Earmark CPE

Earn CPE Anytime, Anywhere

Blog – Full Posts

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

· ·

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.

How Tim Duncan and Stan Lee Lost $50 Million to People They Trusted Most

· ·

By 2017, Marvel movies were dominating the box office. Multiple films in the global top ten, billions in revenue, a cinematic universe shaping pop culture like we’d never seen before. At the center of it all, at least symbolically, was Stan Lee. But that same year, his wife Joan passed away after nearly 70 years together, and suddenly decisions they’d been navigating as a team were landing entirely on him.

That same year, NBA legend Tim Duncan discovered his financial advisor of 20 years had been stealing from him for the last decade. Between these two cases, the damage exceeded $50 million, and not a single dollar was stolen by a stranger.

In the latest episode of Oh My Fraud, host Caleb Newquist revives the podcast’s popular “Defrauded Famous” series to examine how trusted insiders extracted tens of millions from two of America’s most recognizable figures. As Caleb puts it, these cautionary tales are reminders that “fraud usually comes from the inside.”

The Big Fundamental’s Big Loss

Tim Duncan wasn’t your typical NBA superstar. Five-time champion, two-time MVP, 15-time All-Star, and nicknamed “The Big Fundamental” for his unglamorous but devastatingly effective style. As Shaquille O’Neal wrote in his autobiography, “I could talk trash to Patrick Ewing. Get in David Robinson’s face. Get a rise out of Alonzo Mourning. But when I went at Tim, he’d look at me like he was bored.”

This wasn’t a guy with a garage full of Ferraris and a Bengal tiger in the backyard. Tim grew up in the U.S. Virgin Islands and planned to be a competitive swimmer until Hurricane Hugo destroyed his training pool. Basketball came later, but success came fast. He was the number one pick in the 1997 draft and won his first championship in his second season.

By the time he retired, Tim had earned well over $200 million in NBA contracts alone. And from day one, he’d been working with financial advisor Charles Banks IV.

Charles came from money. His father was president of Ferguson Enterprises, a major plumbing and HVAC distributor. Charles became president of CSI Capital Management, managing around $400 million for about 150 professional athletes. He was tall, bookish, a wine enthusiast who even co-owned Screaming Eagle Winery with billionaire Stan Kroenke. He positioned himself as someone who could connect clients with sophisticated opportunities beyond basic retirement planning.

For a pro athlete, that kind of help matters. As Caleb explains, NBA players face the “jock tax,” meaning they owe state income taxes in every state they play. A game in California? Taxed there. New York road trip? Taxed there too. With 80-plus games a season, sitting down to personally vet investment deals isn’t exactly practical.

The Trust That Turned Toxic

The turning point came in 2007 when Charles left CSI Capital Management. He never told Tim. Their formal advisory relationship had ended, but Charles kept approaching Tim with investments. And after 2007, Charles had an undisclosed ownership interest in each of them.

Take Le Metier de Beaute, a cosmetics company. Charles pitched it as profitable with $8 million in sales, claiming Kevin Garnett would also invest. Tim put in $1.1 million. In January 2013, an audit uncovered “accounting irregularities and possible fraud.” But Charles texted Tim a month later, “Need to update on a deal. All good news.” The company went bankrupt that September. Tim’s money was gone.

The biggest fraud involved Gameday Entertainment, a struggling sports merchandising company where Charles was chairman and held a controlling interest (facts he never disclosed to Tim). Charles convinced Tim to take out a $10 million line of credit, then loan $7.5 million to Gameday at 12% annual interest. He claimed another investor was putting in the same amount. That investor didn’t exist. Charles pocketed $225,000 in fees and skimmed $15,000 from each monthly payment for two years.

The most brazen move came during the 2013 NBA Finals. While Tim was playing Miami, Charles faxed him signature pages (not the full agreement) for what he described as an amendment that would “remove $1.5 million of risk for you.” He texted: “All great news. No downside.” In reality, Tim had just taken on $6 million in new liability while giving up his priority position as a creditor. Charles paid himself over $1.5 million from the proceeds.

Gameday’s own controller later testified it felt like Charles was using the company as “his personal piggy bank.”

Justice, Sort Of

Tim’s 2013 divorce led to the discovery. A new financial consultant found discrepancies everywhere, including unclear loans, missing documentation and undisclosed conflicts. The final tally showed Tim had invested $24.1 million with Charles and gotten back about $7 million, all from interest payments, not actual returns.

In September 2016, a federal grand jury indicted Charles on four counts of wire fraud. He pleaded guilty to one count and was sentenced to four years in federal prison plus $7.5 million in restitution. Federal investigators calculated Tim’s actual loss at $13.5 million. Tim himself estimated it closer to $25 million.

At sentencing, Tim told Charles directly, “I just wanted you to own up, pay up, and we’d move on. You wouldn’t. So now we’re here.” He also wrote to the judge, “You may not understand how difficult it is for me to be in the public light in this horrible way, as the poster child for a dumb athlete whose financial advisor took his money.”

Judge Fred Berry wasn’t sympathetic to Charles, comparing him to a drug dealer he’d sentenced earlier that day. “People like you ought to be held to a higher standard because you know better,” he said.

Making matters worse, Kevin Garnett was sitting in that courtroom during Charles’s sentencing, across from Tim, with Charles’s family. At the time, Kevin didn’t think he was a victim. Tim’s attorney later said, “We tried to save Kevin. We tried to tell him.” By 2018, Kevin had filed his own lawsuit alleging Charles stole $77 million through a partnership called Hammer Holdings LLC. Combined, Charles allegedly extracted roughly $100 million from these two NBA stars.

When the Gatekeeper Dies

Stan Lee’s story is different but equally troubling. Despite being the face of characters worth billions, including Spider-Man, X-Men, Iron Man, and The Hulk, he didn’t own them. Early comic deals weren’t creator-friendly. But convention appearances, licensing deals, and media projects still generated significant income, and Stan needed help managing it.

For decades, that manager was his wife, Joan. She handled schedules, controlled access, and served as the gatekeeper. When she died in 2017 after nearly 70 years of marriage, that protective layer vanished overnight. What followed was three overlapping fraud cases totaling over $26 million in alleged losses.

Gerardo “Jerry” Olivares, a former florist turned publicist, had worked his way into Stan’s life starting in 2010. After Joan’s death, he allegedly moved fast, convincing the grieving Stan to sign over power of attorney within days, then firing Stan’s banker of 26 years and his longtime attorneys. A lawsuit alleged Jerry transferred $4.6 million from Stan’s account without authorization, including $1.4 million traced directly to Jerry and $850,000 for a West Hollywood condo.

Then there’s the detail that sounds like something out of a horror movie. Jerry allegedly had a nurse extract vials of Stan Lee’s blood to stamp on Black Panther comics that sold for up to $500 each. Stan never authorized it. The lawsuit called it a “diabolical and ghoulish scheme.”

Max Anderson, Stan’s road manager since 2006, allegedly stole over $21 million, including $11 million in autograph revenue and $10 million in appearance fees. At one 2017 New York Comic Con, Max allegedly collected over $800,000, paid himself $700,000 as a “management fee,” and gave Stan just $50,000. He also allegedly got Stan, whose vision had deteriorated so badly he couldn’t read what he was signing, to grant him a worldwide license to Stan’s name and likeness in perpetuity for one dollar.

Keya Morgan, a memorabilia dealer who took control of Stan’s business affairs in early 2018, faced criminal charges, including false imprisonment of an elder and elder abuse. He allegedly moved the 95-year-old Stan from his home late at night and called 911 on social workers who came for welfare checks, trying to convince Stan he was in danger.

Limited Justice for Stan

The outcomes were frustratingly incomplete. Jerry Olivares settled for an undisclosed amount without admitting wrongdoing. Background checks later revealed he had 45 tax liens and 15 court judgments, none of which Stan had verified before handing over his finances.

Max Anderson’s civil case settled a week before trial. He pled guilty to federal tax charges for not reporting $1.25 million in income and got 12 months and a day in federal prison.

Keya Morgan’s criminal trial ended in a mistrial with the jury deadlocked 11 to 1 in favor of acquittal. The judge dismissed all remaining charges “in the interests of justice.”

The total alleged harm was over $26 million. But total proven misconduct was just Anderson’s $1.25 million in unreported income. That’s it.

Stan Lee died in 2018 before most of these disputes were resolved.

What We Can Learn

As Caleb frames it, “Nobody manages this level of complexity completely alone.” Tim wasn’t reckless. Stan wasn’t naive. They worked with people they had good reasons to trust. “That is normal. But trust without oversight is basically the equivalent of keeping your fingers crossed.”

The lessons for accounting professionals are:

  • Trust needs verification. Independent review and periodic check-ins aren’t signs of distrust. They’re good governance. Charles operated unchecked for 20 years. That’s a single point of failure.
  • Scale changes everything. Once you reach a certain income level, you’re basically a small business. Multiple revenue streams, complex taxes, and licensing deals demand real internal controls and separation of duties.
  • Fraud comes from inside. It’s not hackers or strangers. It’s people who know “where the documentation is thin or non-existent, where no one’s double checking anything.”
  • Life transitions create vulnerability. Joan Lee’s death removed Stan’s only real oversight. Tim’s fraud was discovered during his divorce. Powers of attorney and defined processes are easier to establish in advance than during a crisis.
  • Documentation matters. Charles faxed Tim the signature pages during the NBA Finals rather than the full agreement. Insist on complete documentation every time.

As Tim said after everything came to light, “I was coached early on in my career about preparing for something like this. I thought I was prepared the right way. I thought I did the right things and it still happened. So obviously it can happen to anyone.”

The full Oh My Fraud episode digs deeper into both cases, including more courtroom details and that wild story about Stan Lee’s blood. These stories are reminders that the principles of internal controls exist for exactly these situations. Every client who says “I trust my advisor completely” might be describing a perfectly healthy relationship. Or they might be involved in exactly the kind of setup that enabled Charles Banks IV to steal for two decades without detection.

Tax Season Is the Best Time to Build Your Referral Pipeline

· ·

Rachel Dillon’s January looked nothing like it used to. On the latest episode of Who’s Really the Boss?, recorded at the start of February, she and her husband, Marcus, reflected on surviving the chaos of 1099 season, year-end financials, and the opening weeks of tax prep. But for Rachel, this January brought something different. Her calendar was booked solid with prospect meetings from the moment the holidays ended through the last day of the month.

“This year was a little bit different,” Rachel shares. “My calendar from as soon as we came back from the holidays all the way through the last day of January was booked pretty solid with meetings with prospective clients.”

This wasn’t always the case. In fact, just a few years ago, the Dillons learned a painful lesson about relying too heavily on digital marketing when a website rebrand wiped out their entire online presence overnight.

When a Rebrand Breaks Everything

Back in August 2022, Marcus and Rachel made what seemed like a smart strategic move. They renamed their firm from Dillon CPAs to Dillon Business Advisors. The old name was attracting the wrong leads, mostly people looking for quick tax returns with no interest in advisory services.

“We got a lot of leads and phone calls, but they were all tax-related,” Marcus explains. “We just would filter through those, try to upsell people into CAS services when at all possible. But it was just a lot of no.”

Along with the new name came a new logo and a brand-new website at dillonadvisors.com. There was just one problem. Nobody properly redirected the old domain to the new one. Overnight, every bit of search engine authority they’d built since 2011 vanished.

“We went from three to four online form fills and probably four to five or phone calls per week with new prospects reaching out about services to zero, none,” Rachel recalls. “No phone calls, and no form fills.”

The silence was so complete that they weren’t even getting spam. If your contact form isn’t attracting junk submissions, Rachel notes, “that’s 100% sure, you know your website is not working.”

They waited three months before questioning it, trusting their consulting team’s assurance that new sites take time to gain traction. When they finally investigated, they audited the site with three or four different vendors. The one that ultimately helped them rebuild provided data no one else had surfaced.

The experience taught them valuable lessons. Always redirect your old domain—it’s non-negotiable. Get multiple website audits, and don’t accept vague promises about improvements. And if your leads drop to zero overnight, don’t wait to investigate.

Where Quality Referrals Really Come From

That website disaster forced Marcus and Rachel to rebuild their lead generation around something more reliable than search rankings: human relationships. And it worked. Those January meetings didn’t materialize out of nowhere. They were the result of relationships nurtured throughout the previous year, especially in Q3 and Q4.

When Rachel analyzes where their best leads come from, the same sources keep appearing: current clients who love their team. Professional referral partners like financial advisors, attorneys, and bankers. Personal network connections from church, the neighborhood, and mastermind groups.

“Most likely to sign and quickest to sign are people referred by others who know us,” Rachel says. Whether it’s a long-term client, a team member, or a financial advisor who shares mutual clients with DBA, trust transfers through that existing relationship.

Marcus developed a specific approach to cultivating these relationships. He tells referral partners exactly what capacity the firm has available. “I’ve got room for one more CFO-level client” or “I’m building the roster for this team member you may have met.”

“Having those conversations with people, whether it’s through email or just one on one over the phone or at lunch or coffee, that’s always very helpful because then they have a connection and want to help you,” Marcus explains.

He also ends every coffee or lunch meeting with the same question: “Is there anybody that you think I should meet?”

The Secret to More Referrals: Total Transparency

Rachel discovered that telling referral partners exactly what will happen when they send someone your way makes the biggest difference in referral quality and volume.

“Referral partners want to know exactly what’s going to happen when they refer the person to your firm.  Who are they going to talk to? What timeline should I expect?” Rachel explains.

DBA has answered these questions so thoroughly that they created videos on their website walking through the process. Rachel can articulate the specific workflow. After an introduction, the prospect books a meeting with her through an automated calendar link. From that meeting, DBA requests access to QuickBooks Online and prior-year tax returns. Within five business days, the prospect receives pricing and recommendations.

Knowing their contact will have meaningful answers within one to two weeks makes referral partners far more confident about making introductions.

The firm also nurtures prospects between initial contact and the first meeting. Their website runs on HubSpot, which tracks what pages prospects visit and for how long. If there’s more than a week before the scheduled call, Rachel sends strategic content. That might be a blog article, the pricing page, or an explanation of their “Team of Three” service model.

“If they ask for payroll only, I want them to see those plans and pricing ahead of our conversation,” Rachel says. “Maybe they cancel because they don’t want all of that, or that pricing doesn’t align with what they think. That’s okay. That just means we haven’t wasted anyone’s time.”

How to Start Building Your Pipeline During Tax Season

Tax season might seem like the worst time to focus on business development. Marcus and Rachel disagree. They’ve identified several high-impact, low-effort strategies you can implement right now.

First, capture testimonials when gratitude is fresh. As returns go out and clients express appreciation, reply immediately. Either direct them to leave a Google review or ask permission to use their words as a testimonial. Marcus suggests creating a saved email signature with a direct link to your Google review page (the one that immediately pops up the rating box).

Second, document client wins before they disappear. Rachel recommends keeping a running list of specific outcomes, such as tax savings amounts, successful refinances, or time saved. “We forget those so quickly and easily, especially with the volume of work going in and out,” she notes. Set a goal for eight documented examples during the season.

Third, show up in person. Rachel recently spoke with three marketing professionals outside DBA, all of whom confirmed that in-person events outperform digital outreach for lead generation.

“Even though it feels like you should be doing something online that can cast out to hundreds or thousands of people, that doesn’t give the return that in-person events do,” Rachel explains.

The options go beyond formal networking events. Try study groups, chamber meetings, hobby gatherings, and church groups. Basically, anywhere your ideal clients naturally spend time. Marcus takes it further by inviting clients to events hosted by referral partners. The client gets continuing education credit, and Marcus stands in a room full of other ideal prospects.

If you think you don’t have time for this, Marcus has a pointed question. “Do you even have the capacity to serve new clients well?”

Start Where You Are

Building a referral pipeline doesn’t require a complete overhaul of your practice. It starts with small, deliberate actions that compound over time.

Rachel’s challenge is simple but powerful. “Start thinking about where your ideal clients hang out and how to get in those places. And if it’s not somewhere you necessarily want to be, then maybe reconsider your ideal client.”

Thriving firms don’t wait for leads to find them through Google searches or hope for referrals to materialize. They build relationships, educate partners, nurture prospects, and show up where their ideal clients already gather, even during the busiest seasons.

For Marcus and Rachel, that website disaster turned out to be a hidden blessing. It forced them to build something no algorithm change can destroy: a referral system built on trust, transparency, and genuine human connection.

Ready to hear the full conversation, including Marcus’s exact language for asking for introductions and Rachel’s specific HubSpot automations? Listen to the complete episode of Who’s Really the Boss?.

Rachel and Marcus Dillon, CPA, own a Texas-based, remote client accounting and advisory services firm, Dillon Business Advisors, with a team of 15 professionals. Their latest organization, Collective by DBA, supports and guides accounting firm owners and leaders with firm resources, education, and operational strategy through community, groups, and one-on-one advisory.

The Privacy Excuse for Not Using AI in Accounting Just Lost Its Last Leg

· ·

Blake Oliver needed to file a City of Los Angeles business tax return for his last remaining bookkeeping client. Instead of spending 30 minutes clicking through websites and copying numbers, he gave Claude Cowork a single instruction: “Search my email for info about the account and help me file it on the city website.”

What happened next, documented on a recent episode of The Accounting Podcast, shows exactly where the accounting profession stands with AI adoption. The AI agent searched Blake’s email, found the tax notice, extracted the business details from a PDF, logged into the city website, navigated to Xero to pull gross receipts, filled out the return, and drafted the client confirmation email. Total human involvement: one correction when it pulled accrual instead of cash basis numbers.

“This is a task that might take 15 to 30 minutes if you filled out a time sheet. Claude just did it,” Blake told co-host David Leary during their weekly news roundup.

The Numbers Show AI Closing In Fast

OpenAI didn’t just release another model update with ChatGPT 5.4. It specifically targeted the kind of work that fills an accountant’s day. As David read from OpenAI’s announcement, the company “put a particular focus on improving GPT 5.4’s ability to create and edit spreadsheets, presentations, and documents.”

The benchmarks back up that focus. Using something called GDPval—which measures performance on real-world knowledge tasks across 44 occupations—ChatGPT 5.4 now beats or ties industry professionals 83% of the time. On spreadsheet tasks specifically, it jumped from 68% accuracy to 87% in a single generation.

“It’s getting close to that 90% success now on everything,” David observed. For context, that means if you give an accountant and this AI the same spreadsheet task, the AI will match or beat the human’s performance nearly nine times out of ten.

Real Accountants, Real Work, Zero Software Costs

While Blake was experimenting with Claude for business tax returns, a developer went further. Fed up with TurboTax, he used Claude to complete a 42-page federal return plus two trust returns, all at zero software cost beyond his AI subscription.

His approach was surprisingly low-tech: Downloaded blank PDFs from the IRS, have Claude fill them out, then print and mail. The biggest challenge wasn’t getting the AI to do the calculations or understand the tax code. It was trying to make it work with the IRS’s online fillable forms. So he skipped that part entirely.

“The comments were like, ‘Can I quit doing my returns tomorrow? I’ve been waiting for this my whole life,'” David said, describing the reaction from tax professionals who saw the developer’s work on social media.

The timing is notable. These experiments happened during tax season, when practitioners are supposedly too busy to explore new tools. Yet here’s a developer replacing TurboTax with Claude, and Blake casually using an AI agent for client work.

The Privacy Excuse Just Disappeared

Most firms claim they can’t use AI because client data is too sensitive. This week, Zapier offered a solution to the privacy problem.

Its new AI Guardrails can detect over 30 categories of personally identifiable information, redact sensitive data before it reaches AI systems, block workflows when it detects problems, and identify attempts to manipulate the AI. You insert it as a step in any workflow, and it sanitizes the data before AI ever sees it.

“If you have client data being passed through Zapier into any AI tool, go add this step to your workflows,” David advised listeners.

Blake was even more direct about the implications. “I totally see this being a huge tool for accounting firms, because we have all this information we want to use with AI. But a lot of it is too sensitive. That’s the main reason most firms aren’t doing anything with it.”

Beyond AI: The Week’s Other Bombshells

While AI dominated the discussion, Blake and David covered several other major stories that accounting professionals need to know about, including:

The Botkeeper Collapse Gets Messier

In an interview with Accounting Today, CEO Enrico Palmerino claimed the company went from healthy to dead in eight days. But Blake uncovered how Botkeeper engineered its financials by selling their bookkeeping clients to a firm called Benchmark Cloud Accounting. It then had that firm buy a multi-million dollar Botkeeper license. “That is how you turn service revenue into SaaS recurring revenue,” Blake explained.

Iran’s Drone Economics

The cost disparity between Iran’s drones and America’s million Interceptor missiles raises questions about the financial sustainability of current military strategies. “We’re spending $3 million to shoot down something that costs $20,000 to $50,000,” Blake pointed out.

KPMG and Polymarket

Anonymous accounts on the prediction market Polymarket have been suspiciously successful at betting on earnings for companies audited by KPMG- (and only KPMG) audited companies. The amounts are small so far, but as David noted, “Are they doing it on the real derivative markets as well?”

Record 401(k) Withdrawals

Vanguard reports hardship withdrawals have tripled since 2020, jumping from under 2% to 6% of participants. Despite positive business sentiment, individual financial stress is climbing.

What This Means for Your Firm

General-purpose AI agents can complete multi-step workflows across email, accounting systems, and government websites. The privacy barriers that kept firms on the sidelines now have concrete, deployable solutions. The capability exists. The safety tools are live. The only question is timing.

Blake’s Claude experience offers a preview of the emerging division of labor. AI handles the execution, humans provide the judgment. The AI pulled the wrong basis for the numbers. Blake caught it. That’s where professional value lives now, not in the clicking and copying, but in knowing what the AI doesn’t know to check.

The message might seem poorly timed to practitioners overwhelmed by tax season. But accountants are eager for tools that eliminate the drudgery, even in the thick of deadline pressure.

Listen to the full episode to hear Blake walk through his Claude workflow step by step, get David’s take on what ChatGPT 5.4’s benchmarks really mean, and understand why the Botkeeper story matters for anyone considering AI-powered bookkeeping solutions. The episode reflects a profession at an inflection point—not in some distant future, but this week.

Why the Biggest Financial Scandals in America Are Perfectly Legal

· ·

Before a recent episode of Oh My Fraud discussed how America legalized corruption over the past 50 years, it started with something simpler: Olympic-level credit card fraud.

French biathlete Julia Simon won gold at the 2026 Winter Olympics while carrying some interesting baggage. Last October, she received a three-month suspended sentence and a €15,000 fine for spending €2,000 on her teammate’s credit card. The teammate she scammed finished 80th at the same Olympics. Simon also used the team physiotherapist’s credit card in 2021 and 2022.

The best part is, Simon denied the crime for three years, claiming identity theft until investigators found photos of the credit cards on her phone. “I confess the accusations, but I don’t remember committing them. It’s like a blackout,” Julia told the court.

That’s the kind of corruption we can all understand: straightforward, prosecutable, and absurd. But the most effective heists in American history aren’t happening with stolen credit cards but with Supreme Court rulings, secret contracts, and fee structures so boring that nobody bothers to read them.

That’s the world investigative journalist David Sirota has spent decades mapping. Recently, David sat down with host Caleb Newquist for what he calls “not a political episode in the tribal sense,” although he admits upfront that two self-described lefties are about to discuss how money corrupts democracy.

Who Is David Sirota?

David isn’t your typical political commentator. He’s written four books, most recently Master Plan: The Hidden Plot to Legalize Corruption in America. He founded The Lever, an investigative news outlet focused on how money manipulates power. He co-wrote the Oscar-nominated film Don’t Look Up with Adam McKay. It’s the fourth most-watched Netflix original movie ever. And he created award-winning podcasts on everything from the 2008 financial crisis to, well, legalized corruption.

David has a bachelor’s degree in journalism from Northwestern University. But his real education came from sitting in on politicians begging donors for money.

The Windowless Room Where Democracy Goes to Die

Fresh out of college, David landed a job running the fundraising call room for a congressional candidate in the Philadelphia suburbs. The candidate was on his fourth run for the same seat, having lost the previous race by just 40 votes.

For eight hours a day, David sat with the candidate as he worked the phones, begging for money. Then David handled the follow-up calls to ensure those commitments actually materialized.

“If you’re not willing to take fundraising seriously, to raise enough resources to communicate with voters, there’s no point in running a campaign,” David told Caleb. “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington? That’s not real. That’s not a real thing.”

What struck David wasn’t the grind; it was the distortion. The candidate spent all day talking to people who could write thousand-dollar checks, not knocking on doors in neighborhoods where people couldn’t spare ten bucks. The donors’ concerns inevitably became the candidate’s concerns. Not through explicit bribery, but through simple repetition. Eight hours a day, every day, he listened to what wealthy donors care about.

“You can see how what the candidate worries about and what they’re thinking about is distorted,” David explained. “They’re not necessarily spending eight hours a day knocking on doors and talking to people who can’t even write a $10 check.”

Bernie Sanders and the Bill That Died on Christmas

Later, David went to Washington as press secretary for “this obscure, independent weirdo named Bernie Sanders.” It was the late 1990s, and Sanders was considered fringe. He was a self-described socialist in an era when that word was political poison.

Working for Sanders meant seeing Congress from the outside looking in. One of his first experiences came when setting up a camera to beam Sanders questioning Alan Greenspan to local TV stations via satellite. While other congressmen fawned over the Fed chair, Sanders “ripped his face off.”

“The whole room is quiet,” David recalled. “And I was like, oh, this is a way different job than any other press secretary for any other member of Congress.”

But the moment that crystallized how corruption really works came later. Sanders championed a bill allowing Americans to buy cheaper prescription drugs from Canada. These were the exact same drugs, but at Canadian prices. After massive effort, they got it through the Republican House, the Republican Senate, and Bill Clinton signed it.

But three weeks before Clinton left office, during Christmas week when nobody was paying attention, HHS Secretary Donna Shalala killed the program using a poison pill provision someone had slipped into the final bill.

“We defeated money, and money still won,” David said.

When Fighting Corruption Gets You in Trouble

The final lesson in David’s corruption education came at the Center for American Progress, the Clinton machine’s think tank in exile. David published a report showing how much money 30 key House Democrats had taken from the credit card industry, right before they helped pass President Biden’s bankruptcy bill, legislation that made it dramatically harder for Americans to escape predatory debt.

House Democrats went ballistic. They dragged John Podesta to Capitol Hill and demanded David be fired or muzzled.

“I thought we were doing the right thing, even if it pissed off some Democrats,” David recalled. “You’re supposed to be against corruption as long as being against corruption helps the party that you’re affiliated with. You can combat corruption, but only up to a point.”

That’s when David left for what Caleb called “the literal wilderness” of Montana.

What Corruption Actually Is (And Why We’ve Legalized It)

When Caleb asked David to define corruption, David had a ready answer.

“It’s something that interferes with how a system is supposed to work,” he said. “Specifically, how a democratic institution is supposed to work.”

When the public overwhelmingly wants lower prescription drug prices but money ensures it doesn’t happen, that gap between public will and policy outcome is corruption. Legal or not.

And the kicker is, America has legalized most of it.

If you hand a congressperson $5,000 cash with a specific legislative ask, you can go to prison. But funneling $50 million through dark money groups to elect 25 congresspeople who write every bill you want is perfectly legal.

“We have created this patina of ‘that’s just politics, that’s just the way it works, it’s all legal, so there’s nothing dirty,'” David explained. “This is a deeply, deeply corrupt system. We’ve just put a nice fresh coat of paint on it.”

The 50-Year Master Plan

How did we get here? David traces it to a deliberate campaign that began after Watergate, ironically, right when real anti-corruption reforms were passed.

In 1971, Lewis F. Powell (then head of the American Bar Association and Philip Morris board member) wrote his now-famous memo arguing that corporations needed to start buying American politics because the government was too responsive to ordinary people. Shortly after, Powell landed on the Supreme Court.

There, he engineered the Buckley v. Valeo ruling, which established a radical idea as constitutional doctrine: money isn’t corruption, money is free speech. The legal argument was crafted by, among others, John Bolton. Yes, that John Bolton.

That ruling became the foundation for corporate spending rights, then Citizens United, transforming elections from democratic contests into auctions.

Meanwhile, courts were narrowing what counts as prosecutable bribery. The culmination came recently when an Indiana mayor awarded a municipal contract to a company that then gave him $10,000. The mayor was prosecuted and convicted, but the Supreme Court overturned it, ruling it wasn’t a bribe but a “gratuity,” and thus, perfectly legal.

“That’s where we are,” David said. “That is literally where we are right now.”

The $5 Trillion Heist Nobody’s Watching

While everyone’s distracted by culture wars and political theater, there’s $4-5 trillion sitting in public pension funds across America. That’s money from teachers, firefighters, and first responders, invested for their retirements.

Increasingly, it’s flowing into private equity, hedge funds, and venture capital, despite these “alternative investments” often underperforming simple index funds over the long term while charging astronomical fees.

A Vanguard fund charges almost nothing. Private equity charges the classic “two and twenty:” 2% management fee plus 20% of profits.

“Even Warren Buffett would say nobody can beat the market,” David noted. So why pour billions into high-fee, high-risk investments? Maybe because the people running those firms donate heavily to the politicians who appoint pension board members.

When David’s team obtained leaked contracts, they discovered investment funds charge different fees to different investors in the same fund. The billionaire investing his own money negotiates a better rate than the pension fund managed by political appointees without skin in the game.

“The pensioners subsidize the free ride of the billionaire who’s investing alongside,” David explained.

The old cliché about the mafia looting pension funds “is happening every day in every state and city in America,” David said. “And it’s not a story.”

When David exposed these connections in New Jersey’s $100 billion pension fund, Governor Chris Christie attacked him by name at multiple press conferences. “You’re talking about a $100 billion pension fund,” his editor explained. “There are a lot of really powerful people that want things from that, and you’re getting in their way.”

If Humans Built It, Humans Can Unbuild It

Despite everything, David strikes a surprisingly hopeful note. The corruption is no longer hidden. Trump, if nothing else, made the transactional nature of politics explicit. “You don’t have to explain that there is a problem anymore,” David said. “Everybody understands there is a problem.”

David offers practical advice for fighting corruption:

  • Run for local office where elections are small enough that money doesn’t determine everything
  • Support ballot initiatives for dark money disclosure and limits on corporate spending
  • Push for publicly financed elections so candidates can run without relying on donors who demand favors

“Back in the 1970s, the people who legalized corruption worked at it for 50 years,” David said. “Those dreamers made their dream happen. And now we’re all living in their nightmare.”

But if they could dream their corrupt system into existence, we can dream something better. The work starts now.

The pension fund story should hit particularly close to home for accounting professionals. This is about fiduciary duty, fee transparency, and what happens when the people guarding the money answer to the wrong stakeholders. You’re trained to see what others miss in the numbers. The people benefiting from this system count on complexity and boredom to keep everyone else looking away.

Don’t let them be right about that.

Listen to the full episode of Oh My Fraud for more, including David’s Bernie Sanders rental car bus story and his Oscar night encounter with Harvey Keitel. Because sometimes understanding corruption requires understanding the people fighting it, and they’re more human than you might think.