, a director gives a glowing review of one of the young employees. Don’t you wish your directors talked about you like this?
Coxey’s director Joanne Evans said: “Molly has a natural affinity with all things accountancy related. It’s like her brain just automatically tunes in and understands whatever issue we are talking about at the time. We are all so proud of her, she’s a real ray of sunshine, a great personality to have around the office, everyone loves her.
“Young accountant spearheading major drive to boost the numbers at fast-growing firm,” Deeside.com Sept 2, 2024
And that’s enough of that! We’ve got a couple interesting items to write up today that were not included in this news brief, you’ll see those shortly. Please let me know if you have seen a story we should be talking about, are privy to some drama going down at your firm, or anything else via email, text, or Twitter. Bye! Love yooou.