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From Stuck to Strategic: How Top CPA Firms Break Free from Endless Problem Loops

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Picture a CPA firm owner sitting across from the same colleague at the same conference, one year later, complaining about the exact same problems: the same staffing issues, same client complaints, and same technology frustrations. Marcus Dillon sees this scene too often, and it breaks his heart. “One of the most disappointing things to me,” he shares on the latest episode of Who’s Really the Boss?, “is whenever you have a conversation with somebody a year later and they’re in the same exact place they were when you previously talked to them.”

But in a packed ballroom at Hotel Vin in Grapevine, Texas, 105 accounting professionals gathered this October to make sure they’d never be that person stuck in an endless loop of unaddressed challenges. Over two and a half days in October 2025, firm owners, leaders, and carefully selected team members came together for Gather 2025, an event that offered CPE credits but delivered something far more valuable than continuing education.

About two-thirds of attendees were firm owners and leaders, while the remaining third were team members positioned to create ripple effects back in their firms. “You want to bring a team member who can learn and take part in table discussions, but then also take what they’ve heard and learned back to others on your team,” Marcus explained.

From Growth to Excellence: A New Chapter in Leadership

After a year focused on “the goal is growth, not comfort,” Marcus introduced a new rally cry for 2026 that signals a shift in how successful firms approach leadership: “Lead Change, Create Impact.” This evolution is more than a tagline change; it marks a maturity in thinking about what drives firm success.

“We’ve had a very large growth year,” Marcus reflects. “We added a couple of director level positions, did a couple of acquisitions, and continue to grow Collective by DBA very intentionally. So now we’re going into a season of refinement and then excellence.”

This natural progression, from growth to refinement and excellence, mirrors a cycle that successful firms navigate intentionally. But growth isn’t just about numbers. As Rachel emphasizes, when they adopted their previous rally cry, “We’re really thinking about growth personally and professionally, of what does it look like to delegate to someone else? What does it look like to upskill and learn that next new thing, or say yes to something we don’t feel we have the skill set for?”

Rachel shares a particularly striking insight she heard recently from author Ruth Chou Simons, “You don’t have to be blooming to be growing.” Sometimes the most critical development happens underground, in the roots and foundation of a firm’s culture. These invisible victories, such as saying no to wrong opportunities, developing team members’ skills, or refining internal processes, often matter more than year-end revenue numbers.

The data from Gather 2025 validates this approach. While participating firms showed revenue increases, the standout statistic was a 10% decrease in owner production hours. For an industry where firm owners routinely work 2,000+ hours annually in production, this reduction shows genuine progress. As Marcus points out, this matters enormously for succession planning. “If there was a firm owner working over 2000 hours per year, as a buyer, you probably have to hire two people to replace that outgoing owner.”

The Four P’s Framework: Your Roadmap Through Change

Change doesn’t fail because people resist it, but because leaders haven’t provided the clarity teams need to embrace it. The Four P’s Framework, which Marcus discovered through his C12 leadership group, transforms vague announcements into actionable roadmaps.

“We used to talk about change and how we communicate change to the team,” Marcus recalls. The standard three questions (What’s changing? What’s staying the same? How does this impact me?) weren’t enough. The Four P’s provide a complete structure:

  • Purpose answers “Why are we changing?” But “the lens that you answer that question through should be your mission, vision and values,” Marcus emphasizes. “You’re not changing your mission vision values based on a change. You’re seeing the change through the lens of those mission vision values.”
  • Picture addresses “What does success look like?” Marcus admits this is his personal weakness. “You have to paint a great picture of what it looks like on the other side of this change and what it looks like going through this change.” Teams need to visualize both the journey and the destination.
  • Plan tackles “How do we get there?” This includes specific milestones. “You’ll know when you’re 20%, 50%, or 80% there and you can celebrate and then maybe push or sprint to that next threshold,” Marcus explains.
  • Part clarifies “What is my role?” This component “helps foster ownership, provide clarity” by making it crystal clear how each person contributes.

The framework came to life during DBA’s recent acquisitions. Purpose aligned with their mission of “impacting others and creating a great place to work.” Picture showed “a fully integrated team under one brand, serving very similar clients in very similar ways.” Plan mapped out specific 30-day and 90-day milestones. And each team member received a clearly defined part. Some continued with existing clients, others mentor new colleagues, and  others take ownership of new relationships.

Rachel’s reflection provides crucial context. “We have not always done it this way. We communicated the change, but rarely thought through all four parts.” The difference is dramatic. “You as the leader will not be in it on your own, trying to drag people along,” she notes. “You will have people who step into their role and know what it looks like to be successful.”

Solving Problems Together: The Power of Collective Intelligence

While firm owners tackled KPIs and succession planning in one room, team members gathered in another for a revolutionary session called “Borrow a Brain, Share a Solution.” With over 24 anonymously-submitted real firm challenges, participants tackled everything from lead generation to remote team connectivity to AI adoption.

“Even staff members had great ideas for lead generation,” Rachel observes. “It’s not always up to the leader to solve every challenge in the firm.”

The structured approach went beyond brainstorming. Teams identified questions needing answers, developed solutions, assigned implementation responsibilities, and specified necessary tools. They documented all frameworks and made them available through the Collective Community Resource Center, creating a permanent library of tested solutions for the 300+ team members now on the platform.

Angel Sabino, Jr., Dillon Business Advisor’s Director of Technology, demonstrated exactly how firms could build their own AI agents using Microsoft Copilot. “He built this AI agent for internal DBA team members to ask questions,” Marcus explains. “What’s our PTO policy look like? What firm holidays exist? What do I need to do to get this approved?” The agent pulls answers from the firm’s knowledge base, providing instant, accurate responses.

“He can also break it down into simple enough terms and pictures,” Rachel notes. This wasn’t about showcasing technology for its own sake, but solving the real challenge of making standard operating procedures accessible and useful.

The case study sessions added another dimension. Firm owners could submit data anonymously and pose specific questions to peers. Marcus calculated the value. “I did quick math. It was about $20,000 per hour in that room.” But the true value transcended hourly rates. It was about getting honest feedback from people who “truly care about you without having a vested interest.”

Putting It All Into Practice

The event’s structure reinforced its practical focus. After sessions on everything from KPIs to AI implementation, the final afternoon wasn’t filled with more presentations. Instead, teams and firm friends gathered to process what they’d learned and create action plans. “What did you hear? What are you going to work on?” became the guiding questions as DBA and Collective team members wove through conversations offering support.

The result? As one attendee shared with Rachel, “This is the first time I’m leaving feeling confident about what I’m going to do and not feeling overwhelmed and defeated that I’m not doing enough.”

Even the venue contributed to the experience. The Hotel Vin’s European-style food hall offered variety without leaving the building, while The Baked Bear ice cream truck (featuring customizable cookie ice cream sandwiches) provided a sweet networking opportunity in perfect October Texas weather.

Your Next Step Forward

For Collective by DBA members ready to continue this journey, Recharge 2026 awaits in Mexico (April 22-25) at an all-inclusive, adults-only Marriott resort. “We’re going international,” Rachel announces, promising two days of CPE, karaoke, collaborative dinners, and the option to extend your stay. Given that the group will occupy over 50% of the boutique hotel, spaces are limited.

But you don’t need to wait for an event to start implementing these insights. The frameworks, tools, and collaborative approaches shared at Gather 2025 offer immediate value for any firm ready to move beyond the cycle of unsolved problems.

Listen to Rachel and Marcus Dillon’s full conversation to discover how two leaders who’ve “been in this game since 2011” learned to stop dragging people through change and started leading them toward impact.

As Marcus reminds us, when you look back at your biggest wins, you won’t remember the change itself. You’ll remember the people who journeyed alongside you. The question is, will you be remembered as someone who helped others navigate change, or as someone who kept showing up with the same unsolved problems? The choice (and the tools to succeed) are yours.

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 Hidden Gender Gap in AI That’s Reshaping Accounting Without Women’s Input

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When Apple launched its revolutionary health app in 2014, it tracked everything from blood pressure to copper intake, but somehow forgot that half the population has menstrual cycles. This stunning oversight, which took an entire year to correct, perfectly captures what happens when companies design technology without women at the table.

In a revealing episode of the She Counts podcast, CPA and AI educator Twyla Verhelst joins hosts Questian Telka and Nancy McClelland to expose a difficult realization about the accounting profession’s AI revolution: women are being systematically left behind by design. Verhelst, who serves as Vice President of Industry Relations and Community at Karbon and co-founded TB Academy to empower accountants with AI training, brings personal experience and industry-wide perspective to this critical conversation.

While the accounting profession races to embrace AI technology that promises to transform how we work, women accountants face unique barriers to adoption that go beyond straightforward reluctance. From juggling disproportionate caregiving responsibilities to battling perfectionism in male-dominated spaces, these challenges create a system where the tools shaping our industry’s future are being built without our input.

This conversation uncovers why women fall behind in AI adoption, what happens when technology evolves without diverse perspectives, and most importantly, how women can claim their seat at the AI table, even if they have to bring their own folding chair.

The Perfect Storm: Why Women Fall Behind in AI Adoption

The gender gap in AI adoption isn’t about capability or interest. It’s about a perfect storm of societal expectations, time constraints, and deeply ingrained psychological patterns that create unique barriers for women in accounting.

Verhelst knows this struggle intimately. Despite her current role as a leading AI educator for accountants, she spent two full years feeling paralyzed by overwhelm. “I sat with AI saying like, “Oh my gosh, I’m so far behind. I haven’t even opened ChatGPT,” she admits. Even at AICPA Engage 2024, surrounded by industry innovation, she found herself thinking, “I still haven’t done anything. I still feel behind.”

This paralysis stems from something deeper than mere procrastination. Women, Verhelst explains, carry an ancestral caution that shapes how they approach risk. “If you go way back to our ancestors, men went out to hunt, while women stayed home or back at the tribe to care for the children and the elders. We were cautious by nature.” This evolutionary programming still whispers in our ears when faced with experimental technology, urging us to proceed with caution while our male counterparts dive in headfirst.

The perfectionism trap compounds this hesitation. Women in accounting already fight to prove themselves in traditionally male-dominated spaces, and using AI can feel like taking a shortcut that undermines our credibility. Verhelst observes, “Women feel like they’re cheating by using AI while men are looking for any way possible to ‘do the thing.’”

McClelland’s confession during the conversation highlights another crucial barrier: the gaming gap. “I didn’t grow up playing video games. I didn’t grow up taking apart electronics and putting them back together. Those were considered ‘boy’ hobbies,” she shares. When colleagues tell her to “just go play with it,” she responds with genuine confusion, “I honestly don’t even know what you mean when you say that. I don’t know how to play with technology.”

But perhaps the most insurmountable barrier is time poverty. While AI adoption requires experimentation and play, women simply don’t have the capacity. “I don’t have the capacity in my day to play. That just doesn’t happen,” Verhelst states bluntly. “I’m looking after children. I’m looking after senior parents and managing a household. I have a career. I have a part-time job on the side.”

The irony is that AI could actually help alleviate this time poverty, but women need time to learn how to use it effectively. It’s a Catch-22 that keeps women perpetually behind the curve, watching as male colleagues who started experimenting early become the go-to AI experts in their firms.

When Products Aren’t Built With Women in Mind

The consequences of women’s delayed AI adoption extend beyond individual careers. They’re shaping the very DNA of the technology that will define our profession’s future.

The Apple Health app story is an example of what happens when technology evolves without diverse input. In 2014, Apple’s revolutionary health tracking app monitored everything imaginable, yet somehow missed that 50% of the population experiences menstrual cycles, an aspect of women’s health that affects heart rate, body temperature, and breathing patterns throughout the month.

“No matter who you are as a woman, no matter what phase of life you are in, our whole rhythm revolves around the 28-ish day cycle,” Verhelst explains. Without this critical data point, the app sent false alarms about potential health issues while missing actual problems. Women worried unnecessarily about elevated heart rates that were actually normal for their cycle phase. It took Apple an entire year to correct this oversight.

This pattern repeats across industries. McClelland shares her own revelation about automotive safety: “I used to date an engineer who designed seat belts for cars. He explained to me that for many, many years, they only had male models.” The very devices meant to save lives in vehicle accidents were tested exclusively on male bodies, leaving women—particularly petite women—vulnerable to injuries that could have been prevented with proper testing.

The same types of oversights are happening right now with AI in accounting. “ChatGPT and other AI tools are built off of user input,” Verhelst warns. “If most of the users are men or the earliest adopters are men, then it’s being trained on and continues to evolve on how males use the platform versus how women will use the platform.”

Every prompt, every interaction, every piece of feedback shapes how these tools develop. When women don’t participate in that early development phase, the tools optimize for male communication patterns, work styles, and problem-solving approaches. The technology literally learns to speak a language that may not resonate with how women naturally interact with technology.

“AI is not a fleeting technology,” Verhelst emphasizes. Unlike temporary disruptions like Covid-19, AI is fundamentally shifting how accounting work gets done. The patterns being established now will shape the profession for decades.

Telka’s reaction during Twyla’s WAVE Conference presentation captured the urgency perfectly: “That really blew my mind. Because we tend to be later adopters, these tools we’re using are being built without our input.” She realized something as adaptable as ChatGPT, which changes based on user inputs, could evolve into something fundamentally misaligned with how women work.

Bringing Your Folding Chair: Practical Strategies for Women in AI

Despite the barriers, women have unique strengths that position them for AI success if they can reframe their approach and find the right support.

“Women need to pull up their seat at the table. And if that seat’s not there, you just bring your folding chair,” Verhelst declares, offering both a rallying cry and a practical philosophy for women ready to claim their place in the AI revolution.

The first step is recognizing an advantage many women don’t realize they possess. Ashley Francis, a recognized AI innovator in the accounting space, points out that women are actually better positioned to excel with AI than their male counterparts because women tend to have stronger language and communication skills.

Verhelst confirms this. “The number one roadblock to not getting what you need out of AI is poor communication.” Since women generally excel at thorough, nuanced communication, they’re naturally equipped to craft the detailed prompts that make AI tools work effectively.

Instead of diving headfirst into complex automations, Verhelst advocates for a pain-point-first approach. “Take some steps back to recognize what it is you want from AI today. Start with a pain point you experience. How can you leverage AI to solve for that pain point?”

Community learning is perhaps the most powerful accelerator for women’s AI adoption. Verhelst discovered a TikTok creator who opened a Slack channel specifically for female founders and entrepreneurs to share AI experiments (both successes and failures) in a supportive environment. “With women we can be a bit more vulnerable,” Verhelst explains. 

The practical applications Verhelst shares do away with the myth that AI requires extensive technical knowledge. Her “restaurant flex” perfectly illustrates playful exploration. She takes photos of menus and asks ChatGPT which wine is driest, which meal fits her dietary goals, and even requests recipes to recreate favorite dishes at home. “It’s embracing AI for things that aren’t just work,” she explains.

For professional applications, meeting transcription tools have become game-changers. Tools like Fathom, Otter.ai, Read.ai, and upcoming Karbon integrations with Vinyl and Abacor allow women to fully engage in conversations without worrying about note-taking. “Meeting transcripts have certainly changed my life,” Verhelst shares. Telka agrees emphatically, “I cannot take notes and focus.”

Women also use AI to handle emotional labor that often goes unrecognized. Verhelst describes how women upload screenshots of ambiguous emails, asking AI to decipher tone and suggest responses. “That saves a lot of headache and sleepless nights in some cases,” she notes.

Perhaps most importantly, Verhelst rejects the “do more with AI” messaging that dominates tech marketing. “I don’t want to do more. I already do a lot. I want time back to do what I want with it, not more tasks.” She shares how AI helps her handle overwhelming projects, like reformatting documents based on meeting transcripts. “That task would feel incredibly daunting and very tedious if it wasn’t for AI.”

There’s also liberation in accepting that expertise is impossible in this rapidly evolving field. “I don’t believe there are experts in AI,” Verhelst insists, even about recognized leaders like Chad Davis, Jason Staats, and Ashley Francis. “They can’t be. It’s moving too quickly.” If no one can be an expert, then everyone is learning together, and starting later doesn’t mean permanent disadvantage.

Some firms are already seeing creative applications. One TB Academy participant created a custom GPT that sits on their website, allowing clients to ask questions as a first stop before contacting the firm directly. These innovations come from experimentation, not expertise.

The Future We Choose to Build

The gender gap in AI adoption isn’t a personal failing. It’s a systemic challenge rooted in time constraints, societal expectations, and technology designed without our input. But there’s hope in Verhelst’s message.

No one is truly an expert in this rapidly evolving field, which means the playing field is more level than it appears. Women’s natural communication strengths align perfectly with what AI needs to function well. And participation doesn’t require perfection, but curiosity and small experiments.

Telka closed the episode with a quote from Sheryl Sandberg: “No industry or country can reach its full potential until women reach their full potential. This is especially true of science and technology, where women with a surplus of talent still face a deficit of opportunity.”

The path forward is about bringing our unique perspectives to tools that desperately need diverse input. Every prompt from a woman teaches these systems something new about how half the profession thinks, communicates, and solves problems.

“Even listening to this podcast tells me you’re not behind,” Verhelst reassures. “It tells me you’re curious, you’re engaged, and you want to learn.”

Listen to this transformative episode of She Counts to discover how you can overcome the barriers holding you back from AI adoption. Learn more about Verhelst’s work at TB Academy (tbacademy.ai) or connect with her on LinkedIn. And check out Tam Nguyen’s free AI prompts at Tech with Tam for an easy way to get started.

The future of our profession is being written right now, with or without us. Will we let it be designed without us, or will we grab our folding chairs and help build a future that works for everyone?

When Bots Listen to Robots and Real Money Disappears

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Picture this: a computer on stage playing songs to an audience of computers. No humans involved, just machines performing for machines in an endless digital loop. Yet somehow, millions of dollars change hands.

This isn’t science fiction. It’s happening right now on streaming platforms, and it’s just one of the mind-bending fraud schemes explored in this episode of Oh My Fraud. Host Caleb Newquist opens with a relatively new conspiracy theory called the Dead Internet, which suggests that most online activity, including posts, likes, followers, and streams, isn’t human anymore. It’s “bots talking to bots, talking to bots,” creating an information superhighway filled with self-driving cars that have destinations but no passengers.

But what happens when someone exploits this artificial ecosystem for real money? That’s exactly what we’re about to find out.

The $121 Million Email That Fooled Silicon Valley

Between 2013 and 2015, a Lithuanian man named Evaldas Rimašauskas pulled off something that shouldn’t have been possible. He convinced two of the world’s smartest companies, Google and Facebook, to wire him $121 million. His method wasn’t sophisticated hacking or complex algorithms. He simply pretended to be someone else.

Rimašauskas impersonated Quanta Computer, a real Taiwan-based hardware manufacturer that actually did business with both tech giants. He set up a company in Latvia under Quanta’s name and opened bank accounts in Latvia and Cyprus. Then his team got to work, calling Google and Facebook customer service lines to gather intelligence, including names of key employees, contact information, and other details that would make their lie believable.

Through phishing emails and what Caleb describes as “a maze of phony invoices, contracts, letters, and corporate stamps,” Rimašauskas created enough confusion to convince someone at Google to update the bank account they had on file for Quanta Computer. In 2013, Google sent $23 million to his account. Two years later, using the same playbook, Facebook wired him $98 million.

The money flowed through accounts across Latvia, Cyprus, Slovakia, Lithuania, Hungary, and Hong Kong. And here’s the kicker: these amounts were so insignificant to Google and Facebook that they “went virtually unnoticed.” As Caleb puts it, “$23 million and $98 million aren’t even rounding errors on the amount of revenue for Google and Facebook. It’s less than pocket change.”

Eventually, someone at Google caught on. Rimašauskas was arrested in March 2017, extradited to the U.S. that August, and pleaded guilty to wire fraud in March 2019. He got five years in prison, and both companies got their money back.

From IT Mogul to Music “Producer” to Alleged Fraudster

Our second story shifts from simple impersonation to something far stranger. Meet Michael Smith, a 52-year-old with a resume that reads like three different people’s lives smashed together.

According to the research, Smith made his first fortune in the 1990s with an IT business where he allegedly wrote “one of the main fixes for the Y2K millennium software bug.” He then ran chains of medical clinics, which landed him in trouble in 2020 when he and two associates paid $900,000 to settle Medicare and Medicaid fraud allegations.

But here’s where it gets weird. At age 39, Smith decided to become a music industry player. Despite having no apparent musical background, he somehow ended up judging a BET hip-hop competition called “One Shot” alongside DJ Khaled, T.I., and Twista. As Wired magazine described it, he was “a relatively unknown record producer with a checkbook” among actual stars.

When Caleb asked producer Zach Frank if he’d ever heard of anyone building a successful music career starting in middle age, Zach’s response was telling: “It’s extremely, extremely rare. Not without money, at least.”

The Streaming Revolution and Its Discontents

To understand Smith’s alleged fraud, you need to understand how dramatically the music industry has changed. Zach, who comes from a family of professional musicians, explained how streaming completely upended the business model.

In the old days, people bought physical albums for $12-15 at stores like Tower Records. Artists made real money from album sales. Then came Napster and peer-to-peer sharing, which Caleb admits using extensively in college. “People were listening to all this music completely in its entirety for free,” he recalls.

Today’s streaming platforms like Spotify and Apple Music operate on a subscription model. Users pay monthly fees for unlimited access, and artists get fractions of pennies per stream. Spotify made $17 billion in 2024 and claims 70% goes to the music industry, but individual artists see almost nothing.

The numbers are staggering. According to Spotify’s former chief economist, more music is released every single day in 2025 than in the entire year of 1989. And here’s what makes it worse: bigger artists negotiate better deals, while smaller artists, as Zach puts it, “get screwed.”

Building an Army of Fake Listeners

This is the landscape Smith allegedly decided to exploit. Starting in 2017, he orchestrated what the Department of Justice calls a scheme to steal millions in royalties by fraudulently inflating music streams.

The mechanics were brilliant in their simplicity. First, Smith created thousands of bot accounts using fake email addresses and names. He even told a coconspirator to “make up names and addresses” but to “make sure everyone is over 18.” He paid $1.3 million in subscription fees because, as Zach explains, paid subscribers generate higher royalty rates than free users.

By October 2017, Smith had 1,040 bot accounts spread across 52 cloud service accounts. Each bot could stream about 636 songs per day, generating approximately 661,440 total daily streams. At half a cent per stream, that meant $3,307 daily, $99,000 monthly, or $1.2 million annually.

But Smith had a problem: he needed content. Lots of it.

When AI Makes Music for Bots to Hear

Initially, Smith used music catalogs from coconspirators and even tried selling his streaming service to other musicians desperate for plays. But as he wrote in May 2019, “I can’t run the bots without content and I need enough content so I don’t overrun each song. If we get too many streams on one song, it comes down.”

His solution? Artificial intelligence. Smith partnered with Alex Mitchell, CEO of an AI music company called Boomy, who began providing thousands of AI-generated songs each week.

The song and artist names were gloriously terrible. Song titles included “Zygotic Washstands,” “Zygoptera,” and “Calvinistic Dust.” Band names ranged from “Calm Knuckles” to “Camel Edible.” As Caleb jokes, “I don’t know what camel edibles are. Perhaps they are THC gummies for camels.”

To demonstrate just how far AI music has come, Zach used Udio.com during the podcast to generate two complete songs about Oh My Fraud in just 10-15 seconds. The results were unnervingly good, professional-sounding tracks that could easily pass for human-created music. “There’s a lot of AI music on Spotify at the moment without people knowing it’s AI,” Zach notes.

Smith used VPNs to hide that all streams came from one location and spread activity across thousands of songs to avoid detection. When flagged for “streaming abuse” in 2018, he protested: “We have no intentions of committing streaming fraud.”

By February 2024, Smith’s scheme had generated 4 billion streams and $12 million in royalties.

Folk Hero or Fraudster?

The reaction to Smith’s indictment has been surprisingly divided. Some see him as a criminal who stole from real artists through the “stream share” system, where royalties are distributed based on each rightsholder’s proportion of total streams. Others view him as a folk hero exposing an exploitative system.

The case raises uncomfortable questions. When the band Vulfpeck released an album of complete silence and asked fans to stream it while sleeping—earning $20,000 before Spotify banned them—was that fraud or performance art? As Zach asks, “If someone’s playing blank music, who are they to say that’s not real?”

Smith has hired the prestigious law firm that defended Diddy and plans to fight the charges vigorously. This will be the first major streaming fraud case fully litigated, potentially setting precedents for how we define fraud in digital spaces.

What We Learned

As Caleb reflects at the episode’s end, these cases reveal something profound about our digital economy. Google and Facebook, companies worth trillions with founders worth hundreds of billions, got tricked by simple schemes. A middle-aged entrepreneur with a checkbook created a phantom musical empire that earned millions.

For accounting professionals, these are warnings about the future of fraud detection. When documentation can be perfectly faked, when bots are indistinguishable from humans, when AI creates content that only machines consume, traditional audit procedures become obsolete.

These cases force us to confront questions about power, technology, and authenticity in the digital age. When companies make billions while creators earn pennies, algorithms determine value instead of human appreciation, and the line between real and artificial completely disappears, that’s when people start rooting for the fraudsters. Not because they’re right, but because the system itself feels so wrong.

Listen to the full episode to hear Caleb and Zach grapple with these questions, including those AI-generated songs that sound disturbingly human. Because in an age where machines create for machines while extracting real value from real people, understanding these frauds helps preserve what makes us human in an increasingly artificial world.

The Private Equity Takeover of Accounting Firms Creates a New Independence Crisis

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When BDO threatened to sue a one-person blog for questioning its independence, it sparked a conversation about private equity’s growing influence in accounting. In this episode of The Accounting Podcast, hosts Blake Oliver and David Leary discuss this controversy along with Trump’s costly tariff policies, the profession’s hiring challenges, and a Hollywood accounting scandal.

The BDO-Going Concern Dispute

The accounting world is buzzing about BDO’s cease-and-desist letter to Going Concern, a one-person blog run by Adrienne Gonzalez. The dispute started when Going Concern’s Monday morning news brief linked to Bloomberg’s reporting about BDO cutting jobs while managing its debt to Apollo Global Management.

Here’s what happened: BDO took on $1.3 billion in debt from Apollo at 9% interest to fund an employee stock ownership plan. Apollo was also shorting First Brands Group, a company BDO was auditing. When First Brands suddenly collapsed without BDO issuing a going concern warning, Apollo made money on its short position.

Going Concern embedded a tweet connecting these dots, and BDO responded with legal threats demanding a retraction. Blake pointed out the irony: “You do this and now we’re talking about it. We wouldn’t have talked about it again this week. It was last week’s story. It became news again this week.”

The core issue isn’t whether BDO did anything wrong—there’s no evidence they did. It’s about appearance. As Blake explained, “You have to be independent in both fact and appearance. BDO may be independent in fact, but are they in appearance?” When your auditor owes money to a firm that’s betting against your audit clients, questions naturally arise.

Private Equity’s Rapid Expansion

The BDO situation reflects a broader trend that’s transforming the accounting profession. Since 2021, 24 of the top 100 U.S. accounting firms have taken private equity money. Even Crowe, which publicly rejected PE investment for years, is now hiring investment banks to explore selling a stake.

David warned about the pace of change. “When things are going too fast, people are not making sound decisions.” He pointed to the Citrin Cooperman deal as an example of potential conflicts. The PE firm that invested in them owns music catalogs, while Citrin Cooperman specializes in valuing music catalogs. A music industry blog picked up on this potential conflict, leading David to observe, “If somebody in the music industry is recognizing there might be independence issues, it’s a problem.”

Adding to the irony, BDO Global is now telling member firms to avoid taking external equity investments to preserve “independence and sustainable future,” even while BDO US remains tied to Apollo.

Trump’s Tariff Troubles

While accounting firms grapple with independence, businesses are dealing with expensive new trade policies. The Supreme Court is scheduled to hear arguments on whether Trump’s tariffs amount to an illegal $3 trillion tax on Americans. Lower courts have already ruled Trump exceeded his authority by imposing 10-50% tariffs through emergency declarations.

The real-world impact is already visible. Retail prices jumped 4.9% above pre-tariff trends in eight months. Coffee and tea prices rose 7.5%, while apparel increased nearly 9%. Both imported and domestic goods are getting more expensive, as domestic producers raise prices when foreign competition becomes costlier.

Small businesses face particular challenges beyond just higher costs. Blake shared a quote from David Zampierin, owner of Zamp Racing, a company that makes racing equipment. “I’ve been doing this for 40 years and it’s never been this complicated,” Zampierin told Accounting Today. Companies now spend hours on simple import documentation, and if businesses can’t prove where aluminum originated, customs assumes it’s Russian and charges a 200% tariff.

The Profession’s Mixed Signals

Despite these challenges, accounting firms remain optimistic about hiring. According to an AICPA survey, 75% of firms that hired in 2024 plan to maintain or increase hiring this year. However, they’re recruiting from a shrinking pool. Accounting graduates dropped 6.6% to just 55,000 students, with master’s programs declining 15%.

There’s a bright spot: accounting enrollment has surged 12% for two straight semesters, suggesting the pipeline might be recovering. But the profession’s image problem persists. U.S. News & World Report ranked accounting 90th out of 100 best jobs, with a median salary just under $80,000. The profession scored poorly on future prospects (4.3 out of 10) and work-life balance (5.1 out of 10).

The traditional career path is also changing. Only 38% of graduates now start in public accounting, down from 55% in 2014. Blake predicts this shift will continue. “Most accounting grads go into private industry, but we need experienced people in public accounting to do audits.”

Technology Updates

On the technology front, firms are embracing AI despite implementation challenges. AI adoption in audit jumped from 8% to 21% in one year, with early adopters reporting up to 40% productivity gains. However, most companies remain stuck in what researchers call the “middle maturity trap,” investing heavily but struggling with execution.

Several platforms announced updates. Keeper is rebranding to Double after settling a lawsuit over the name. BILL is partnering with NetSuite and Acumatica for embedded bill pay, though they’re also cutting 140 employees (6% of workforce). Canopy launched AI-powered client intake that predicts needed documents and auto-fills known information.

A Hollywood Fraud Scandal

In fraud news, a Los Angeles film production accountant was charged with embezzling nearly $2 million. Joshua Mandel, owner, CEO, and CFO of First J Productions, moved funds between productions to hide his theft, funneling money through an account he named “Fun Fun Fun.” He spent the money on Vegas trips and payments to adult film performers he met online. He faces up to 20 years per count if convicted.

Looking Ahead

Can firms maintain independence while taking private equity money? Will traditional safeguards survive this ownership transformation? As David warned, “We’re probably going to have another Enron here. We’re going to have an Arthur Anderson issue eventually.”

Blake emphasized what’s at stake: “The integrity of auditors is all that’s holding up our financial system.” With nearly a quarter of top firms now tied to private equity and more joining weekly, the profession must figure out how to preserve independence in this new reality.

The BDO/Going Concern dispute may seem like a small skirmish, but it represents a larger battle over accounting’s soul. When firms owe money to companies betting against their audit clients, when ownership structures become too complex to untangle, and when legal threats replace transparency, the profession’s core value—independence—comes into question.

Listen to the full episode to hear Blake and David’s analysis of these stories and more, recorded live from Intuit Connect in Las Vegas.

Intuit Finally Tackles Practice Management But Will Accountants Actually Switch?

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For years, QuickBooks Online Accountant (QBOA) served as little more than a client list with basic billing features. That’s about to change in a big way.

In episode 121 of The Unofficial QuickBooks Accountants Podcast, hosts Alicia Katz Pollock and Dan DeLong dive deep into everything they learned about Intuit Accountant Suite (IAS) at Intuit Connect. The hosts brought insights from their conversations with the developers and project managers building these new features.

Dan, who was one of the first four Intuit agents to support QBO back in 2013, found the transformation almost surreal. “To see its evolution from 2013, when it first started as just a client list dashboard to what it’s actually evolving into, is a pretty surreal thing,” he reflects.

Alicia spent most of the conference in what she calls the “Innovation Circle” rather than breakout sessions. In the Circle, she talked directly to developers at about 20 different stations, gathering pages of notes about features that will fundamentally change how accountants manage their practices.

From Simple List to Practice Command Center

The transformation starts with the news that Intuit Accountant Suite will replace QBOA entirely. The new home screen adapts to each user’s role and access level, making it different for everyone based on their specific workload.

“Instead of having to go into each of your clients and find out those anomalies, you’ll have a dashboard inside of a one-stop shop,” Dan explains. “You need to look into anomalies for this client, fix a disconnected account for this client, reconnect an app for that client. The dashboard basically lists the fires you need to put out today.”

The home screen will show integration issues across all clients, news with product updates, and a ProAdvisor team certification bar graph. You can pin custom items and see product recommendations, although Intuit promises these won’t advertise services you already offer.

One of the biggest workflow improvements is the new client groups feature. Instead of assigning permissions client by client and team member by team member, you can now create groups based on any dimension that makes sense, such as office location, industry, service type, or subscription level. Assign team members to a group once, designate a lead, and everyone gets appropriate access automatically.

This is especially valuable given the current wave of mergers and acquisitions in accounting. “With private equity happening in the accounting space and smaller bookkeepers joining forces to turn into larger firms, this was a big sticking point,” Alicia notes. The new realm consolidation features let you transfer clients between accounts and reassign primary admin status to accommodate these structural changes.

The Practice Management Play

Intuit Accountant Suite will have two different plans: Core and Accelerate. Core includes everything currently in QBOA and will remain free. Accelerate adds the new features and will have a price after the first free year. Some features, like Books Close, might be available à la carte.

Client Insights offers what many accountants have been building manually in spreadsheets. You’ll choose from over 30 KPIs at launch, with more coming. The dashboard refreshes every 24 hours, though you can update on demand. The AI “accounting agent” (shown as a sparkle icon) flags anomalies and significant changes across your entire client base.

“You’ll have default template views—P&L data, balance sheet data, bookkeeping data,” Alicia explains. “And then you’ll be able to design your own custom views as well, with your own KPIs.”

Books Close made Alicia do a double-take, as it works a lot like Double (formerly known as Keeper). The feature lets you handle routine reconciliation and review without clicking into individual client files.

The transaction review capabilities include counts for uncategorized transactions, transactions without payees, transactions posted to parent accounts, expenses without attachments, transactions over your threshold, transactions auto-added by bank rules, and transactions auto-posted by AI.

“That’s huge,” Dan responds to the bank rules visibility. “As long as you can do a batch action type of thing or multiple edits, that will actually put the word ‘quick’ back into QuickBooks.”

The workflow system assigns team members as preparer, reviewer, or approver. You create templates, assign them to new clients, and your month-end process is structured automatically. Capacity planning shows team workloads, tracks budgeted versus actual time, and lets you set utilization rates by person. When someone goes on vacation, you reallocate their tasks directly in the interface.

Intuit also positions QuickBooks Live experts as an overflow option when you’re over capacity—a feature that drew mixed reactions from the hosts.

Training Goes Firm-Wide

Jaclyn Anku, ProAdvisor Program Leader, explained to Alicia how they’re adapting to industry changes. “She’s really conscious that the industry is changing and the ProAdvisor program needs to stay relevant to today’s firms as we move into advisory and human intelligence,” Alicia notes.

The new training dashboard in IAS solves a persistent problem: every team member’s certifications lived in their own portal with no firm-wide visibility. Now administrators can view all staff certifications on one screen, track progress toward ProAdvisor tiers, access complete transcripts, assign courses firm-wide or individually, and set due dates with automated reminders.

The new CAS Foundation Badge indicates where Intuit sees the profession heading. It requires completing five programs, including a new three-hour AI for Accounting course, communication training, and financial analysis modules. Unlike regular certifications, there’s no test-out option. You must complete the training.

“It covers things you don’t get taught at accounting school,” Dan observes about the communication and soft skills components.

The resource hub adds marketing collateral, workflow templates, and presentation scripts for client trainings. Intuit commits to quarterly updates to keep screenshots and processes current.

What This Means for Your Practice

The hosts offer practical advice for navigating these changes. Since pricing isn’t available yet, they suggest testing features with one or two clients during the free year.

“Double does way more than this is going to do for any length of time,” Alicia notes realistically. “So if you’re only using the basic features of Double, then maybe this will work for you. But we don’t know the price, so we don’t know how it’s going to compare.”

“This is leveling up from individual details of having to go into each of your clients, or having to go into each of your staff members. It’s all in one place for you as a firm owner,” Dan says, summarizing the value proposition.

For solo practitioners or small firms without existing practice management tools, IAS offers infrastructure that was previously out of reach. For established firms with existing workflows, the calculation is more complex. You have a year to test, compare, and decide whether Intuit’s vision aligns with your practice needs.

It’s clear Intuit recognizes they were “leaving money on the table,” as Alicia puts it, and they’re moving aggressively to reclaim that territory. Whether they succeed depends on execution, pricing, and whether accountants find enough value to abandon their current tools.

Listen to the Full Episode

For the complete discussion including all the developer conversations and specific feature details, listen to The Unofficial QuickBooks Accountants Podcast. You’ll hear firsthand how these changes might impact your practice and get practical tips for making the most of the free trial period.

Alicia Katz Pollock’s Royalwise OWLS (On-Demand Web-based Learning Solutions) is the industry’s premier portal for top-notch QuickBooks Online training with CPE for accounting firms, bookkeepers, and small business owners. Visit Royalwise OWLS, where learning QBO is a HOOT!