Accountants Will Go Extinct in the Next Decade, Says Guy

Posted on by Adrienne Gonzalez
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Sad?

There are two types of people: those who don’t find this sad (only accountants fall into this category) and those outside of the profession who think bookkeepers and payroll clerks (RIP) are what make up “the accounting profession.” The latter are definitely on the endangered species list.

We can tell which category this guy is in without even checking his username.

Of all the responses (“It can’t come soon enough” was my favorite), it’s this one I want to flag.

Text:

The desire to enter the profession in the first place is on the decline as well.

There is still a need (likely always will be) for the expertise at the top end of the profession.

But how do you get people through the pipeline to the top end?

For a profession that instills trust & confidence in the market…your concern is extremely valid.

In all the talk about AI and offshoring eliminating accounting as we know it, one aspect not talked about enough is the first 1/4th of the pipeline. We’re so worried about getting enough fresh meat into it and not thinking about the people who’ve recently entered it.

AI and tremendous amounts of offshoring appeared seemingly overnight — we went from about one-to-two percent offshoring in 2010 to as much as 60 percent or more now — and as such, little thought was given to what happens to the onshore young people coming up through the pyramid structure. A fresh-faced batch of youngsters come in every spring and winter, learn the ropes, and those who stick around pay it forward to another batch of not-yet-bitter youth. On and on, year after year, so goes the machine. Now the tasks they used to cut their teeth on are being sent overseas to underpaid associates or given to algorithmic models that never bitch about busy season or leave in the middle of it. Meanwhile, India has been not-quietly gathering up all that knowledge. See: India’s answer to Big Four firms could be in the works: Here are the details in Business Today.

Can India have a home-grown mega sized CA firm that can go global and compete with the Big Four firms? It may be in the works. The Institute of Chartered Accountants of India (ICAI) and the Ministry of Corporate Affairs are laying down the ground work for this.

“We have made a Committee for Aggregation of CA firms. It is working very effectively on how to frame guidelines for networking, multidisciplinary partnership, international networking, merger and demerger and advertisement. We are working on these five fronts so as to empower Indian firms to become global,” said ICAI President Ranjeet Kumar Agarwal.

In an interaction with BT, Agarwal said ICAI is working on these five fronts to empower Indian CA firms to become global. It is also going to make a presentation before the ministry of corporate affairs on this. “The ministry is also very keen on how Indian CA firms can grow big,” he said.

Did we really think they would be content to do our bitch work for 1/5th of the price forever?

“We want to leverage and we want to allow them to merge so that they can become bigger. For merger, they need some incentives, policies and tools on which we are working,” said Agarwal, underlining that Indian firms have the capacity to grow big and become global but they need some handholding.

“India has no dearth of talent. A large number of Indian CAs are also working abroad,” he highlighted. Out of a total of 400,000 CAs in the country, about 160,000 are practicing professionals.

At least a few people are talking about this future problem of onshore associates missing out on solid foundations. See this year-old thread: AI won’t take our jobs, but Outsource will

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See also: I didn’t beleive [sic] it! Big 4’s ultimate goal is indeed to offshore!

I remember a time many years ago when we were asking what if 20 percent of audit work is performed offshore as if this were a ridiculous scenario that could only be dreamed up on the fifth day of Burning Man (i.e. you’d have to be high as balls to think it could ever happen).

A 1997 paper entitled Challenges confronting accountancy in the 21st century by Carolina Koornhof [PDF] basically predicted the future we live in now.

There’s little to be done about it now other than the same reactionary freakouts the profession has engaged in for as long as I can remember. Just like the talent shortage thing that was building up for a DECADE before people really started freaking out. I mean, we were freaking out but that’s only because we’re overly negative and enjoy pointing out potential disasters on the horizon as well as current ones.

Guess we should be extra nice to the Indians, we might be working for them in the not-so-distant future.

Related:

When AI Stands For ‘Actually Indians’

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Job of the Day: Bank Controller at Morgan Stanley

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Get Sensitive or Else: How to Keep Talent When the World’s Gone Crazy

As hardcore accountants, you and your talent probably aren’t suffering quite as much from the […]

Retired Accountant Who Took Up Bodybuilding Initially Not Comfortable with Skimpy Outfits, Manscaping, Teasing Women in the Crowd

Retirement. Unfortunately for most of you, you’re nowhere near it. And for those of you that are thinking about it, you’ve probably discovered that your savings aren’t quite what you imagined they would be at this stage in life and you’re doomed to a few years of recommending power tools at the local Home Depot. Once you finally do get to retire, you’ll be confined to the shuffleboard court and the senior tee boxes at your local municipal golf course.

This is not the retirement of one Don Ohmes of O’Fallon, Missouri. While most of you think of traveling the world stuff your pieholes on cruise ships, Don is getting ripped. And not just for fun. For competition.

[Ohmes] decided at age 64 that he wanted to compete in body building. This summer he shared that dream with his personal trainer, mentioning his long-time admiration of Arnold Schwarzenegger. To Maida, his wife of 43 years, this was a revelation: Body building? Arnold Schwarzenegger? “Getting on a stage in front of people? This is not really who he is,” she says. “He is a modest person and shy. You have to get up on stage and have a brief on, or whatever it is.”

It’s a “posing outfit” Mrs. Ohmes. And her husband discovered some things about bodybuilding that he hadn’t previously considered. For example, your business casual outfits may fit nicely in a JCPenney shopping bag but that sort of storage isn’t necessary for outfits required by Don’s new hobby:

“It came in an envelope,” Don recalls, burying his face in his hands. “That’s all it was in. I thought, ‘Holy cow!'” Posing costumes are so itsy bitsy that competitors must shave their bodies.

Right. The manscaping. Don eventually got more at ease with the nuances of his new obsession but there was one thing he couldn’t quite get comfortable with:

Don had to pick a song for his one-minute posing routine. He chose “Hurts So Good,” by John Mellencamp. He practiced at home, with [his trainer] and at Gold’s gym. But there was one thing Don just couldn’t do for [her]. She wanted him to point at a woman in the audience — any woman — at the song lyric, “With a girl like you.”

“I can’t act like some 20-year-old kid, because I’m not,” Don says.

So, despite his washboard abs Don isn’t so comfortable enticing the ladies. But considering he finished second in 50 and over division, it probably cost him the title. Which is fine with Don because this isn’t about fun for him, he’s trying to inspire you aging cube-dwellers out there:

“I felt a deep sense of accomplishment,” he says. “And maybe people will think — ‘This guy is 64 and he can do it. So maybe I can do it, too.'”

This means you, Tim Flynn.

Retired accountant morphs into body builder at 64 [St. Louis Today]

One thought on “Accountants Will Go Extinct in the Next Decade, Says Guy”

  1. India is an even more dysfunctional and corrupt clusterfuck than the US. But the one thing India has going for it is a shit ton of disposable people. If even a tiny percentage of those disposable people can be trained like a monkey to email out an A/R confirmation, then we’re in business!

    The problem here is short-sightedness. All anyone cares about is making as much money for themselves, and fuck everyone else. That especially applies to all the assholes running the large accounting firms. They are actively and actively destroying the future of the profession in order to maximize their own profits. It’s really no different than everything else going on in our society as it continues to decay. Late stage capitalism.

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