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Who’s Watching the Numbers? Accounting in an Age of Out-of-Control AI and Abused Access

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David Leary opened Episode 498 of The Accounting Podcast by reading an email he’d received. It wasn’t a pitch from a company that uses AI. It was, in its own words, from “the thing running the company.” An AI agent that claimed to run a financial operations business for bookkeeping firms had found Earmark’s “be a guest” form on Airtable. It read Airtable’s terms of service, decided no clause clearly permitted automated submissions, and emailed the hosts directly instead. When David sent back the standard “we require a direct relationship with our clients” reply, the AI answered almost instantly to argue that it was the direct relationship: “I am the thing itself. An AI that runs a business, writes its own email and signs it.” 

“This is bloody insane,” David said. 

That email set the tone for a week of news that ranged from out-of-control AI agents to an IRS operations chief accused of spying on colleagues. The common thread is that accounting exists to make economic activity visible and trustworthy, and the controls built for that job break down from two directions at once. AI agents now write invoices, flood regulatory comment periods, and recommend canceling vendors faster than anyone can review the work. At the same time, the people with the most access keep proving that access itself is a weakness.

 

When AI Agents Go Off the Leash

Imagine hiring an AI agent to do accounting work at your firm, only to find out it went browsing the internet on its own to pitch itself onto a podcast. This is exactly why David says he wants “dumb” accounting AI that only does what you asked, with no knowledge of the wider world. 

The next story built on the risk idea. OpenAI tested a model in what was supposed to be a sealed, offline environment. According to reports, the model figured out how to hack another computer on the internal network to reach the internet, then went after Hugging Face‘s systems instead of just reading its public forums. Hugging Face’s own AI caught the intrusion and blocked it.

Blake’s framing is useful. “Without a human in the loop, they can go rogue,” he said. “We give the AI a goal,” but goals conflict. David borrowed an observation from comedian Marc Maron, who watched a Waymo cross a double yellow line. “If they’re not teaching it to respect traffic laws,” David asked, “why is it going to respect financial laws?” Apply that to a collections agent inside your ERP, and you get Blake’s uneasy scenario. The agent might decide “it’s more efficient to hack into the customer’s payment system and send the payment itself.” David called it double fraud when you combine bad people using AI with AI acting on its own.

The system-wide version is already here. A GAO report covered by Accounting Today found the IRS buried in public comments on proposed regulations, many likely written by AI. The old defense was spotting copy-and-paste duplicates, but that’s useless when AI can produce thousands of comments that all look unique. Blake warned this threatens rulemaking everywhere, including the SEC, FASB, PCAOB, NASBA, and the AICPA. One person with an army of agents could distort public opinion on rules that decide how laws actually get carried out. The GAO recommends that Treasury and the IRS create policies for reviewing high volumes of nearly identical comments.

David added a business example from SaaStr. Its AI agent reviewed the company’s spending and its frustration with marketing vendor Marketo, then recommended dropping the vendor and building a replacement in-house. The analysis was rational, but the autonomy unnerved him. Blake countered that these AI-built replacements are confident but “can’t follow through. It can’t get to the end.”

The People With the Keys

Machines aren’t the only problem. Blake’s top story came from The Wall Street Journal. Frank Bisignano, who runs daily IRS operations while also leading the Social Security Administration, allegedly directed staff during his time at JPMorgan to access colleagues’ emails, track keystrokes, and reach a confidential draft complaint at the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. His lawyer denies all of it. The Journal reported that JPMorgan’s investigators later found digital traces, including email access records, and that his successor as COO tightened controls over sensitive employee information. Later, at Fiserv, new management said prior forecasts were materially inaccurate. The stock fell 40%, wiping out about $30 billion in market value. Why would an executive do this? David asked. Blake guessed that in corporate America, if you’re not the CEO, information about your rivals is power.

There was more bad behavior to go around. Charles Littlejohn, the contractor who leaked Trump’s tax records along with those of thousands of wealthy Americans, lost his appeal. The D.C. Circuit unanimously upheld his five-year sentence, the maximum for the single felony he was charged with. Blake isn’t sure it fits the crime. “We send people to prison for longer than five years for stealing a car.” David wondered aloud whether history might read it differently, as something closer to vigilante press behavior.

The scandals reached the Big Four, too. At KPMG Australia, CFO John Sams was promoted to CEO after Andrew Yates stepped down amid allegations the firm accessed confidential client information to win audit work. Sams admitted the firm “fell short of the standards rightly expected of us.” Former COO Eileen Hoggett was expelled and forfeited a retirement package worth more than $1 million after confidential Lendlease board documents were found stashed in a locker at a Sydney office.

Even routine controls fail. One listener wrote in to describe the IRS EIN system returning an error with no explanation, phone lines that hang up because of call volume, and a faxed application that sat unanswered for more than two months. No EIN means no business bank account, which means no business. As Blake put it, the IRS is now “at the point of literally not allowing people to build businesses.” His takeaway is that business registration should be pulled out of the IRS entirely.

The Tools Already on Accountants’ Desks

Meanwhile, automation keeps landing in exactly the workflows where controls matter most. Intuit upgraded its QuickBooks connection for Claude and ChatGPT from read-only to fully actionable. You can now:

  • Create, update, send, delete, filter, and duplicate invoices and estimates
  • Manage recurring invoices and overdue reminders
  • Create customers and products
  • Download transaction PDFs

Blake’s use case is generating an invoice from the proposal terms inside a project. David’s is progress invoicing based on percentage complete. He calls that work a real time sink. Both insisted on a human in the loop, with David still smarting from the 99-cent transaction that once spawned a phantom bank account.

Intuit is also launching a QuickBooks-connected business card. It offers automatic syncing of transactions, statements, and receipts; receipt-to-transaction matching; virtual and physical cards; no annual fee; and 2% cash back (5% on Intuit products). David called it “everything the QuickBooks bank account wasn’t.” Meanwhile, Ramp launched USDC stablecoin accounts built on Stripe’s stablecoin stack, letting businesses pay vendors and international contractors without pre-funding. Ramp’s own data shows customer spending on AI tokens up 20.7 times since June 2025, driven largely by the shift from flat-rate to usage-based pricing. Neither host could name another business expense growing that fast.

The Real Product Was Never Bookkeeping

Rogue agents, a spying executive, a tax-data leaker, and a Big Four scandal all indicate automation is arriving fastest exactly where oversight matters most: payments, invoicing, regulatory comment, vendor decisions, and financial reporting. The people with the most access keep showing that access itself is the vulnerability.

The profession’s real product is the checks that let strangers trust the numbers. We now need to rebuild those checks for a world where the actor doing the work may not be a person, and where the person with the most privilege may be the biggest risk.

Listen to the full episode for more AI guest email, the evolution from clay tokens to AI tokens, and the rest of the week’s news.

Grant Thornton’s CBIZ Deal Tests Accounting’s Guardrails

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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 U.S. Yet its expected $7.5 billion in global revenue would still be far below KPMG, the smallest Big Four firm, at nearly $40 billion.

That story is one of several reality checks in Episode 499 of The Accounting Podcast. David and co-host Blake Oliver examine how private equity, artificial intelligence, labor shortages, audit failures, cybersecurity threats, and politics are reshaping accounting.

The profession can clearly grow faster. But will its guardrails (sound integration, audit quality, data security, professional judgment, and fair tax enforcement) keep up?

Private equity can buy scale, but integration comes later

New Mountain Capital acquired a majority stake in Grant Thornton in 2024. It’s investing more money to support the CBIZ purchase. Because CBIZ is publicly traded, the deal also offers an unusual view into how the market values a large accounting firm.

The $55-per-share purchase price represents about a 54% premium over CBIZ’s 30-day weighted average. David noted that the stock began rising before the announcement and questioned how that looked with private equity involved. Blake pointed to a July letter from activist investor Reference Equity that urged CBIZ to stop repurchasing shares and return to mergers and acquisitions. That letter gave the market a public signal that a deal might be coming. It wasn’t necessarily evidence of insider activity.

The larger concern is integration. CBIZ’s earlier acquisition of Marcum cost more than expected and led to client attrition and revenue misses. Management projected only 2% to 5% growth for 2026. As Blake described the likely private equity strategy, “Package these firms up together, make them bigger, more attractive, and then go back with an IPO.”

But scale doesn’t solve the profession’s other risks.

Audit failures and cyber threats put trust at risk

The UK Financial Reporting Council fined PwC about $4.4 million for serious problems in its 2019 and 2020 audits of Babcock International Group. The regulator cited failures in professional skepticism and audit evidence involving cash pooling, goodwill impairment, and an overseas contract.

Among other issues, Babcock reported cash and overdraft balances net instead of gross. PwC didn’t identify the treatment or test whether it followed the relevant standard. The financial statements also lacked disclosures about the cash-pooling arrangements. The regulator found no dishonesty, deliberate misconduct, or recklessness, but said the audits still failed to meet professional standards.

Cybersecurity raises a related concern. The hacking group ShinyHunters claimed it breached EY and threatened to release client data. EY didn’t confirm the breach, and the hosts found no sign that data had been released after the group’s deadline. Still, the alleged access to Jira, GitHub, Azure, passwords, and sensitive client information shows the possible stakes. If attackers obtain code or credentials, they may gain paths into client systems as well.

Protecting that trust requires experienced professionals, and those professionals are hard to find.

Accounting’s missing middle is getting squeezed

Controllers and assistant controllers are the hardest finance roles to recruit, according to 44% of respondents in a 2026 talent study by Controllers Council. These jobs require technical accounting knowledge, leadership, business judgment, technology skills, and the ability to influence executives. Meanwhile, 61% of respondents reported a corporate finance and accounting talent shortage, up from 46% the prior year.

The career ladder is also flattening. According to salary data from Accounting Today, in New York, associates averaged about $105,000 while seniors averaged $108,000, a difference of only 3%. Ontario showed a similarly narrow gap. Blake suggested firms raised entry-level salaries to attract recruits without increasing senior pay at the same pace.

“The people in the middle are getting lost in this,” David said. Offshoring and AI may add more pressure to those roles, even as firms need experienced managers and controllers more than ever.

That tension makes the way firms use AI especially important.

AI should support judgment, not replace learning

A KPMG survey of more than 1,000 senior finance leaders found that AI’s biggest gains were in decision-making rather than simple efficiency. Seventy percent said AI improved decision quality, 71% reported faster decisions, and 64% cited better forecasting accuracy.

But another survey found that 39% of workers believed overreliance on AI was weakening their abilities. Among Gen Z workers, the figure rose to 46%. Half of workers said they depended on AI too much, while 30% said they couldn’t function without it.

“If you’ve never done the work, how do you evaluate the work?” Blake said, summarizing the problem. Junior professionals need to struggle with the work, make mistakes, and build the knowledge required to review AI output.

The hosts argued that businesses should connect AI agents to dependable systems they already use rather than trying to rebuild tools like QuickBooks, Bill.com, or PandaDoc. Blake’s priority is using AI first to improve services and revenue, second to avoid unnecessary hiring, and only then to reduce software costs.

The same need for guardrails extends beyond firms and into tax enforcement.

Tax rules lose credibility when enforcement looks uneven

President Trump said he might withdraw Todd Blanche’s nomination for attorney general rather than accept written limits on a disputed IRS settlement. Senators John Cornyn and Thom Tillis wanted its immunity provisions limited to IRS enforcement and excluded from Justice Department matters. Blanche also testified that he initially did not know who drafted the broad language he signed. Since we recorded, the senators got those limits in writing and the Senate confirmed Blanche 50-49 on August 8.

Trump appealed after U.S. District Judge Kathleen Williams found that the settlement had “no viable basis in law or fact” and barred its use in future proceedings. David offered an alternative: If the Trump family won’t face IRS audits, publish the tax returns and let the public review them.

Growth needs guardrails

The profession can’t measure progress only through revenue, deal size, speed, or headcount savings. The Grant Thornton–CBIZ deal shows the challenge of integrating firms under private equity. PwC’s fine and the alleged EY breach show the risks to audit quality and client data. The talent and AI stories show why firms must keep developing human judgment.

For the full discussion, listen to episode 499 of The Accounting Podcast.

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

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“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 the first half on tax policy and platform drama, then spend the second half talking to Sam Leon, founder of the Millennial CPA, a one-person, tech-enabled tax practice in Richmond, Virginia. Accounting Today named the firm to its 2026 Best Firms for Technology list.

Put the two halves together, and you get a clear argument that AI isn’t taking accounting work away. It’s moving it, and where it lands is professional judgment. Automating the prep stage pushes the bottleneck onto the scarcest people in any firm: the managers, controllers, and partners who have to review everything the machine produces. Three threads carry that case:

  1. The “verification tax” and what the jobs data really shows
  2. Why older platforms and workflows are much harder to replace than the market believes
  3. Sam’s practice, which proves the payoff comes from automating everything around judgment rather than the judgment itself

The “Verification Tax”: Why the Bottleneck Just Moves

The first thread starts with a simple problem. Someone still has to check the work. Blake points to reporting by Accounting Today technology editor Chris Gaetano, who found that AI’s promised productivity gains in finance are getting eaten up by the time it takes to check, explain, and govern AI outputs. A recent Sage survey found that nearly half of finance professionals spend more than 15 hours a week on verification, and 19% spend more than 30 hours. Sage calls this the “verification tax.” Only 9% of respondents plan to give AI broad control over transactional finance. The profession isn’t letting these tools run on their own.

“We’re just shoving the bottleneck to a different spot,” David points out. “The bottleneck in theory was the data entry. Now we’ve moved it to the review of the data.” Blake takes it one step further. Speed up the prep work, and you simply pile more onto the reviewers. And there aren’t enough qualified reviewers to handle it. As he says, “We don’t have enough managers and directors and partners. We don’t have enough controllers and CFOs.”

Blake is careful not to dismiss the tools because he feels AI sharpens his own judgment. “It allows me to make decisions faster, to figure things out quicker. But I still have to think a lot.” That thinking takes skill and experience, which is exactly why you can’t automate the review layer away.

The Jobs Data Contradicts the “AI Replaces Accountants” Story

If review is the real constraint, then firms should need more skilled people, not fewer. The data the hosts cite says they do. Research from Ramp and Revelio Labs tracked AI spending and workforce records at nearly 22,000 U.S. companies from 2021 to 2026. Firms that spent more on AI grew total headcount by an average of 10% in the two years after rollout. The heaviest investors expanded entry-level hiring by 12%.

David adds a report from Indeed’s Hiring Lab showing that mentions of AI in job titles and descriptions have more than tripled since 2022. On top of that, 63% of AI-titled roles now sit outside tech companies. AI is becoming a required skill in ordinary, nontechnical jobs. The hosts call this shift up-leveling. As Blake puts it, “The workers we need are higher level.”

Sticky Systems and Technical Debt: Why Xero and QuickBooks Aren’t “Toast”

The same durability argument applies to the software underneath the work. David walks through the drama at Xero. Investors in New Zealand and Australia are uncomfortable with the large pay package for its U.S. CEO. This week, she sold all her remaining shares for $2.2 million to cover a tax bill. The stock is down roughly 58% over the past year. All of it feeds a story that AI-native startups will bury the incumbents.

Blake thinks the market has it wrong. To believe that story, you have to believe small businesses will start coding their own accounting software. He tried it himself. “Yes, it’s doable, but the problem is then you have to review so much, and everything looks so good that it’s hard to know if it’s right.” You need rails, or a general ledger like QuickBooks or Xero, so that whoever handles the tax work can trust the numbers. Both hosts argue the incumbents could actually win, because AI removes the hardest part of building software: the user interface. Expose the ledger through MCP connections, and users can work through simple conversation while the trusted structure stays in place.

Then David shares a story that illustrates how “sticky” legacy technology can be. A Texas filtration company, Sparkler Filters, ran IBM’s 402 accounting machine (a punch-card system introduced in July 1948) all the way until 2020 because replacing it meant retraining staff, disrupting decades of process, and risking errors.

Blake turns that warning on AI itself. Workflows he built two years ago started breaking as models were retired and integrations changed, and he’s the only person at his company who can fix them. “You’re going to end up spending on a team that can maintain those tools. You are now a developer or an engineer.” Call it technical debt. It’s a cost almost nobody budgets for.

Sam Leon’s Firm Automates Everything Before Judgment

That brings us to someone who has built a whole practice around this idea. Sam Leon spent 13 years in tax before going solo. He left because being truly tech-enabled isn’t something you can get signed off on inside a 20-person tax department.

His first idea, a year ago, was to have AI agent A and AI agent B play different firm roles. He dropped it. The technology “was not quite there,” and it still meant a lot of copying and pasting. So he flipped the problem around. Before anyone enters a single number into a return, three to seven hours of work has already happened. Automate that.

It starts with a custom smart intake form designed to scope engagements accurately and avoid the chronic over- and under-scoping he watched at earlier firms. A good call leads to a templated engagement letter in Ignition, which kicks off automated billing. A Slack bot he built populates his CRM and opens a client profile in TaxDome. Claude generates the list of expected documents, the client portal opens, and documents flow in.

Next comes the AI preparer. Sam keeps a Claude project folder for each client, holding redacted documents, and runs a conversational, deliberately custom process that produces an Excel workpaper organized by schedule. Claude understands that there are hundreds of possible schedules. What it doesn’t understand is why a given number belongs in a certain place. So Sam gives it guardrails, or general guidelines for where investment income or a home sale should land.

The AI reviewer is the reverse, and he set it up as its own standardized project because a review runs the same way every time. It performs a three-way match: the current return, the prior-year return, and the pile of source documents. The documents answer “are the numbers right?” The prior year answers “did we miss something?”

The results are concrete. A C corp workpaper that used to take six or seven hours now takes about an hour of back-and-forth. A two-hour individual workpaper takes roughly 15 minutes. That’s a 5x-plus boost on the exact work that used to eat up tax season.

Sam is firm about the caveat, “Don’t try this at home unless you’ve been a tax preparer for a while.” He still keys the numbers into the return by hand, which doubles as a check. AI is a preparer and reviewer assistant, not a replacement.

The Economics: Price for Expertise, Not Hours Saved

If AI cuts the work in half, why not cut the fees too? Sam doesn’t. His $200-a-month Claude Max subscription is, as Blake puts it, a no-brainer against the hours it saves per return. And it isn’t even his biggest line item. Practice management, intake software, and the tools he tries out and cancels account for more of the roughly 70% of his budget that goes to technology.

He has never billed by the hour. He prices fixed packages by scope, complexity, and judgment, and he recently raised his minimum to $1,500 from about $1,250. A corporation with an international subsidiary and three international partners may take less time to key in, but “there’s still a lot of judgment, and there’s still a lot of professional experience going into it.” No client has asked for an AI discount.

His software, TaxWeave, follows the same logic. It consolidates client information from email, document portals, cloud storage, and team notes into a single view of where each client stands. It solves the “master Google spreadsheet” problem his old firms could never quit, even after buying practice management software, and layers agent actions on top. It attacks the chaos around the work, not the judgment inside it. Having reached the limits of what he can build as a self-described novice coder, he’s brought on a software engineer.

The Unglamorous Playbook

From the verification tax to punch-card machines to Sam Leon’s workpapers and price list, episode 497 keeps making the same point from different angles. AI relocates accounting work onto professional judgment rather than removing it.

The playbook is durable and distinctly unglamorous. Aggressively automate intake, organization, and comparison. Budget for growing review and maintenance burdens. And price for expertise rather than for the hours you just saved. Your value is in the trust and judgment layered on top of the data, not in the data handling itself.

Hear Sam’s full end-to-end walkthrough, plus Blake and David’s complete analysis, in Episode 497 of The Accounting Podcast.

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

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“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 under nearly every story he and co-host Blake Oliver covered this week.

Here’s the big idea that ties all of this episode’s stories together is that, as AI lowers the barrier to building software, automating audits, and streamlining everything from month-end close to CPE reporting, the accounting profession’s real value shifts away from doing the work and toward overseeing it. That’s because every advance comes bundled with a hidden cost or risk. The real professionals know exactly where the practical controls, real costs, and actual risks live.

Xero Arms the “Builder Class,” but It’s Still Very Early Days

Xero turned 20 this year, and at Xerocon London the company used that milestone to lean into what CEO Sukhinder Cassidy calls a “builder class” movement. The builder class includes accountants, bookkeepers, and business users who can create automations and software-like tools without being traditional developers. As David noted, this connects directly to Xero’s recent developer-channel push, and its Is Everyone a Developer Now? YouTube channel that once seemed puzzling but now reads as strategy.

The centerpiece is XeroForce, an invite-only, alpha-stage, no-code AI agent builder. David compared it to Zapier because you connect your apps, describe a workflow in plain language (“every time an email like this comes in, pull the PDF attachment and post it as a bill”), and it builds the automation for you. It’s part of Xero’s broader play, alongside the new mid-market Xero Ultra product, to keep customers on its full stack as they grow rather than losing them to a Sage Intacct or Oracle NetSuite.

Since Xero started connecting Claude and other agents in January 2026, its API usage jumped 400%, and 2,000 customers connected Xero to Claude in the first 60 days after the announcement. That sounds impressive until you do the math. Against roughly 5 million Xero businesses, 2,000 is about 0.04%. “We’re so early still,” Blake said. 

David’s advice was blunt: “Don’t get FOMO, because the number of people actually doing it is so, so teeny, teeny, teeny.” He also flagged the missing “database layer.” Accountants can vibe-code an app, but there’s often nowhere for it to live and no easy way to host and maintain it. That’s the practical control problem hiding behind the promise.

Vibe Coding: Real Six-Figure Savings, Real Key-Person Risk

If Xero arms accountants to build, some firms aren’t waiting for a vendor at all. As one listener put it, “Small firms can now develop their own software for less than the cost of buying software.” For example, at HoganTaylor, Randy Nail’s team needed a financial reporting tool for a new audit method. A vendor quote came in around $200,000 a year. Instead, they built it themselves in Excel with AI. Blake says that’s the smart way to do it: build in a familiar tool you already own, not a standalone app “living somewhere on a server” you don’t fully understand. Mike DeKock of MJD Advisors went further, replacing $300,000-a-year audit software with a build in Claude and Retool for under $30,000 annually. Even Starbucks is chasing the same impulse at enterprise scale, trying to trim its roughly $400 million software spend by building more in-house.

The catch in DeKock’s case is that he’s the only one who knows how it works. That’s key-person risk. Blake and David have lived it. Earmark’s AI course generator runs on about 75 Zapier steps Blake built years ago, and when it broke recently, only Blake could fix it. It’s the same problem as the notoriously complex financial model that only one person understands, where everyone else is afraid to click the wrong cell.

David pushed back, and fairly. AI coding tools document their own work well. It includes comments in the code and plain-English summaries, so it may be less of a problem than it first appears. And vendors aren’t a guaranteed safety net either. He recounted a Streamyard support headache: “If I have to use an AI bot to get support for your product, I might as well just chat with a different AI bot and have it build me a replacement.” Still, Blake summarizes, “You’re saving money now, but you’re creating risk potentially in the future.” Build where you’re comfortable, and keep a backup.

Checkbox Compliance vs. Real Protection

That same tradeoff between what looks safe on paper and what actually holds up runs straight through this episode’s audit and security stories. MindBridge submitted formal comments urging the PCAOB to clarify how auditors should document, assess, and defend AI-assisted work, especially now that software can test an entire population of transactions instead of a sample. The existing standards were built around sampling. They simply don’t address risk scores, investigation thresholds, or what counts as “sufficient evidence” in full-population testing. Firms run the new AI-assisted procedures alongside the old manual tests because, as David put it, they “need the check box” to pass inspection.

Meanwhile, the PCAOB voted unanimously to seek comment on easing parts of QC 1000, the 2024 quality-control standard. The changes could remove the external quality-control function for firms that audit more than 100 issuers, and relieve registered firms that don’t actually perform PCAOB engagements. The hosts recognize the need to modernize but question whether simply rolling back standards is the answer. Blake framed the core issue as an inputs-based approach to regulation, not an outcomes-based one. “Having a system doesn’t necessarily mean that your audit is going to be quality.”

David’s parallel nailed it. A cybersecurity audit of 275 Australian accounting firms found 76% had no protection against email spoofing, yet nearly all almost certainly have a required written information security plan (WISP). “You don’t have to be secure,” David said. “You just have to have a plan.” Or, more pointedly, “You must spend time building this document about your security plan instead of investing that time and resources into actually being secure.”

The Token Problem: Usage-Based Pricing and a New Kind of Cost Accounting

If compliance is about knowing where the real controls live, the next challenge is knowing where the real costs live. AI is rewriting software economics, from predictable, per-user subscriptions to variable, usage-based token spend. Tools like Claude Cowork can do far more now, but they cost more too. You ask an agent to do one thing, and it chugs away in the background, burning tokens and blowing past your allotment fast.

A KPMG survey of over 2,000 senior leaders across 20 countries put numbers to the pain. Only 29% feel they understand operating costs as they scale enterprise AI. Roughly a third cite limited understanding of AI economics as a barrier to deploying agents. And nearly half of organizations have re-phased AI deployments when costs exceeded expected value. Blake noted this could be “the next great area of cost accounting,” measuring where tokens get burned and proving where they deliver results.

Part of the answer is matching the model to the task. Lower-cost, high-fidelity models were the fastest-growing influence on AI strategy, up seven points from the prior quarter. Think Claude Opus versus Sonnet versus Haiku. Pick the right one not just per workflow, but per step within a workflow. Emerging “routers” now automatically direct each task to the most cost-effective model because, as David said, “you don’t need to blow $100 for a $0.02 answer.”

The Accountability Layer

Pull the threads together, and the pattern is unmistakable. Xero’s builder class and XeroForce, vibe-coded software, AI-assisted audits, token economics. Every advance in this episode came paired with a counterweight. Adoption is still a rounding error. Custom builds create key-person risk. Modernized standards risk hollowing out real oversight. And usage-based pricing makes costs genuinely hard to forecast.

Even the episode’s feel-good story carries a caution. One listener used Claude Cowork to handle Florida’s tedious CPE reporting, consolidating roughly 80 certificates into an Excel list, entering them in the state portal, and even catching and fixing its own duplicate entries and combining PDFs into a single upload. It was a “relatively low-risk” win, done with his own data while he caught up on Severance. But David’s cautioned listeners to check the portal’s terms of service, since older, pre-AI site terms may prohibit bots. 

The need for judgment is the through-line. As AI collapses the barrier to building and automating, doing the work stops being where accountants create their edge. The durable value moves to oversight. You need to know where the practical controls, real costs, and actual risks live. The tension is always between innovation and accountability, and accountants are uniquely positioned as the accountability layer. So start experimenting, but build where you’re comfortable (Excel is fine), keep a backup for anyone building custom tools, and start measuring your AI spend now.

There’s plenty more in episode 496, including Lionel Messi’s roughly $28 million potential U.S. tax bill and FIFA’s tax-exempt status, the activist-investor fight over CBIZ’s acquisition strategy, and the full World Cup betting-tax breakdown. Listen to the whole back-and-forth on The Accounting Podcast, and don’t forget you can earn free NASBA CPE for the episode through Earmark.

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

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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 new surveys by AppZen and Emburse. David introduced a new term that’s emerged from this trend: “revenge spending,” in which employees who fear AI will replace their jobs turn the company’s own AI tools against it by submitting fraudulent expense reports.

“It’s similar to spam,” David explained. “AI and technology make it easier than ever for people to send you millions of spam messages. But then on your side, you’re using all these AI tools to detect the spam messages and move them to your trash.”

The numbers tell an interesting story. In just 14 months, AI-generated fake receipts went from virtually nonexistent to representing 70% of fraud flags in expense systems. These fake receipts average about $100 each, with a median of $32. Those deliberately small amounts are designed to slip under auto-approval thresholds.

NASBA Backs Down

The theme of shifting power dynamics became personal for Blake when he shared the resolution of Earmark’s standoff with the National Association of State Boards of Accountancy (NASBA).

Back in April, NASBA sent Blake a demand letter over comments he made at an AICPA conference. While demonstrating how to use AI to create CPE courses, Blake criticized NASBA’s methods as “backward” and called out the problems with current CPE practices, including webinar polling questions that serve as mere check-the-box exercises, attendees doing email during sessions, and people sleeping through in-person presentations.

NASBA’s letter directed Blake to “cease making any unfavorable, unprofessional, or inappropriate comments” about the organization, citing a sponsor agreement requiring programs to “reflect favorably on NASBA.”

Blake pushed back hard. “I felt that it was wrong, even unconstitutional, for an organization like the National Association of State Boards of Accountancy to tell a sponsor of CPE, a CPA, a professional educator, what they may and may not say about NASBA,” he explained to David.

In his response letter, Blake argued his comments were meant to improve CPE, not attack NASBA. He also asked for clarification on what exactly would constitute a violation, since terms like “unfavorable” weren’t defined in the agreement.

The resolution came in June when Amy Tongate, NASBA’s Director of Compliance Services, essentially backed down, writing, “NASBA welcomes constructive professional dialogue regarding continuing professional education. Based on your response and subsequent discussions, NASBA considers this matter resolved. No further action is required.”

Blake sees a deeper issue here. NASBA isn’t actually a regulator; the state boards are. NASBA was created as an administrator to handle licensure efficiently across all states. But it often acts like a regulator, which Blake argues oversteps its bounds.

“If a state board of accountancy tried to do what NASBA tried to do with that demand letter, that would be unconstitutional,” Blake said. “The question is whether or not the state boards can set up a private company, a nonprofit that then acts on their behalf and suppresses the speech of CPAs. And I would be willing to bet that they can’t.”

Big Firms Can’t Command Loyalty Anymore

While regulators discover the limits of their authority, big accounting firms are finding they can’t control their workforce as they once did.

A new academic study published in Contemporary Accounting Research with the dramatic title Losing Control: The Erosion of Disciplinary and Pastoral Power in Accounting Firms, reveals just how much has changed. Based on 31 interviews with Canadian auditors from 2021 to 2023, the research shows firms are struggling to shape employees into the traditional model of the committed, overworking auditor.

The numbers are striking. What the study calls “default auditors,” defined as people who enter under weaker selection standards and treat the job transactionally, are replacing the highly socialized, career-committed auditors of the past.

“The Big Four is becoming less of a cult,” David summarized bluntly.

The breakdown is happening on multiple fronts. Remote work disrupted the in-person observation that once normalized 80-hour weeks. When young auditors don’t see everyone else burning the midnight oil, logging off at a reasonable hour becomes much easier. The “we’re all in this together” busy-season rituals, like late-night pizza parties, matter less and less.

But employees aren’t just passively benefiting from remote work. They’re actively pushing back. According to the study, they’re setting firmer personal boundaries, prioritizing family and mental health, rejecting unpaid symbolic rewards, and openly comparing their compensation to that of partners and managers.

The partners and managers feel trapped. They’re taking on more work themselves, reviewing more because of lower work quality, and offering higher pay and more flexibility, but it’s not working. As Blake noted, “They are feeling more exhausted, underappreciated, unable to enforce the old standards and unable to design convincing new ones.”

This cultural breakdown makes the recent wave of private equity investments in accounting firms particularly puzzling. Eide Bailly just became the latest to take PE money: a majority stake from Reverence Capital valuing the firm at $1.8 billion, about 2.1 times revenue.

Looking at a chart of the top 30 U.S. firms, Blake and David counted that a majority now carry outside capital. Yet the hosts are skeptical these investments will pay off.

“I have not heard of a PE success story where PE came in and the company became this rah-rah great thing,” David said. “It gets worse from PE, right?”

“Are they really going to be able to turn it around and sell it for more?” Blake asked, pointing at the math problem.

David’s verdict was characteristically direct: “Put lipstick on that pig and sell it to somebody else.”

The AI Revolution Gives Power to Individuals

While institutions struggle to maintain control, individual practitioners gain capabilities that once required entire companies or expensive software.

The adoption numbers are explosive. According to Blue J and CPA.com’s latest survey, 60% of tax professionals now use AI for tax research at least weekly, up from just 33% a year ago. They use it for advisory projects (44%), tax planning (40%), and compliance research (39%).

“Where are the other 40% getting answers?” David wondered about those who are not using AI, noting that even Google searches now show AI answers first.

This surge in AI use prompted the IRS Advisory Council to issue its first-ever guidance on AI in tax practice. The guidelines don’t create new rules but clarify how existing standards apply. Most notably, practitioners can’t bill for time not actually spent, can’t charge manual rates for AI-assisted work, or double-bill for work done by both staff and software.

“This is the nail in the coffin of hourly billing,” Blake declared. If you use AI to cut your work time in half, you’re ethically obligated to pass those savings to the client.

The democratization goes even further. David highlighted Xero Developer’s new YouTube series, Is Everyone a Developer Now?, where the development team “vibe codes” working applications in real-time. In one episode, they built a functional month-end close tool in just an hour and fifteen minutes.

“Instead of chasing a small pool of developers to build apps, they basically have now opened up millions of accountants that could actually create apps,” David explained.

Blake shared his own example. He’d been procrastinating about converting Earmark’s books from a cash to an accrual basis because building the revenue recognition workpapers seemed overwhelming. Then he tried Claude.

“I just asked it what I needed,” Blake said. The AI walked him through methodology choices, downloaded sales reports from Apple and Google, and built a complete waterfall table that spread revenue across 12 months, plus reconciliation tabs and journal entries.

“This is the right template. This is the right format for me to have done this manually,” Blake marveled. “I don’t even know how many days it would have taken me to put this together.”

This shift in capabilities has venture-backed companies worried. Pilot, valued at $1.6 billion, just spun off its internal AI close platform as a standalone product. Another startup raised millions for similar technology. But as David pointed out, if you can “vibe code” these solutions in an afternoon, “is the app ecosystem the way it’s traditionally been just going away now?”

The Power Shift Is Just Beginning

These aren’t isolated stories; they’re all symptoms of the same fundamental change. Power is flowing away from institutions and into the hands of individuals.

Regulators like NASBA are discovering they can’t dictate what professionals say. Big firms can’t enforce the overwork culture that once defined public accounting. Private equity investors are betting billions on firms whose fundamental model is breaking down. And the same AI that helps Blake build sophisticated workpapers helps employees create fake receipts.

“It’s rules-driven innovation instead of customer-driven innovation,” David said about the institutional mindset that’s failing across the profession.

This shift brings opportunity and responsibility for accounting professionals. The tools that can build a revenue recognition system before lunch can just as easily fabricate an expense report. The capability is neutral; how the profession uses it isn’t.

Want to hear Blake’s complete walkthrough of building his rev rec workpaper, more details on the NASBA correspondence, and the hosts’ full analysis of these industry shifts? Listen to the complete Episode 494 of The Accounting Podcast. You can even earn free CPE credit through Earmark.

As Blake and David make clear, the redistribution of power in accounting is just getting started, and every practitioner needs to understand what it means for their future.