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Two-Thirds of Accounting Staff Hate Private Equity—But Partners Love It

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Two-thirds of partners at private equity-backed accounting firms say they’re satisfied with their arrangements. But ask the staff actually doing the work, and you’ll hear a different story. Over half are dissatisfied, with one director calling the situation “a dumpster fire.”

This stark disconnect emerged from an Accounting Today survey discussed on The Accounting Podcast by hosts Blake Oliver and David Leary. The episode also revealed a disconnect in pricing. Tax preparers charge an average of just $280 for a basic 1040 (CPAs) or $228 (enrolled agents). These numbers had David asking incredulously, “Where are these people? I’ve never been quoted this low of a price.”

The Private Equity “Dumpster Fire”

The numbers from Accounting Today’s survey reveal a profession divided. Among partners and owners at PE-backed firms, 67% report satisfaction (40% very satisfied and 27% somewhat satisfied). But look at staff responses and it’s almost a perfect mirror image: 52% are either somewhat dissatisfied or very dissatisfied.

The anonymous comments from survey respondents paint an even bleaker picture. “It is a dumpster fire,” said one director at a large firm. “Low morale, people leaving, bonuses cut, pay raises eliminated or lowered.”

Another director at a very large firm agreed. “It’s horrible and dysfunctional. Losing clients, staff leaving, and partners pay more attention to their bank account than taking care of staff. Most partners are counting the days until they can leave with their money in hand.”

Perhaps most concerning for the profession’s future, 64% of respondents believe private equity will have a negative impact on the integrity and independence of public accounting firms. Another 56% think clients will suffer negative consequences.

“The industry will take a hit and the clients will take a hit,” David noted. “That’s not going to bode well for everybody else.”

It’s worth noting that fewer than 400 of the 44,000 US CPA firms have taken private equity investment, so less than 1%. But these tend to be larger, high-performing practices, and the trend only started accelerating around 2022.

Tax Preparers Leave Money on the Table

While PE-backed firms wrestle with cultural upheaval, smaller practitioners face a different challenge: chronic underpricing. The National Association of Tax Professionals’ 2025 survey reveals CPAs charge an average of just $280 for a basic 1040. Enrolled agents charge even less at $228, while non-credentialed preparers average $185.

These numbers shocked David. “Since I stopped doing my own taxes and pay an accounting firm to do them, it’s $1,200 to $1,300 a return. I’ve never been quoted this low of a price.”

Still, the survey contained some encouraging news. When preparers raise fees, clients rarely leave. Melissa Bowman, an EA in Ohio, increased prices 12-20% across the board twice since 2020, and “not one client left because of pricing.”

“If not one client leaves after you implement a substantial price increase like that, you’re still underpriced,” Blake pointed out.

One particularly surprising finding is that 18% of preparers don’t charge extra for state returns. “TurboTax has trained 45 million taxpayers over the last 30 years that you have to pay extra to get your state return done,” David noted. “The fact that almost 20% don’t charge for doing the state return seems crazy to me.”

Billion-Dollar Audit Relationships Raise Independence Questions

The independence concerns raised by private equity pale next to the decades-long, billion-dollar relationships between the Big Four and their largest clients. Deloitte has audited Microsoft since 1986, collecting $78 million in 2025 alone.

“This is like a $2 billion relationship between Deloitte and Microsoft over the last 40 years,” David calculated. “With that much money involved, the motivations just can’t be aligned with the public.”

The situation gets more complex when you consider that these firms also sell consulting services. “Doesn’t Deloitte sell Microsoft consulting type services and they implement Microsoft Copilot AI type things, but they also audit Microsoft?” David asked.

Blake acknowledged the concern. “These firms are audit firms, but they’re also consulting firms. And consulting teams are some of the biggest resellers now of the technology their clients develop.”

Change may be coming whether firms want it or not. With Microsoft cutting 15,000 jobs in 2025, David predicts inevitable pressure on audit fees. “They’ll go back to their auditor and say, ‘we don’t want to pay this much for our audit. We want you to use AI,’” David predicts.

What’s Next for the Profession?

The AICPA is seeking comments on ethics rules updates for alternative practice structures—the arrangements that enable private equity investment. But there’s a catch. Despite announcing the comment period weeks ago, the actual exposure draft won’t be available until December 29.

“Today is the 23rd,” David pointed out. “If it’s not done today, when are they doing this? Christmas Eve, Christmas Day?”

David predicted the process could drag on. “This could take a decade,” he suggested.

The accounting profession is under pressure from private equity reshaping firm culture, chronic underpricing in tax prep, and billion-dollar audit relationships raising independence questions. For practitioners, there is a clear need to raise prices and watch the PE developments carefully.

For the complete discussion, including a story about a Scottish police officer’s heroic retrieval of evidence from a toilet and concerns about IRS readiness for tax season, listen to the full episode of The Accounting Podcast.

Deloitte’s $440,000 AI Fabrication Scandal Exposes the Accounting Profession’s Deepest Fears

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A startup founder discovered $2.1 million in embezzlement by his co-founder in just 18 minutes using Claude AI. The company’s internal auditors, external auditors, and even the CFO had completely missed it. Meanwhile, Deloitte was forced to refund the Australian government hundreds of thousands of dollars after delivering a report filled with AI-generated fabrications.

In this episode of The Accounting Podcast, hosts Blake Oliver and David Leary dig into these stories. They explore how AI is both exposing massive frauds and creating embarrassing failures, examine the chaos from the government shutdown, and question whether traditional accounting services still matter when 86% of major companies use broken charts that nobody even notices.

When AI Catches What Humans Miss (And Creates What Shouldn’t Exist)

The accounting profession is experiencing an AI identity crisis. On one hand, artificial intelligence can spot complex fraud that teams of professionals completely miss. On the other hand, professionals are using it to generate work that looks legitimate but is actually riddled with fabrications.

Let’s start with Deloitte’s spectacular failure. The Big Four firm charged the Australian government $440,000 AUD (about $290,000 USD) for a 237-page report on welfare compliance systems. The problem? It contained over 20 AI-generated errors, including completely made-up quotes from federal court judgments and references to non-existent academic papers.

Chris Rudge, a Sydney University researcher, spotted the errors immediately. One fabrication attributed a non-existent book to constitutional law professor Lisa Burton Crawford on a topic completely outside her field. “I instantaneously knew it was either hallucinated by AI or the world’s best kept secret because I’d never heard of the book, and it sounded preposterous,” Rudge said.

Even after getting caught, Deloitte insisted its findings and recommendations were still valid. This prompted Australian Labor Senator Deborah O’Neill to observe that Deloitte has “a human intelligence problem.”

But here’s where it gets interesting. While Deloitte was using AI to create fake references, a startup founder used it to uncover real fraud. He exported his company’s QuickBooks data into Claude AI and asked one simple question: “What’s wrong with this picture?”

In just 18 minutes, the AI found what everyone else had missed: 17 fake companies routing $2.1 million to his co-founder’s personal accounts through shell companies. The AI spotted patterns humans overlooked, including fake vendors paid on 23-day cycles while real vendors were paid on 28-day cycles, and payment amounts that followed Fibonacci sequences, which humans subconsciously create when making up numbers.

The founder has since turned this into a business, selling AI-powered fraud detection prompts for $10,000 each to 47 clients. He’s probably making more money from his fraud-detection business than from his original startup.

As Leary points out, this creates both an opportunity and a threat for accounting firms. “The real risk of AI taking accounting jobs isn’t that AI will take the job away. Clients are just going to say, ‘I can do that myself. I don’t need to pay somebody $400,000 to do a half-assed ChatGPT thing.’”

Government Shutdown: When Critical Systems Break Down

The conversation then turned to the government shutdown’s impact on air travel and tax services. The situation has become genuinely dangerous, with cascading failures that reveal how fragile our systems really are.

Air traffic controller-related delays jumped from a typical 5% to 53% as workers called in sick rather than work without pay. Oliver experienced this firsthand when his flight was delayed for hours with no official explanation, though flight attendants privately blamed air traffic control shortages.

The scariest incident happened at Burbank Airport in Los Angeles, where the tower went completely unmanned. “When that happens, there is a backup procedure, which is that the pilots have to do their own air traffic control,” Oliver explains. “They get on a shared frequency and have to communicate with each other. There’s no intermediary. So that not only slows things down. It also creates risk. There’s a huge risk of these planes crashing into each other because they miscommunicate.”

The economic impact is staggering. The US Travel Association estimates $1 billion in weekly losses to the travel economy. Over 750,000 federal workers have been furloughed, while more than a million work without pay. For TSA screeners earning an average of $51,000, the situation is untenable. “If they don’t get paid, they are not paying their bills,” Oliver notes. “They’re going to go drive for Uber to pay the bills.”

The IRS shutdown creates serious problems for accountants. Nearly half of IRS staff have been furloughed. While electronic returns continue processing and automated refunds still flow, human support has collapsed. Phone support is essentially gone, paper returns sit unprocessed, and audits have stopped. Yet interest and penalties continue to accrue, and all deadlines remain in effect.

Adding to the chaos, Trump fired over 4,100 federal workers instead of furloughing them. The Treasury alone lost 1,446 employees, including about 1,300 IRS workers. “It’s the first time in modern history that mass firings have happened during a funding lapse,” Oliver observes.

The administration also created a new “CEO of the IRS” position to bypass Senate confirmation, appointing Frank Bisignano, former CEO of Fiserv, who still owns about $300 million in company stock. This creates obvious conflicts of interest, especially since Fiserv is involved in launching digital stablecoin initiatives. “This is why you have to have hearings. You can’t just appoint somebody to a position,” Leary emphasizes.

When Independence Becomes a Joke

Next, Oliver and Leary discussed how financial entanglements are destroying audit independence while regulators focus on trivial violations.

Take BDO’s current crisis as an example. The firm took a $1.3 billion loan at approximately 9% interest from Apollo Global Management to finance its employee stock ownership plan. The debt forced the company to lay off employees, freeze travel, and conduct emergency cost reviews across all divisions.

But while BDO was giving First Brands a clean audit opinion, Apollo was actively shorting the company. First Brands collapsed months after BDO’s clean audit. “If I’m BDO and I audit a company that is being shorted by a company I took a $1 billion loan from, where’s the independence?” Leary asks. “What is the fraud triangle? Opportunity, rationalization, and financial pressure. All the parts of the fraud triangle are here.”

Meanwhile, EY is celebrating a “dramatic audit quality turnaround,” with its deficiency rate dropping from 46% in 2022 to below 10% in 2025. They achieved this miracle by firing 132 public company audit clients. In other words, the problematic audits didn’t disappear. They just moved to Deloitte and KPMG. “Have we actually achieved anything here? Or have we just shifted the bad audits somewhere else?” Oliver wonders.

The hosts also discussed a new scheme where crypto promoters target CPA firm clients. The Truevestment Bitcoin Legacy Fund wants CPAs to help raise $150 million from their clients, which institutional investors will then match before merging into a Nasdaq entity—essentially a SPAC wrapped in Bitcoin speculation.

The marketing compares buying Bitcoin today to “buying the Dow at 900.” But as Leary points out, when the Dow was at 900 in the mid-1960s, it consisted of companies like AT&T and General Electric—”companies that made things” and created real value, not speculation.

Why Nobody Cares About Financial Reports Anymore

Perhaps the most damning revelation from the podcast’s recent news roundup is that 86% of major companies are using broken charts in their financial reports. A CPA Journal study found bar charts with misleading axes, pie slices that don’t match percentages, and deliberate distortions to exaggerate performance. Of 1,584 charts reviewed, 12% had fatal flaws that completely misrepresented the data.

“The fact that so many of them have errors and nobody’s pointing them out indicates to me that nobody’s reading them,” Oliver observes. Indeed, 10-K filings get downloaded an average of just a few dozen times.

The hosts even shared a bizarre example where social media bots criticizing Cracker Barrel’s new logo caused the stock price to tank. According to Wall Street Journal data, 44.5% of posts about the logo change were from bots. “Maybe nobody cares about your charts because nobody even cares about the financial statements,” Leary suggests.

What This Means for Your Firm

The key insight from Hector Garcia stuck with David: “AI is never going to do perfect accounting, but it’s going to do it good enough.” For most clients, “good enough” financials that they can generate themselves might be perfectly adequate.

Accounting professionals can embrace AI for meaningful fraud detection and insights, or watch clients realize they can generate “good enough” work themselves. As this episode of The Accounting Podcast makes clear, the traditional value proposition of professional accounting services is crumbling. The firms that survive will be those that identify and deliver human value that transcends what AI can do: strategic insight, ethical judgment, and genuine expertise that no algorithm can replicate.

Listen to this episode to understand not just the challenges facing accounting, but what you need to do differently starting today.

The Hidden Cost of Big Four Hiring Bias

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Imagine being told your 20 years of diverse accounting experience don’t qualify you for a job because you never worked at a Big Four firm. This is absurd, and it happens every day in our profession.

In a recent episode of The Accounting Podcast, we examined the hiring bias that is creating an artificial barrier in our field. It’s not just a minor inconvenience – it’s limiting diversity, overlooking valuable talent, and perpetuating a dangerously narrow view of what constitutes “success” in accounting.

A Barrier to Diversity and Talent

Scroll through job postings for corporate accounting roles, and you’ll quickly notice a pattern: “Big Four experience required” or “Big Four experience preferred.” This requirement is so commonplace that many in our profession barely question it. But we should.

Why should one to three years of experience on a resume dictate your entire career trajectory? Demanding Big Four experience in job postings is lazy, and it borders on discrimination and classism.  

This hiring bias creates an artificial barrier that significantly narrows the talent pool. It overlooks the wealth of experience and skills accountants gain in smaller firms, industry roles, or alternative career paths. 

Consider the CPA who wrote to us. (Listen to the episode for details.) They have two decades of diverse experience across multiple industries, including exciting projects with buyouts and public company purchases. Despite this rich background, they are potentially disqualified from roles simply because they never worked at a Big Four firm.

The impact of this bias extends beyond individual careers. It homogenizes our profession, limiting the diversity of thought, background, and experience crucial for innovation and problem-solving. This practice also disproportionately affects professionals from underrepresented groups who may have had fewer opportunities to enter Big Four firms early in their careers.

Big Four Experience vs. Operational Expertise

The emphasis on Big Four experience stems from a perception that it provides a unique skill set essential for success in corporate accounting roles. But does this perception align with reality?

Our listener’s feedback paints a different picture: “I have worked with employees of Big Four firms during audits, and frankly, they are disconnected from the reality of operational accounting.” The listener continues, “They can review the heck out of internal control issues, but none of them ever worked with a badly implemented ERP system with an AR module failing and unable to reconcile cash for eight months because of poor IT support.”

As our listener points out, the skills honed in Big Four firms, while valuable, don’t necessarily translate directly to the day-to-day challenges of operational accounting. Audit experience focuses heavily on reviewing past transactions and assessing controls. But operational accounting requires implementing and managing systems, solving real-time problems, and navigating the complexities of business operations.

If you require experience from the Big Four, you might be overlooking candidates with hands-on experience in favor of a resume line item that may not indicate readiness for the role.

Moving Towards a More Inclusive Hiring Approach

Our profession needs to broaden its definition of what makes a successful accountant. We must move beyond the Big Four checkbox and adopt a more holistic view of professional qualifications that values diverse backgrounds, operational expertise, and adaptability.

What might this look like in practice? We should emphasize problem-solving skills and adaptability over pedigree, value diverse experiences and skill sets, consider candidates’ proficiency with various accounting systems and technologies, and assess their ability to handle operational challenges.

By adopting this more inclusive approach, we’ll tap into a broader talent pool, bring more diverse perspectives into our teams, and build teams better equipped to handle complex, multifaceted challenges.

Professional organizations like the AICPA and state societies could play a crucial role in this shift by discouraging the practice of requiring Big Four experience in job postings and promoting more inclusive hiring practices.

Embracing a New Era in Accounting Recruitment

The Big Four bias in hiring isn’t just a topic for academic debate – it’s a real issue affecting careers and shaping the future of our profession. 

This shift isn’t just about fairness. In a rapidly evolving business landscape, we need accountants with varied experiences and skill sets to drive innovation and tackle new challenges.

The accounting profession must embrace a more inclusive approach that values diverse backgrounds, operational expertise, and adaptability.

Listen to the full episode of The Accounting Podcast, where we explore the hidden costs of hiring biases, share more real-world examples, and discuss practical strategies for implementing more inclusive hiring practices. Whether you’re a hiring manager, a job seeker, or simply passionate about the future of accounting, this episode offers valuable insights to help reshape our profession.

It’s time to redefine what success looks like in accounting – and it starts with how we hire. Join the conversation and be part of the solution.