Hey. I’m a little disappointed we’re already back at Monday but what can you do? You can read some news!
Partner profits at KPMG Australia are down but use of bots to replace human work is up, reports Australian Financial Review:
Lower demand for “legacy” consulting services has pushed revenue at KPMG down 3.6 per cent, sending partner profits lower by an average of 9 per cent.
The firm also revealed mundane work previously performed by humans, such as reviewing regulatory documentation and creating training materials, was now the partial responsibility of bots. In fact, KPMG has put in place 20 of a planned 125 “digital FTEs” – or full-time equivalents – the firm said.
The firm’s 2023-24 revenue was $2.2 billion and average partner income was down to $650,000. That compares with an average partner income of about $814,000 at EY and between $430,000 and $516,000 at Deloitte.
BREAKING NEWS! Young accountants are at risk of ‘burnout’:
Resilience in young workers is relatively low and on a steady decline, which is directly contributing to the decrease in young individuals entering the professional services industry, according to research and resilience training provider Springfox.
Springfox CEO and co-founder Peta Sigley said young workers are more prone to burnout due to workplace expectations and overwhelm.
“When junior accountants kickstart their careers they often have to grapple with high expectations and pressures to succeed which can lead them to set lofty goals and take on more work than they can handle,” she said.
“This drive, while admirable, can soon leave them feeling overwhelmed and out of control.”
Ah yes, it’s their drive that causes burnout and not the firms themselves piling on more work.
Did the SEC censor an academic paper produced by one of its fellows because it didn’t like the optics? That’s the accusation covered in this FT article:
The US Securities and Exchange Commission has been accused of censorship after forcing an academic to delay publication of a paper examining the impact of regulation on small audit firms for nine months.
The politically sensitive paper, based on three years of interviews with audit firm staff, was completed by Ally Zimmerman and three other researchers while Zimmerman was in a one-year fellowship at the SEC last year. Zimmerman, an associate professor at Florida State University, finished the fellowship in July.
The paper highlights criticism of the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board, the US audit regulator that is overseen by the SEC. Small firms complained of delays in getting feedback from the agency, the paper found, indicating the regulator’s inspection regime favoured larger firms such as the Big Four. Smaller auditors did not have the same infrastructure to respond when inspectors found audit flaws, the researchers said.
The work had only now been made public after the end of her fellowship, Zimmerman told the Financial Times, and the authors plan to submit it for peer review. “The SEC didn’t like the paper being out there,” she said, adding that one SEC staffer told her during her fellowship that there was a problem with “optics”.
Streisand Effect lol
@AKofth6 on Xitter asked us to comment on this, maybe you should instead.
I learned so much sat in the audit team room in my first few years.
— The Secret CFO (@SecretCFO) August 19, 2024
Chatting issues through. Hearing my senior colleagues on the phone. Sharing ideas. Trying to make myself a bit better than the person next to me.
If audit rooms are dying off due to more remote work, that has…
@SecretCFO thread here.
Regular Going Concern readers will know we have been keeping an eye on various municipal bush fires burning throughout the country, most of which are directly related to the talent shortage. Here’s another one. Though it sounds like the situation in Pawhuska, Oklahoma is one guy, not an understaffed CPA firm:
Pawhuska city officials voiced frustration during an Aug. 13 City Council meeting about the ongoing wait for delivery to them of an audit report for the 2022-2023 fiscal year.
The city engaged the firm of David Clanin, a CPA based in Vinita, to perform the 2022-2023 audit for $12,000. The engagement letter said that the firm anticipated starting work approximately in July of 2023 and issuing a report no later than Dec. 31, 2023, Jones explained.
“He (Clanin) did not provide a new timeline,” Jones told the Council on Aug. 13. She said that she had reached other providers of audit services.
Private equity firms are “circling” the King’s Grant Thornton. Like vultures?
Private equity giants are circling Grant Thornton with a view to lodging bids for Britain’s sixth-largest accountant, which could kick off a formal sale process as soon as next month.
CVC, the European owner of the La Liga football league, is running the rule over the UK arm of Grant Thornton, which employs about 5,500 people, in the hopes of lodging a bid.
KKR has also taken a look at bidding for the accountancy in recent weeks, although people close to the situation said that it was unclear whether the US buyout behemoth was currently interested.
Sources are telling The Times that Grant Thornton has been approaching private equity firms directly and that a formal process will begin soon. We’ve heard that before…
Closer to home, Grant Thornton US published “Our commitment to audit quality” on August 15. We assume this was prompted by a deficiency rate of more than 50% in its most recent round of PCAOB inspections:
For nearly 100 years, Grant Thornton has been providing exceptional audit and assurance services to the domestic and global marketplace. We operate with quality as our North Star and our foundation, regularly identifying and addressing challenges, while always building on our capabilities.
Today, for example, we’re leaning into technology and innovation. Advanced technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) are helping us conduct more effective audits and empower our people to deliver on every engagement with high quality. Already, we’re creating AI systems to analyze and identify areas of audits that have historically required added scrutiny, while also using AI to monitor cloud-based audits. And we’re using AI for ICFR (internal control over financial reporting) engagements.
We’re also reinventing the way we train and upskill our people — from how and who we hire to how we train and coach our teams. And we’re implementing new policy and process updates, and heightening quality controls.
At the same time, we’re standardizing work papers to drive consistency, and we’re deploying a new pre-issuance review team that executes inspections on public company audit files prior to issuing audit reports. Similarly, we’re utilizing an audit quality pod system designed to drive actions that continuously improve audit quality.
Yeah, we don’t need to read the rest of that. Show, don’t tell.
Bberg’s Talking Tax podcast goes inside EY’s generative AI rollout:
The Big Four company is investing $1.4 billion into gen AI globally. Other Big Four firms have made similar pledges. The investments are in part a bet that the technology can fill in some gaps from the longstanding accounting shortage.
But implementing the technology in tax departments is difficult, in part because of how often policies change and the vast amount of data. Daren Campbell, leader of EY Americas Tax Technology and Transformation team, gave Bloomberg Tax an inside look at how his team seeks to overcome these challenges, where the technology is today, and what’s next.
The podcast module annoyingly can’t be embedded so you’ll have to click that link above to listen.
And in “Oh God, Another Big 4 Lawsuit!?” news, PwC snagged one from a former client:
A UK property developer is suing PwC in London’s High Court, alleging that the Big Four accountancy firm provided “negligent” tax advice that landed the company with a £3mn bill to Britain’s tax authority.
Revelan, a commercial property developer formerly backed by US investment manager Ares, is seeking about £6.6mn for loss and damages after claiming that the consulting firm “failed to accurately calculate tax due” by the group over a five-year period, according to court documents obtained by the Financial Times.
The errors, some of which PwC admitted in a letter to HM Revenue & Customs, left Revelan with a bill totalling about £3mn to the tax authority, comprising outstanding tax liabilities, unpaid interest and penalties for late payment, the documents show.
£3 million = about $3.9 million USD.
I haven’t had my sugar-free Red Bull yet so that will have to do for now. We’ve got a busy week of PCAOB inspection reports to get through this week and a surprise story about BDO that will give us a look into their current financial state. If you see anything else we should be talking about, please email or text 202-505-8885 and we’d be happy to take a look.
Have a great week, you!