Blog - Earmark CPE

Trevor Milton Built a Fake Truck Empire and Then Got a Presidential Pardon for It

In January 2018, a video exploded across social media. It showed a massive, futuristic semi-truck silently gliding down a desert highway. The caption read, “Behold the 1,000-horsepower, zero-emission Nikola One semi truck in motion.” People lost their minds. The truck looked like something out of a sci-fi movie. Nikola Corporation…

Forty Percent of Workers Admit Faking Receipts With Company-Paid AI Tools

Forty percent of U.S. workers admit to using AI to generate fake receipts for expense reports. Even more troubling is that 40% of those workers use AI tools their own companies paid for. Blake Oliver and David Leary opened Episode 494 of The Accounting Podcast with these startling statistics from…

The Four Words Congress Never Defined That Could Cost Your Clients Thousands in Self-Employment Tax

Congress once wrote four words into the tax code: “limited partner as such.” But then it never explained what those words meant. Even worse, they wrote these words before limited liability companies existed. Today, those four words are at the center of a legal battle moving through multiple appellate courts,…

The IRS Answered Only 21% of Your Calls This Season, and It’s Getting Worse

During the 2026 filing season, the IRS received 48.1 million phone calls but answered just 9.9 million. That’s only 21%. As Blake Oliver put it on Episode 495 of The Accounting Podcast, “79% of the time when you call the IRS, you hang up before you get somebody because the…

Mel Brooks Accidentally Wrote the Perfect Fraud Triangle Case Study in 1967

What if the smartest fraud scheme you’ve ever studied wasn’t from a court filing or an SEC enforcement action, but from a 1967 Mel Brooks comedy? In the latest Oh My Fraud episode, hosts Caleb Newquist and Zach Frank dissect The Producers with the same rigor they apply to actual…

The Cryptoqueen Who Bought Her Own Forbes Cover and Vanished With Billions

It’s June 11, 2016, at London’s Wembley Arena. 11,500 people are on their feet. The lights go down. Alicia Keys blasts through the speakers. Fireballs shoot up from the stage as Dr. Ruja Ignatova walks out in a floor-length burgundy ball gown covered in black sequins. The crowd goes wild.…

How Florida CPAs Beat Back a Bill That Would Have Erased Their Own Licensing Board

Shelly Weir stood in the rotunda of the Florida Capitol building. The House floor was on one side, the Senate floor on the other. The clock was ticking toward midnight on the final day of the legislative session. Shelly was physically pulling senators off the floor while CPAs across the…

The Big Four Keep Publishing Fake AI Citations and It’s Getting Embarrassing

A solo accountant can complete two years of bookkeeping in a few hours using Claude Cowork. But KPMG had to pull an entire AI report after 89% of its citations turned out to be fake. The AI revolution in professional services is already sorting winners from losers. In episode 493…

What If You Managed Your Private Company Like It Was Publicly Traded?

Ask any business owner what their company is worth, and you’ll likely hear a number they picked up at a conference, borrowed from a buddy’s sale, or scribbled on a napkin using some multiple of EBITDA. Ask them how they’re actively managing toward that number, and the room usually goes…

Shared Business Activity—not Mere Co-Ownership—Often Determines Partnership Status

Two friends buy a short-term rental together. They split everything, from income and expenses to responsibilities, 50/50. One manages the bookings while the other handles repairs. They never wrote up any agreement, registered an LLC, or created any paperwork at all. Did these friends accidentally create a partnership with federal…

What Women in Accounting Gain From Conferences Has Little to Do With CPE Credits

Picture standing in a crowded expo hall, trying to reach a single vendor booth, but you can’t make it more than a few steps without someone pulling you into a hug. The problem gets so bad that a colleague appoints himself your personal handler, physically steering you through the crowd…

Private Equity, Proprietary AI, and the Self-Reinforcing Cycle Coming for Independent Firms

In 2025, there were roughly 900 roll-up transactions in the accounting profession. Only a handful were mega-deals that made Accounting Today headlines. Most were small firms merging, tax-only shops joining advisory practices, and everything in between. Of those transactions, 200 were directly linked to private equity investments. Meanwhile, half of…

AI Models Now Outperform Human Bookkeepers and One Controller Proves a Finance Team of One Actually Works

A controller at a SaaS company that processes $50 million a month through its marketplace went on a two-week vacation. When he returned, his AI agents had already coded, categorized, approved, and synced 2,000 transactions. He reviewed just 67 (about 3%) by hand, and the entire cleanup took 30 minutes.…

Intuit Laid Off 17% of Its Workforce — But the Real Story Is What It’s Building With the Other 83%

When 3,000 Intuit employees opened their inboxes at the end of May, the internet had already written the narrative for them: AI is coming for your job. But the three hosts of The Unofficial QuickBooks Accountants Podcast, one of whom survived two rounds of Intuit layoffs during his 18-year tenure…

The Platform That’s Replacing QBO Accountant Goes Paid in August and Most Accounting Professionals Haven’t Logged In Yet

In Episode 145 of The Unofficial QuickBooks Accountants Podcast, hosts Alicia Katz Pollock and Dan DeLong break down Intuit’s May “In the Know” webinar, and the numbers they share are attention-grabbing. When Intuit polled attendees about its new Accountant Suite platform, 70% either hadn’t heard of it or hadn’t tried…

Nobody Is Going to Hand You Power, So Here’s How to Build Executive Presence on Your Own Terms

Lindsay Patterson’s very first day as a reporter should have been routine. Twenty years ago, she walked into a small community meeting in Uvalde, Texas, fresh out of college, holding a notepad and recorder, ready to cover a state representative’s remarks for the local paper. She sat down, pen ready.…

Beyond the Stock Sale: Allocating Purchase Price When S Corp Assets Sell Individually

When a buyer offers $1 million for your client’s S corporation, the simplest path is a stock sale. There’s one transaction, one gain calculation, and you’re done. Purchase price minus stock basis equals gain. You could calculate it on a napkin. But most buyers don’t want simple. They want to…

Your AI Isn’t the Problem—Your Ledger Is

You export a report from your accounting software, spend 20 minutes cleaning up the data in a spreadsheet, paste it into ChatGPT, and ask about vendor spending trends. The AI immediately asks for more context that wasn’t in your export. Back to the source system, pull another report, reformat, and…

The $15,000 Mistake That Could Happen to Your Firm Tomorrow

A top-20 CPA firm in Minnesota got hit with a $15,000 fine. The fine didn’t stem from shoddy audit work, but from letting a license lapse. Worse, they had to reissue every single report completed during the lapsed period. Imagine making that call to your clients. And they’re far from…

Private Equity’s Big Bet on Accounting Firms Is Starting to Look Shaky

CBIZ stock has lost half its value in the past year. Starbucks just killed its AI inventory counting tool after nine months of miscounts. And Microsoft, after investing $13 billion in OpenAI, had to cut off its own engineers from AI coding tools because costs went through the roof. These…

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