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AI Agents Now Complete Tax Returns Start to Finish While the Government Can’t Even Audit Its Own Books

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The US government just declared itself insolvent. AI agents are completing tax returns without human intervention. And the accounting profession is caught between these two massive disruptions.

In Episode 481 of The Accounting Podcast, hosts Blake Oliver and David Leary opened with a bombshell that somehow flew under the mainstream media radar. The Treasury Department’s own financial statements show the US is $42 trillion in the red, and that’s before counting Social Security and Medicare obligations. They then dove into an equally seismic shift with guest Kenji Kuramoto, founder of Acuity and newly appointed Managing Partner in Residence at AI company Basis, exploring how artificial intelligence is transforming every corner of the accounting world.

Deficit Spending Just Keeps Going

“It’s official. We are insolvent,” David announced at the start of the episode, referencing the Treasury’s 2024 financial statements. They show $6 trillion in total assets against nearly $48 trillion in total liabilities. That $42 trillion hole doesn’t even include the $88 trillion in unfunded Social Security and Medicare obligations sitting off the balance sheet.

“Imagine a family making $52,000 that owes $1.3 million in a line of credit,” Blake said, putting the crisis in household terms.

Making matters worse, the Government Accountability Office issued a disclaimer of opinion for the 29th consecutive year, essentially saying it can’t even verify the accuracy of the numbers because the Department of Defense has never passed an audit.

“This is the reason a huge number of people voted for Trump,” David said. “They wanted to stop deficit spending, and it just keeps going.”

Meanwhile, AI Is Eating the Accounting Profession

While the government’s books are falling apart, AI companies are racing to automate the work of keeping everyone else’s books together. TaxGPT announced an AI agent capable of completing 1040 returns from start to finish without a preparer touching a keyboard or mouse. The tool works with existing web-based portals and tax prep software, pulling in W-2s, 1099s, and other source documents, then having a review agent double-check everything.

“Why go after tax pros?” David asked. “Just get in bed with the portal companies and go after TurboTax.”

Kenji, who recently joined Basis after selling Acuity and taking a year off, described watching AI agents handle complex accounting work that made him come out of retirement. “I saw an agent handle complex payroll entries like booking the GL entry, creating an accrual because the pay period didn’t align with month-end, posting the reversing entry for the following month, and building a complete set of work papers,” he said. “I saw this last year, and I was like, wait, what?”

The flood of AI announcements kept coming throughout the episode:

  • Ramp launched an accounting agent that auto-codes transactions down to the line-item level on invoices, claiming to save finance teams 40+ hours per month
  • Xero announced a multi-year partnership with Anthropic to integrate Claude AI directly into its platform
  • Canopy launched a bookkeeping module with AI that continuously reviews books and flags issues in real time
  • Double (formerly Keeper) released AI Journal Entries that can handle complex, repetitive entries from source documents
  • BILL announced agents for invoice coding, W-9 collection, and automated vendor payment responses

“Everyone thought we were boring,” Kenji said. “Look at this. All these Y Combinator companies spinning up and fundraising announcements and agents everywhere. Come on. Exciting.”

The Skills Gap Is Already Here

The shift is showing up in real time in hiring data. In 2023, only 18% of accounting job postings mentioned AI skills. Now it’s 30%, a 67% increase.

“The real-world requirement is probably 50%,” David argued. “People are behind on updating their postings.”

But a better question is what happens to the business model. Kenji described how at Acuity, the bottleneck was always people. Plenty of companies needed help with their books, but you couldn’t hire enough accountants to serve them cost-effectively. AI agents break that constraint. One highly efficient bookkeeper might handle 45 to 60 clients today. “Will one person eventually be able to handle 200 clients?” David asked.

The threat isn’t just from other firms. An article on Payments.com found that everyday taxpayers are already using ChatGPT and Gemini to do their taxes before ever talking to a professional. The reason is “speed and simplicity,” David explained. “AI can explain tax concepts, organize the documents, and suggest deductions. These are things they’re not getting from their tax professional.”

Are Tokens the New Billable Hour?

As AI cuts the time needed to complete work, firms are scrambling to figure out how to price their services. Bloomberg Law reported that PwC, KPMG, and RSM are all exploring alternatives to hourly billing.

“This may be the thing that finally gets us there,” Kenji said about moving away from billable hours. “If I just used AI to help me get my work done and I’m cutting down my billable hours, I’m losing revenue.”

“You can bill for tokens,” David suggested, offering a provocative alternative.

He then vented about Earmark’s own token consumption across multiple platforms, including Claude, GitHub Copilot, Retool, ChatGPT, and more. “Two days ago, an automation stopped working,” he said. “We spent five plus people hours trying to increase our tokens and get the automation working again.”

The problem is, token costs are opaque and growing. David introduced two terms gaining traction: “token anxiety,” or not knowing what you’re being charged for, and “AI FinOps,” managing AI costs across platforms.

“There’s an opportunity here for firms to become a token expert and offer it as a service,” David suggested.

Blake’s take was more pragmatic. “It’s better than timesheets, that’s for sure.”

The Window Is Closing

The government that sets the rules can’t even audit its own books while declaring itself insolvent. Meanwhile, AI agents are automating core accounting work at a pace that makes the shift from paper to computers look gradual.

“These agents are actually now becoming a component of our workforce,” Kenji said. “You’ve got accountants and you’ve got agents. This is the future state we’re moving into.”

For practitioners, it’s clear that the tools to dramatically expand your capacity exist right now. But so does the threat of clients going straight to AI and bypassing your firm entirely. The window to adapt is open, but it won’t stay that way for long.

As Blake noted about current AI pricing, “When Uber was new, everything was really, really cheap.” The subsidies won’t last forever. To thrive, firms need to figure out the new economics now, whether that’s value pricing, token billing, or something else entirely. Those that don’t may find themselves as obsolete as the government’s ability to balance its own books.

Listen to the full episode for the complete discussion, including deeper dives into specific AI capabilities and Kenji’s firsthand perspective from inside an AI-native company.

Why Women in Accounting Keep Losing Credit for Their Own Ideas

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Nancy McClelland is sitting at her desk when a WhatsApp message lights up her phone. It’s a screenshot from her friend Dymond with a simple question, “Aren’t those your slides?”

They are. A live QB Power Hour session was using the distinctive slide deck Nancy used for three-plus years of 1099 presentations, the one she built, refined season after season, and shared with co-presenters last year. She wasn’t even invited to the session. She later learned presenters were making edits to her slides even five minutes before going live.

“The heat just came up to my head and my face, and it felt like it exploded out the top of my head,” Nancy says, describing her physical reaction on a recent episode of She Counts, the real-talk podcast for women in accounting she co-hosts with Questian Telka. “I got a little shaky and I was just furious.”

This moment became the catalyst for a candid discussion of how women’s intellectual work gets absorbed, reused, and reattributed in the accounting profession, and what if anything we can do about it.

When Credit Disappears, So Does Opportunity

When your slides show up in someone else’s presentation or someone repeats your idea in a meeting as if it were their own, it’s not just about bruised feelings. It’s a systematic pattern affecting women’s advancement in accounting.

“When credit is taken away, it doesn’t just affect that one person,” Nancy explains. “If we don’t enforce these boundaries, it affects all of us.”

The impact goes beyond individual harm. As Questian points out, it “prevents diversity of thought” because when people repeatedly lose credit for their work, they stop creating and contributing. The entire profession loses out on those perspectives.

Nancy isn’t early in her career or insecure. She’s a recognized expert in 1099 compliance who’s been writing for MSN and speaking on the topic for four years. If it can happen to her, it can happen to anyone. And it does, repeatedly, from barely perceptible “borrowing” to blatant theft.

The Full Spectrum of “Borrowed” Ideas

Credit theft ranges from literally reusing your slide deck to repeating your idea without reference, seconds after you said it in a meeting. Understanding that spectrum matters because most of the harm lives in the gray areas where it’s hardest to call out.

Nancy’s QB Power Hour story falls at the blatant end. Last year, she co-hosted an episode with Rich Kane, volunteering her existing deck for the session. This year, the same session ran with her slides but without her. When Jennifer Dymond and Sharrin Fuller recognized the slides, they called it out in the live chat. Nancy fired off an email, deliberately replying to the original thread where she’d shared the deck to make the paper trail unmistakable.

Dan DeLong, the host, responded quickly and apologetically. He said it hadn’t occurred to him that reusing the slides was a problem. He’d just grabbed last year’s deck and asked Rich to update it.

“I named plagiarism and he responded with process failure,” Nancy says. That gap between how women name harm and how it gets institutionally reframed is crucial. As Questian points out, “You can plagiarize work without it being intentional.”

But this wasn’t Nancy’s first experience with credit theft. Earlier in her speaking career, she applied to present at the National Society of Accountants for Cooperatives conference. To add “credibility,” they paired her with their head of education as co-presenter.

Nancy created everything, including slides, research, citations, and examples. When presentation day arrived, her co-presenter had her sit at a table beside the podium while he stood at the podium for the entire session. At one point, he gestured to the screen and said, “When I prepared this slide…”

“I just swung toward him and looked up and my jaw dropped,” Nancy recalls. She wanted to correct the record but wondered, “How much of this do I say out-loud? I don’t know how it’s gonna reflect on me.”

The session was popular enough to warrant a journal article, but only if Nancy listed him as co-author. She refused, offering instead to properly cite his prior article that inspired her research. The publication was denied entirely.

“The lesson I took away from that is you can have exposure or you can have ownership, but you can’t have both,” Nancy says.

Questian’s experiences with credit theft have been on the subtler end of the spectrum. She regularly shares ideas in meetings only to have someone repeat them moments later and receive the credit. “It’s happened to me so much in my life that I’ve just gotten used to it,” she admits. Recently, her partner witnessed it happen multiple times in a single social setting and was stunned.

Then there are the gray areas. After She Counts launched, Questian noticed another female podcaster using specific language and ideas from their episodes. It happened at least three times, but rather than confront it, Questian stopped watching that person’s content. “I have this fear of calling out and hurting someone’s professional reputation,” she explains.

“When is it theft and when is it overlap?” Nancy asks. That’s the question at the center of most situations. The blatant cases are easy to identify, but most credit erosion happens where you know something is off but can’t quite prove it.

Why Credit Systematically Drifts Away from Women

If these were isolated incidents, the solution would be simple. But women often don’t receive credit for their ideas because of deeply embedded biases and hierarchies that operate even when everyone has good intentions.

Nancy discusses the Matilda effect, a term for the systematic under-crediting of women in science. The examples are staggering: Rosalind Franklin’s X-ray crystallography was central to understanding DNA’s structure, but the Nobel Prize went to James Watson, Francis Crick, and Maurice Wilkins. Jocelyn Bell Burnell discovered the first radio pulsars as a graduate student, but the Nobel went to her supervisor. Lise Meitner’s work was key to understanding nuclear fission, but Otto Hahn got the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

“This kind of thing has been happening so much and for so long in science that they actually have a name for it,” Nancy explains.

In accounting, the angle is different but equally problematic. “So much of our work is process, systems, teaching, and translation,” Nancy notes. “Those kinds of things are generally more likely to be reused without attribution. They’re more likely to be absorbed rather than credited, even though they’re highly valuable for our profession.”

Higher-status individuals are disproportionately credited as sources of ideas, regardless of who introduced them. As Nancy explains, “Men are often assumed to be the owner of knowledge and women, the contributors.”

Questian adds another layer, referencing Vanessa Van Edwards’ research on competence versus warmth. “If you are perceived as too warm, you can then be perceived as less competent, even though you are often still highly competent,” she explains. People who are naturally collaborative are especially vulnerable. The very qualities that make you a great colleague make you easy to overlook.

There’s also source confusion. People remember ideas better than where they heard them. Nancy’s experience with Jason Staats illustrates this. She’d discussed her Ask a CPA community with him, specifically about bridging tensions between bookkeepers and tax professionals, and shared her community plans in a class he taught. Weeks later, he posted about the exact topic without attribution. When multiple people tagged Nancy in the comments and she emailed him, Jason explained he’d forgotten the connection.

The consequences are real. And women who claim their credit are evaluated more negatively than men exhibiting the same behavior. “I don’t want people to think I’m a bitch,” Nancy admits, “but that’s how I feel like I am viewed.”

The Power of Collective Action

What works most effectively to combat idea theft is having someone else see it and say something.

Dymond and Sharrin called out Nancy’s slides in the live chat. Multiple community members tagged Nancy when Jason posted about her topic. Nicole Davis reached out directly to address a perceived overlap. Her partner pointed out that Questian had just made the same point. In every case where things went right, it was collective action.

“When we speak up for each other, two things happen,” Nancy explains. “We make it safer for someone else to name harm, and we actually retrain our nervous systems to recognize that just because something is uncomfortable and we speak out about it, it doesn’t mean we’re overreacting.”

The hosts offer practical strategies:

  • Say names out loud. When discussing ideas, credit the source. For example, Nancy notes Debra Kilsheimer is the one who told her about the Matilda Effect.
  • Men have a specific role. When someone repeats an idea in a meeting, men can simply say, “That’s what Questian just told us.” It requires attention, not heroism.
  • Address it directly when it happens to you. Nancy emailed using the original thread where she’d shared her slides, making the trail clear. “We’ve gotta say these things out-loud because maybe there’s a misunderstanding,” she explains.
  • Speak up when you see it happening to others. Reduce someone else’s risk by lending your voice. Tag creators in comments. Mention names in chat.
  • Handle misunderstandings with grace. Nicole provides the model. She spoke up when she thought her work had been borrowed. Nancy explained the timeline, shared evidence, and Nicole graciously acknowledged the misunderstanding. They agreed to co-present on the topic later that year. 

The episode closes with three essential questions:

  1. Where are you sharing work that represents your expertise?
  2. Who benefits when your name is removed?
  3. What would change if you treated your ideas as assets instead of favors?

Your Name Belongs on Your Work

Credit theft in accounting isn’t about villains. It’s about a system where biases and expectations consistently funnel attribution away from women, even recognized experts, and even when people have good intentions.

The same number of women enter the accounting profession as men, but they don’t make Partner at the same rate. So the systematic erasure of women’s intellectual contributions isn’t minor. Every uncredited slide deck, repeated idea, or template passed around without attribution chips away at professional capital women need to advance.

Nancy closes with a quote from Virginia Woolf: “For most of history, Anonymous was a woman.”

In accounting, it doesn’t have to stay that way.

Listen to the full episode of She Counts and share your own story on the She Counts LinkedIn page. Have you ever had your work passed off as someone else’s? The more we name it, the harder it becomes to ignore.

The IRS Now Knows Who’s Trading Crypto But Can’t Tell What Anyone Owes

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The IRS now knows who’s trading crypto, but it still can’t tell if anyone owes tax. That’s the reality of the new 1099-DA reporting system that just went live, and it’s about to affect every tax professional with crypto clients.

On a recent episode of the Earmark Podcast, host Blake Oliver sat down with Lawrence Zlatkin, Vice President of Tax at Coinbase, to explain what the new 1099-DA form reports, where the gaps are, and what changes Coinbase is pushing for in Washington. With a front-row seat to crypto taxation’s biggest challenges, Lawrence offered insight on where the system works (and where it doesn’t).

The problem is that the IRS’s new reporting brings crypto tax enforcement into the mainstream, but the underlying framework creates massive overreporting with little tax benefit. Treating stablecoins as property and requiring reports on tiny gas fees generates millions of forms that tell the government almost nothing about actual tax liability. Tax professionals must bridge the gap between what the IRS receives and what matters for computing taxes.

The 1099-DA: What’s There and What’s Missing

Think of the 1099-DA as crypto’s version of the 1099-B that brokers send for stock trades. The basic concept is familiar: the form goes to your client and the IRS, and the government matches what taxpayers report against what exchanges report. Tax pros have worked with this system for decades.

But this first-year version is bare-bones. As Lawrence explained, “We are implementing the system barely 18 months after Congress issued the regulations. The 1099-B system was developed over a period of five years, and even longer for gross proceeds.”

The result is a “skeletal version” that reports just two things: who the customer is and their gross proceeds from transactions. The critical missing piece is cost basis.

“We’re including basis for our customers for informational purposes, but that information is not actually going to the government,” Lawrence said. Next year, exchanges will start reporting basis, but only when they have it.

Blake walked through a simple example. Say your client sells Bitcoin for $100. The IRS gets a 1099-DA showing $100 in gross proceeds. But if your client bought that Bitcoin for $90, the actual taxable gain is just $10. That $10 is the only number that matters for taxes, but it’s invisible to the government this year.

The problem worsens with transfers between wallets and exchanges. When crypto leaves Coinbase for a self-custody wallet or another exchange, the basis tracking breaks. “The only person who knows what’s in a non-custodial wallet is you because you’re the owner,” Lawrence explained. When that crypto returns to an exchange, there’s no way to reconstruct what happened in between.

So what’s the point of all this reporting? Lawrence was candid. “The government’s concern has been that there’s been underreporting and noncompliance in the ecosystem generally. So what this achieves from their standpoint is they find out who’s really participating.”

Until now, the IRS’s only crypto signal was that checkbox on the 1040, which Lawrence diplomatically called “gobbledygook.” It asks about digital asset transactions. Now the IRS will see actual dollar amounts attached to names. They’ll spot whales with millions in proceeds. They’ll identify non-filers.

“There’s nothing nefarious or awful or evil about that,” Lawrence said. “It’s just that they will have that information they didn’t otherwise have before.”

The practical takeaway is, “you are in control of your tax data,” Lawrence emphasized. Clients who consolidate their activity on a single exchange will have better records. Coinbase provides transaction history and gain/loss data through its “position service.” But clients bouncing between exchanges and wallets need to maintain their own records. Nobody else can do it for them.

The Stablecoin Problem: When Property Isn’t Property

Missing basis data would be manageable if the tax framework made sense. It doesn’t, especially for stablecoins.

Since 2014, the IRS has classified all crypto as property rather than currency or cash equivalents. This includes stablecoins like USDC, which are designed to trade at exactly $1. Every time your client uses USDC, that’s a reportable disposition of property.

“Stablecoins are designed to be stable and consistent and traded at par with the US dollar,” Lawrence said. “99.9% of the time, it’s intended to trade within a fraction of a decimal of the US dollar. So in essence, we’re not reporting a gain or loss. So it’s over-reporting of data. There’s no fundamental purpose for that. I would argue that the only reason for that is surveillance.”

The scale is significant. Coinbase must report stablecoin transactions exceeding $10,000 to the government. Hundreds of thousands of customers received 1099s this year that include these transactions. And taxpayers must report even smaller amounts. Coinbase just won’t tell the IRS about those.

Blake offered his own example. Earmark uses USDC to pay vendors for international transactions where stablecoins are faster than traditional banking. Under current rules, every payment is a reportable property disposition. “It’s as if the IRS got every bank transaction,” Blake said. “Americans would never stand for that. We’d call that surveillance and overreach.”

Lawrence revealed this isn’t hypothetical. Five years ago, the Treasury Department proposed requiring banks to report credit card transactions over $10,000 in aggregate. “That was quashed for the reasons you just described,” he said. Yet here we are with stablecoins.

There’s a small silver lining. “The tax system is based on income. If there’s no gain or loss, there’s no taxable income, and there’s no penalty,” Lawrence explained. You can’t underpay taxes on zero gain. But the reporting requirement still exists.

De Minimis Madness: When Pennies Become Paperwork

Beyond stablecoins, tiny transactions that generate enormous paperwork are another reporting nightmare.

Gas fees, which are the network costs for blockchain transactions, often involve disposing of pennies or fractions of dollars worth of Ethereum. Each one is technically a property disposition that must be tracked and reported. Each might have actual (if microscopic) gain or loss.

The volume is staggering. Coinbase files millions of 1099-DAs containing hundreds of millions of underlying transactions that feed into Form 8949. Lawrence estimates that about half qualify as de minimis, meaning they’re essentially meaningless for tax purposes.

“We’re not going to pave roads and solve the deficit on the backs of de minimis reporting for crypto,” Lawrence argued. He’s pushing for a threshold below which transactions become exempt from reporting or taxation. Should it be $5? $50? $200? Should it be income-based or transaction-based?

“At what point do we stop requiring reporting for transactions?” Lawrence asked. “If the IRS gets bombarded with billions of transactions that are tiny in nature because people are required to report them, the system itself breaks.”

These billions of transactions are being reported today, and the IRS’s ancient computer systems must somehow process them all.

The Washington Agenda: Common Sense Reforms in Political Gridlock

Lawrence came with a clear policy agenda that included ten priorities, although the conversation covered highlighted six in detail.

Beyond stablecoins and de minimis thresholds, Coinbase is pushing for the following reforms:

  • Crypto lending should work like securities lending. “You’re not disposing of crypto because you’re going to get the same amount back,” Lawrence explained. Under current securities rules, that’s not taxable. Crypto should be the same.
  • Staking rewards timing. The IRS says rewards are taxable when received. Others argue they shouldn’t be taxed until sold. “That’s a source of friction and debate,” Lawrence noted.
  • Charitable deductions are perhaps the clearest absurdity. Donate over $5,000 in Bitcoin, and you need a formal appraisal. “You can type it in Google and get a Bitcoin price, just like you get the price of any stock or security,” Lawrence said. Bitcoin has “readily ascertainable fair market value.” The appraisal requirement is “ridiculous.”
  • Foreign investment rules. The US has safe harbors that allow non-US persons to trade securities through US brokers without triggering US tax. No equivalent exists for crypto. “We’re the best and safest market in the world,” Lawrence said. “We’d like to preserve that for crypto, not just for regular old investment assets.”

So why hasn’t anything passed?

“I’m cautiously optimistic,” Lawrence said. President Trump has been supportive. He met with Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong last week. The White House issued a report on digital assets, including tax provisions. Treasury has been “by and large very supportive.”

But Congress is the bottleneck. The House is narrowly Republican-controlled, and crypto has become more partisan than it should be. “This should not be a partisan debate,” Lawrence insisted. “This ecosystem benefits Democrats and Republicans.”

The Clarity Act for crypto regulation is under discussion. So is broader tax reform. But as Lawrence diplomatically put it, “Things don’t move as quickly as we might like in Washington.”

What This Means for Tax Professionals

The picture Lawrence painted is clear, even if the rules aren’t. The 1099-DA tells the IRS who’s trading and how much, but it lacks the cost basis needed to determine actual tax liability. Tax professionals must fill that gap by reconciling gross proceeds against basis records scattered across exchanges, wallets, and spreadsheets.

Meanwhile, classifying stablecoins as property without de minimis rules creates millions of reportable transactions with zero tax consequences. It’s all noise, no signal.

The reforms Coinbase wants make sense. But with narrow Congressional majorities and partisan friction, don’t expect relief before next filing season.

The message for practitioners is crypto is no longer niche. With millions of 1099-DAs arriving and IRS matching letters sure to follow, you need to understand what these forms show, how to help clients track basis, and where the traps are. Firms that build this expertise now will serve a growing client base. Those who don’t risk being blindsided along with their clients.

“Everyone wants to talk about tax,” Lawrence joked at the start. By the end, it’s clear why. The intersection of crypto and tax is where innovation meets regulation, and right now, regulation is playing catch-up.

Listen to the complete episode of the Earmark Podcast for Lawrence’s full breakdown of Coinbase’s policy priorities and practical advice on basis tracking. You can earn free NASBA-approved CPE credit by listening and taking a short quiz at earmarkcpe.com.

Fake Auditor Conclusions, Fabricated Board Minutes, and the Growing Cracks in Accounting’s Trust Infrastructure

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A compliance startup allegedly sold hundreds of companies fake SOC 2 reports complete with made-up auditor conclusions and board meeting notes that never happened. In Florida, legislators nearly abolished the state’s Board of Accountancy entirely. And AI companies now run ads that sound exactly like QuickBooks marketing copy.

These are just some of the topics Blake Oliver and David Leary tackled in their latest episode of The Accounting Podcast. The hosts dug into stories that show the systems meant to ensure trust in accounting face threats from multiple angles.

The (Alleged) SOC 2 Scandal

“This is wild,” Blake said, thanking a listener for sending him a detailed investigation about Delve, a VC-backed compliance startup. The company allegedly created fake SOC 2 reports at scale, using what the hosts described as a disturbing playbook.

According to a Substack series Blake reviewed, Delve’s platform pre-populated everything from policies to evidence and even independent auditor conclusions. The company then allegedly routed these pre-written reports through audit firms that simply rubber-stamped them.

“These are allegations. I have not independently verified any of this,” Blake was careful to note. “This is a very in-depth Substack report by an anonymous poster. So we should take this with a grain of salt.”

But the details were alarming. The investigation claimed to find board meetings that never happened, security simulations that were never performed, and trust pages showing controls as “implemented” before any actual work was done. Companies had written policies claiming they had mobile device management, VPNs, and intrusion detection systems, even though they had none of these.

The author analyzed 322 public Delve trust pages and found that 321 showed the exact same SOC 2 control set, which seems odd for supposedly customized compliance programs.

“The logo you get is an AICPA logo, right? You’re getting a stamp of approval from the AICPA,” David said, cutting to the heart of the problem. “Is the AICPA checking on all these badges that are on company websites?”

Blake explained how easy it would be to game the system. “All you have to do is find a firm willing to sign off without actually doing the work,” he said, comparing it to the BF Borgers case in Colorado, where a CPA firm was caught signing off on audits it never performed.

“This is the problem with assurance,” Blake continued. “If you have a few bad actors willing to just sign off, sign off, sign off, they can make a lot of money. And how do they get caught? And if they get caught, what happens?”

Florida Almost Killed Its Board of Accountancy

While fake compliance reports threaten the profession from within, Florida’s legislature almost destroyed a key piece of regulatory infrastructure from the outside.

House Bill 607 would have eliminated the Florida Board of Accountancy along with other professional licensing boards as part of a sweeping deregulation push. The Florida Institute of CPAs called it “the most serious threat to the profession in decades.”

“How do you regulate the CPA in Florida?” Blake asked, explaining the stakes. Without a Board of Accountancy, there’s no enforcement mechanism, no oversight, and no one to investigate bad actors.

The bill moved quickly through two committees before being stopped. But victory came at a cost. To focus on defeating the bill, FICPA had to table its own effort to create alternative pathways to CPA licensure that would have allowed candidates to qualify with 120 credit hours instead of 150.

The irony wasn’t lost on the hosts. Florida was the first state to implement the 150-hour rule. Now, while about 30 states have approved alternative pathways, efforts to defend against total deregulation have sidelined reforms.

“We want to streamline licensure, but we don’t want it to go away,” Blake said. “We’ve got folks who want too much regulation, and then we’ve got folks who want no regulation. There’s got to be a middle ground here.”

David predicted this won’t be the last such attempt. “I imagine we’re probably going to see more pushes for this because people are going to want the big, huge AI companies to have their AI do CPA work without a license in the way.”

When AI Ads Look Like QuickBooks Ads

Speaking of AI companies, David discovered something unsettling through a targeted LinkedIn ad. Anthropic is marketing “Claude for Finance” using language that sounds exactly like traditional accounting software.

The ad promised to handle recurring financial workflows, organize receipts into clean spreadsheets, build quarterly revenue models, and cross-reference documents for month-end close.

“Third-party app developers and accountants and CPAs that use Claude essentially trained the model so they could just take everybody out of the middle,” David explained. He compared it to how the iPhone camera evolved. At first, you needed third-party apps for filters and editing. Now it’s all built in.

The hosts also discussed a Wall Street Journal article about how regular people are already using AI for tax work. Examples ranged from using Copilot to model Roth conversions to having AI explain confusing IRS notices. One person used Gemini to value charitable donations for their tax return.

“The takeaway is they’re avoiding getting an accountant or a tax professional,” David said bluntly.

But the technology isn’t perfect. One user found that Grok gave wrong answers about capital gains tax until he rephrased his question. A retired tax preparer tested ChatGPT on an IRS volunteer certification exam, and ChatGPT failed.

This leads to what David called the “fact check tax,” a term from Anthropic’s own survey. “An assistant that sounds sure but is often wrong forces you to treat everything as suspect. Instead of freeing attention, AI creates a permanent fact-check tax.”

The Bigger Picture

These stories paint a picture of a profession under pressure from multiple directions. Fake compliance reports undermine the attestation model. Deregulation efforts threaten the licensing framework. AI platforms are positioning themselves as replacements rather than tools.

As Blake noted about AI, “It’s going to be really hard for Intuit and Xero to keep up unless they’re just plugging into ChatGPT or into Claude. How can their own AI chatbots keep up with what these companies are doing, and how fast they’re developing?”

For accounting professionals, these are challenges that require attention and action. Listen to the full episode of The Accounting Podcast to hear Blake and David discuss these stories and more. 

Hidden Screens, Tax-Season Tequila Deliveries, And Other Things Only Women In Accounting Would Believe

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At 37, Questian Telka sat across from a male colleague who asked her something she’ll never forget: “How does it feel to be a woman and be past your prime?”

She looked him dead in the eye. “Past my prime? I haven’t even gotten close to hitting my prime yet.”

Seven years later, on her 44th birthday, the day this episode of She Counts aired, Questian’s confidence proved prophetic. Her experience, revenue, and boundaries are thriving like never before. As she puts it with perfect accounting humor, “I know in accounting, assets depreciate with age, but I prefer to think of myself as an asset whose value compounds over time.”

Welcome to a special birthday episode of She Counts, the real-talk podcast where hosts Nancy McClelland, CPA, and Questian Telka, EA, tackle heavy topics like imposter syndrome, glass ceilings, sexual harassment, burnout, and pricing disparities. But they also know their community needs something lighter. Tax season is brutal, politics are exhausting, and everyone is tired.

So they crowdsourced stories from women across the profession with one simple prompt: “You know you’re a woman in accounting when…”

The responses poured in, and they range from hilarious to infuriating. But they’re all relatable. These are funny stories to share over drinks, but also proof that the absurd experiences uniting women in this profession aren’t anomalies. They’re the norm. And when we finally start talking about them, we realize we’re not alone. In fact, we never were, and laughter might just be our best survival tool.

Conference Survival: A Full-Contact Sport

If you want to understand what it’s really like being a woman in accounting, skip the spreadsheets. Watch us pack for a conference.

Questian calls herself a “minimalist,” which made Nancy burst out laughing. “I love that you think of yourself as a minimalist,” Nancy said, remembering the first time she visited Questian’s hotel room at their very first conference together, the Bookkeeping Buds retreat. “There was stuff everywhere. There’s literally no physical space in this room that does not have something of yours on it.”

Questian’s conference arsenal includes a clothing steamer and multiple shoe options (conference shoes, dinner shoes, and, especially in Las Vegas, dancing shoes). She has a full makeup setup and safety pins. “Inevitably, somebody at the conference is like, ‘I need X, Y, Z.’ And I’m like, ‘I have it. What do you need?'” she explains. “I have safety pins. I come prepared.”

Nancy operates differently. Severe back issues mean she refuses to carry more than a carry-on. Her solution is a handwritten chart mapping every conference day, every event, every outfit, and every pair of shoes, all strategically planned for maximum reuse. “I am obsessed with having absolutely everything I need and not one thing more,” she says.

Except costumes. Nancy always packs costumes.

She has a piñata costume, which she wore in a photo with Leslie Odom Jr., who “did not say a word about it. He just smiled.” She also has a watermelon costume and an aerobics costume for leading conference rooms through “She Works Hard for the Money.” As she puts it, “Costumes are the one exception.”

The shoe situation deserves its own category. Lynda Artesani brings an entire extra suitcase filled with just shoes. Her conference bestie Matthew Fulton carries it for her. “Yep, that’s me. That’s my job. That’s why they call me the conference husband,” Matthew jokes.

Then there’s the survival kit problem. Conference rooms are either arctic or tropical, with no middle ground. Nancy brings handmade ponchos from her best friend, a fiber artist. Questian brings pashminas. In fact, it’s a good idea to have both a pashmina scarf AND a battery-operated fan in your conference bag. Because venue temperature control is, as the hosts put it, “unhinged.”

Despite the need for survival gear, conferences are where magic happens in the most unexpected places. Questian met her romantic partner in the Starbucks line at an accounting conference. Nancy met Misty Megia, founder of Theatre of Public Speaking, when Doug Sleeter literally dragged her down a hallway to join a secret flash mob that would “interrupt” the opening keynote, which Misty actually choreographed herself.

Ellen Oliver nailed what matters most when she said, “You know you’re a woman in accounting when you finally get to meet your internet friends in real life.”

These conference moments create the connective tissue of a community that might only see each other a few times a year. But the real gymnastics happen when you try to schedule your actual life around the profession’s demands.

When the Universe Ignores Your Busy Season Calendar

Questian’s first son was due on Christmas Day. Perfect timing, she thought, not for the holiday, but for the tax benefit. “Who wouldn’t?” she laughs. Plus, as an EA who doesn’t do taxes, her busiest month is January with 1099s, year-end closes, and grant reporting. A December baby would’ve been ideal.

The baby had other plans. He arrived two weeks late, smack in the middle of January chaos. “I was really annoyed,” Questian admits. Fortunately, January’s birthstone is garnet, which is her favorite. She had a ring made to commemorate it.

Not everyone gets thwarted by nature. Dr. Jackie Meyer, CPA, planned both her children’s births before busy season, and it worked. When people asked if she was timing it for the tax deduction, she said no. She was timing it so she could be in the office during tax season. Robina Bennion pulled off the same feat. When her grandmother warned, “You can’t plan your whole life,” Robina shot back, “Oh yeah, grandma, watch me.”

Then there’s Jean Zick, who walked to work nine months pregnant in a late-90s blizzard because wires had to be faxed. A client needed something, so she went. Nancy’s response captures what we’re all thinking: “Thank goodness for today’s remote workforce.”

The emotional toll runs deeper than logistics. Every January, Questian says, “I want to quit accounting.” She’s joking, but she’s also not. “I eventually get over it, but every year I’m like, I need to change careers.”

Nancy shared a meme that rewrites the old rhyme about days in months. “30 days hath September, April, June, and November. All the rest have 31, except for January, which has 426,913.” If you’ve lived through January in accounting, you know that number might be low.

The hosts voiced something every woman in the profession has felt when they said, “You’ve cried over something that had nothing to do with accounting. But it was definitely about accounting.” That breakdown over a spilled coffee during 1099 season? Yeah, that wasn’t about the coffee.

Some stories make you laugh until you realize they shouldn’t be funny at all.

The Absurd, The Infuriating, and The Too Real

Gail Perry, editor-in-chief of CPA Practice Advisor, shared a story that starts unbelievably and gets worse. She was her firm’s multi-state tax expert. A client came in with multi-state issues. She was the obvious choice for the meeting. Except the client insisted on working with a man.

The firm’s solution was to set up a physical screen in the conference room. Gail sat behind it, hidden, listening and taking notes while feeding information to a male colleague who pretended to have her expertise. They joked she was the Wizard of Oz behind the curtain. “At the time, we just thought he was a jerk,” Gail said. Nancy and Questian insist they “would have said no.”

The wardrobe calculations alone could fill a spreadsheet. One listener pointed out the mental drain of deciding what to wear. Is this too tight? Too casual? Will this invite the wrong attention? Questian added that a male colleague recently observed how much time women spend getting “presentation ready.” That’s time men use to actually advance their careers. “This was a man saying this to me,” she noted.

Another listener treats clothing as armor and calls her quarter-zip her protection for meetings with clients who try to look at her chest. She even has a custom field in her CRM to tag problem clients, like men who’ve leered or made passes. “You cannot make this stuff up,” Nancy said.

Another submission was blunt: “You know you’re a woman in accounting when your client texts you late at night trying to sleep with you.”

Not every story stings. Dawn Slokan was at her daughter’s dance competition, convinced she kept seeing ads for Avalara, the tax software. Why would a tax company sponsor a dance event? Turns out it was a skincare brand. Her brain just couldn’t leave work at work.

The takeout metrics tell their own story. Terr Saracino’s local restaurants know it’s tax season by the volume of orders alone. Nancy’s favorite pizza place once taped two plastic containers to her delivery box. Inside each was a shot of tequila. “They knew it was us and they knew it was tax season.”

The conversation shifted when they addressed their most-requested topic: menopause and perimenopause. Nancy went through early menopause around 40. Her doctor dismissed it, saying, “You’re too young” and put her on birth control instead. 

Questian shared that most doctors receive about one month of (optional) menopause training. For something affecting over half the population!

Building Community Through Shared Experience

The hosts introduced Shawn Simmons, Nancy’s best friend since college and a professor of communication design at Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design. At 54, after eight years navigating her own health journey with limited support, Shawn is using her sabbatical to research how design and fiber arts can help women find community around menopause.

“I had trouble finding people to talk to about it,” Shawn explained. “I didn’t have a lot of resources. So I decided to use graphic design and art to help people like me find a community and be able to talk about their experiences.”

She created a survey asking women 16 and older where they currently find support and where they wish they could. Shawn’s research revealed the awareness gap. When she called about hormone replacement therapy options, the women at both her insurance and pharmaceutical companies didn’t know what HRT was.

These Stories Aren’t Bugs. They’re Features

The episode makes crystal clear these are shared experiences. The woman next to you at the conference, behind the screen feeding answers, in the Starbucks line, or whose pizza place knows her tequila preference has her own version of your story.

When we speak these stories out loud, they transform from private frustrations into collective evidence that this profession still has work to do. But more importantly, they prove women in accounting have been doing that work all along with humor, creativity, and an impressive collection of conference survival gear.

The hosts ended with a quote from Betty White that captures the spirit perfectly. “It’s your outlook on life that counts. If you take yourself lightly and don’t take yourself too seriously, pretty soon you can find the humor in our everyday lives. And sometimes it can be a lifesaver.”

In accounting, humor is standard equipment. Right there with the pashmina and the battery-powered fan.

Listen to the full episode of She Counts, then head to the She Counts LinkedIn page to share your own “You know you’re a woman in accounting when…” moment. You’re not the only one. You never were. And now we have the stories to prove it.