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Grant Thornton’s CBIZ Deal Tests Accounting’s Guardrails

Grant Thornton plans to spend about $5 billion to acquire CBIZ in what David Leary called “the largest accounting deal in over 25 years.” The combination would create the fifth-largest accounting firm in the world. Yet its expected $7.5 billion in global revenue would still be far below KPMG, the…

How a Solo CPA Turned a Seven-Hour Tax Workpaper Into a One-Hour Job

“Anybody who says they’ve built autonomous AI in accounting or finance is full of crap. Nobody has figured out how to do that yet.” That’s how Blake Oliver opens Episode 497 of The Accounting Podcast, and it sets the tone for the whole show. Blake and co-host David Leary spend…

“I Don’t Deserve This” and Other Lies We Tell Ourselves During Awards Season

Imagine finding out you’ve been nominated for one of the most prestigious recognition lists in your profession. Thousands of ProAdvisors across the globe, and someone thought you belonged among the best. But your first thought is, “I don’t deserve this. I’m not good enough. I don’t know enough.” That was…

You Don’t Have to Feel Confident to Act With Authority. Here’s the Hack

Picture a sixth-grader in the mid-1980s, standing at the edge of a school dumpster, working up the nerve to climb in. Cassie Divine had accidentally tossed her orthodontic retainer onto her lunch tray and into the trash. This $150 device might as well have cost a million dollars, in her…

What Women in Accounting Learn When They Stop Scaling and Start Choosing

Erin Pohan remembers exactly how it felt the first time she walked into Bridging the Gap and saw accountants laughing in hallways and clustering around tables like they’d known each other for years. “How do they do that?” she wondered. “Don’t they sit at their desks all day like I…

The colleague who masters AI will surpass you (not the machine)

In 2015, at her second QuickBooks Connect, Alicia Katz Pollock spent an entire conference hunting for one woman. She’d just published her first book, QuickBooks Online from Setup to Tax Time, and she wanted into the Intuit Trainer Writer Network. Seth David and Eric Greenspan had given her Alison Ball’s…

QuickBooks Online Accountant Retires December 31. Are You Ready to Make the Switch?

There’s a countdown clock ticking, and most accounting professionals haven’t looked up at it yet. In Episode 149 of The Unofficial QuickBooks Accountants Podcast, host Alicia Katz Pollock and guest host Dan DeLong break down the June 17th ProAdvisor In the Know session hosted by Arti Patel Martinez. Two different…

What Intuit’s $3.3 Billion QuickBooks Quarter Really Means for Your Practice

In a room of 100 accounting professionals at the Scaling New Heights conference, host Alicia Katz Pollock asked, ‘How many of you have actually explored the new QuickBooks features you’re now paying more for? Have you uploaded a contract and sent it for signature? Did you use the customer hub…

Meet the Man Who Turned Insurance Forgery Into an Assembly Line

It’s December 1971, in a comfortable living room in Toluca Lake, Los Angeles. Two men sit on a couch, sharing some Scotch and maybe a Quaalude. One is Art Lewis, a 28-year-old executive. The other is Alan Green, a 21-year-old actuary who’s been working at Equity Funding for over a…

98% of ProAdvisors Miss the Features They’re Paying For

Picture a packed ballroom at Intuit Connect. An Intuit vice president wraps up his keynote and drops a bombshell, saying, “The ProAdvisor program is going away at the end of the year.” Then he walks off stage. The room freezes. Attendees turn to each other, stunned. As Margie Remmers-Davis remembers…

The Seven-Part Framework That Turned a Bottlenecked Firm Into a Director-Led One

Rachel and Marcus Dillon were in the middle of pricing out a closet remodel when the numbers stopped making sense. Rachel was thinking maybe $5,000—and even that felt steep for organizing a space that already had decent storage. Marcus had mentally prepared for $10,000. Then the custom closet consultant dropped…

Growth and rest aren’t opposites when you build the machine that makes both possible

When someone tells Rachel Dillon they landed 20 new clients in six months, her first thought is chaos. Overworked staff. Missed deadlines. A firm running on caffeine and adrenaline. So when the team at Dillon Business Advisors gathered for its mid-year retreat this summer, Rachel noticed that her firm celebrated…

Everyone’s a Builder Now, and That’s Exactly What Should Worry the Accounting Profession

“One day, the board is going to ask the CEO, ‘I see you spent all that on tokens. What was the result?’ And they’re not gonna be able to answer it.” That’s David Leary on Episode 496 of The Accounting Podcast, and in one line he captures the tension running…

AICPA Puts a Deadline on the Work Most Accountants Do Today

The accounting profession’s own leadership just put a timeline on when most of what accountants do today will be done by machines, and it’s sooner than you might think. In this week’s episode of The Accounting Podcast, hosts Blake Oliver and David Leary returned from AICPA Engage in Las Vegas…

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.…

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