Good morning, people! Going Concern quietly celebrated our 15th birthday on Saturday if anyone cares but we’ve long passed the age when birthdays stop mattering so let’s not make a big thing about it.
You know what does matter? NEWS. Here’s some.
OH MY GOD they’ve gassed up the “Free Candy” van now.
Amid shortage of new blood, accounting firms recruiting teens
Jeremy Cole was throwing candy at high school students on a Tuesday afternoon at Siena College earlier this month.
Not exactly the type of behavior one would expect from an accountant.
But Cole and other professionals in the accounting industry and [sic] willing to try almost anything these days to address a growing workforce crisis caused by two major trends.
The reasons: mass retirement of boomers and declining accounting grad numbers. Same old.
Related:
If you were curious, CrowdStrike is a PwC client.
The company’s annual report, filed in May, shows a confident position with the company telling its investors that Falcon is the future of the cybersecurity industry.
“Using cloud-scale AI, our Security Cloud enriches and correlates trillions of cybersecurity events per week … to create actionable data, identify shifts in adversary tactics, and automatically prevent threats in real-time across our customer base,” the filing reads. “The more data that is fed into our Falcon platform, the more intelligent our Security Cloud becomes, and the more our customers benefit, creating a powerful network effect that increases the overall value we provide.”
The filing includes an audit report from CrowdStrike’s accounting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP. That audit found healthy numbers for the company, with an increase in revenue and shareholder equity year-over-year from 2023.
Further reading: ‘Painful’ wake-up call: What’s next for CrowdStrike, Microsoft after update causes outage?
This gent has no idea what he’s in for. But he’s already wearing the right shirt.
The firm is called Ashmole & Co. Say that three times fast.
Former Trump Organization CFO Allen Weisselberg was released from Rikers on Friday:
“Allen Weisselberg was released from custody today and has been reunited with his family,” his attorney Seth Rosenberg said Friday.
Friday’s release marks the second time Weisselberg completed a sentence at Rikers. In 2022, Weisselberg pleaded guilty to 15 state crimes related to a scheme to evade more than $1.7 million in taxes, and received a similar five-month sentence, after which he was released after 100 days.
NASBA’s soon-to-be CEO Daniel Dustin made some leadership picks that will be effective August 1:
The National Association of State Boards of Accountancy (NASBA) President and CEO elect Daniel J. Dustin, CPA, has selected Kent A. Absec, Brenner Allen, Esq., William A. Emmer, CPA, and Sedrik Newbern to join the leadership team at NASBA, effective August 1, 2024. These changes to leadership follow the retirement of current NASBA President and CEO Ken L. Bishop.
Earlier:
EY Germany’s former top dog is fighting the big ass fine he got for Wirecard:
EY’s former Germany boss Hubert Barth is to challenge a €300,000 fine for alleged violations of professional duties during the Big Four firm’s audits of Wirecard.
Germany’s audit watchdog Apas last year fined EY €500,000 and banned the firm from taking on any new listed audit clients in Germany for two years over its failings. It also announced penalties of between €23,000 and €300,000 to five unnamed current and former staff. These fines against individuals were formally imposed last month.
The largest of the personal fines was for Barth, according to people familiar with the decision. His lawyer Jan Bockemühl told the Financial Times that he would appeal against the Apas decision on behalf of his client as he considered it “incorrect” from both a legal and a factual point of view.
KPMG and Avalara have entered a “formal alliance.”
Avalara, Inc., a leading provider of tax compliance automation software for businesses of all sizes, today announced a strategic alliance with KPMG LLP, the audit, tax, and advisory firm to deliver greater value to enterprise businesses across industries. The new alliance allows organizations to leverage the combined power of Avalara’s compliance automation technology – including indirect tax calculation, returns, exemption certificate management, cross-border compliance, e-invoicing, and registrations – and KPMG’s deep expertise in tax consulting and advisory, in addition to ERP implementation capabilities, resulting in improved tax compliance management, operational efficiency, and risk management.
Elsewhere in the House of Klynveld, AFR’s Neil Chenoweth writes about some old ghosts coming back to haunt the firm in Australia:
For the past 11 months, the firm has been studying historical allegations with varying degrees of focus. This follows a complaint made by a former, quite senior, partner about KPMG people behaving badly, much of it dating from the 1980s and ’90s (this masthead has written recently about Chris Jordan’s time at KPMG, but this is unrelated to that).
Where to begin? Perhaps with the partner who is alleged to have had a client replace his garage door in 1994, a second client who painted his house, and a third client who handsomely provided the partner with a Nissan Maxima sedan: all of these services were in return for writing off their KPMG fees.
Talk about full service. It’s quite a progressive payment arrangement. So little paperwork.
There are allegations of accessing client trust accounts to strip out tax losses; partners taking secret commissions; diverting the residual of a client’s estate to a partner’s private company; and moving $7000 from a company which was being transferred overseas into the KPMG trust account. Apparently, an enterprising partner used that money to buy a jet ski. As you do.
And this might be the craziest of all the former partner’s claims:
The most picturesque claim is that in 1984, a partner allegedly had his wife smuggle $625,000 in cash from Singapore into Australia in her handbag for a client (yes, a KPMG spouse is the one with the giant clutch purse). This was after attempts to order staff members to carry the money failed to generate the necessary enthusiasm.
Governing writes about TV and film tax credits. TLDR they’re losers for the states:
From Marvel blockbusters to “The Walking Dead” series, many big hits have been filmed in Georgia due to the state’s massive production tax credits. Set at 30 percent with no cap on the number of credits that can be bought or sold, Georgia’s tax credit is one of the biggest in the country.
But Georgia was among several states where legislators have been reconsidering their film and TV tax credits. Following a state-funded audit last December that found the state loses money on the billion-dollar program, legislators proposed a bill to place caps on it.
The bill didn’t pass. State Rep. Long Tran, a former actor and stunt driver, says it’s too early to make big changes, especially with the industry just finding its footing again after COVID-19 destabilized the global film industry. “I’d like to see us hold off on making any changes for five more years,” Tran said before the bill was defeated in the state Senate. “But if we have to make a change, let’s do something that stabilizes the industry and makes people confident that they can come here.”
Think I’m gonna call it here. As always, dear reader is encouraged to reach out with any comments, complaints, compliments, or concerns. Text the tipline or send me an email if you know of some good happenings we should be talking about. Have a great week, you.