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Your CPA Exam Scores Might Be Lost and Your AI Bookkeeper Is 57% Accurate

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“No kings means no paychecks, no paychecks, no government.” When Treasury Secretary nominee Scott Bessent dropped this line in a Fox News interview, Blake Oliver and David Leary weren’t sure if they should laugh or be terrified. As David put it: “That’s the most un-American thing anybody could say.”

In episode 458 of The Accounting Podcast, Blake and David dig into a series of accountability failures that would be funny if they weren’t so serious. From the Trump administration creating a brand new IRS “CEO” position to dodge Senate confirmation, to NASBA somehow losing track of CPA exam scores, the organizations supposed to maintain standards can’t even maintain their own data.

The IRS Gets a CEO (Because Who Needs the Constitution?)

The Trump administration’s latest move isn’t subtle. It created a new “CEO” position for the IRS that doesn’t require Senate confirmation. As Blake explains, “If the president just creates a new role that has the same responsibilities but doesn’t get checked by the Senate, then that’s just a run around the rules.”

The plan goes deeper than personnel changes. Gary Shapley, an advisor to Treasury Secretary nominee Scott Bessent, wants to weaken IRS lawyers’ involvement in criminal investigations and eliminate extra procedural steps for sensitive cases involving elected officials and tax-exempt groups. These aren’t reforms—they’re removing the safety rails.

“Where’s the AICPA on this?” David asks. The AICPA wrote a letter about the government shutdown’s impact on taxpayers but stayed silent on bypassing Congress to appoint IRS leadership. Blake doesn’t mince words: “They don’t. They are not willing to take a stand on something that matters because they’re afraid of political blowback.”

According to Wall Street Journal reporting that Blake and David discuss, Shapely has already compiled a hit list. The targets? George Soros and affiliated organizations, major Democratic donors, and left-leaning nonprofit groups.

The hosts make an important point that transcends politics. “The Obama administration targeted right wing groups,” Blake notes, agreeing with a viewer comment. “This is why you don’t want to give the government too much power. The other side gets the gun eventually, then points it at the other side.”

When Accounting Organizations Can’t Do Accounting

If you think government accountability is bad, wait until you hear about the profession’s own organizations.

Professor Joseph Ugrin, who creates the CPA Success Index published by Accounting Today, discovered NASBA’s 2024 data is essentially garbage. Between 25% and 40% of candidate scores are simply missing. Plus, Iowa community colleges appear in the data despite state law requiring bachelor’s degrees to sit for the exam.

“NASBA has access to all the transcripts submitted by the candidates,” Blake points out. “So there’s no reason why they couldn’t correctly classify what schools they went to.”

David speculates, “This smells like somebody at NASBA tried to use AI to summarize some stuff and screwed it up.” Whether it’s AI or old-fashioned incompetence, Ugrin can’t publish the Success Index this year because the data is unusable.

Meanwhile, the Chicago Teachers Union hasn’t released required financial audits for over five years, despite paying $80,000 for audit services in 2025 alone. When members finally got federal filings, they showed only 18% of spending goes to representing teachers. The other 82%? Overhead, politics, and “leadership priorities.”

As David asks incredulously: “How did it go past one year?”

The issue isn’t confined to Chicago. Forty-three Arkansas cities can’t get state funds because they can’t find CPAs to do required audits. “The auditors are retiring. They’re not being replaced,” Blake explains. Small-town America is literally running out of accountants.

AI to the Rescue! (Just Kidding, It’s 57% Accurate)

While real problems go unsolved, the profession is being sold AI magic beans.

One marketing CEO’s experience with QuickBooks’ new AI features reads like a horror story. “Although trained on transactions, QuickBooks frequently miscategorized payments based solely on dollar value,” he wrote. If a vendor sent one $1,000 invoice, the AI recorded all future invoices as $1,000. Contractor payments were recorded under “QuickBooks payments” instead of the contractor’s name. The company spent thousands on accountants trying to fix problems that couldn’t be fixed.

“QuickBooks sits at the heart of our business,” the CEO explained. “When AI upgrades destabilize that core, the consequences ripple across the organization.”

The hosts shared another headline that calls AI’s accuracy into question. Microsoft’s AI agent in Excel achieves 57.2% accuracy on spreadsheet benchmarks. As Blake says: “57.2% accuracy is not going to cut it. Not even 98% accuracy is going to cut it.”

Yet companies like Docyt claim AI will let one accountant manage 300 clients. The hosts’ response? “I’ve talked to firm owners that are super efficient,” David says. “Their best bookkeepers maybe handle 45 clients a month.”

Blake’s experience backs this up: “A typical bookkeeper could do 20 to 30 on average. And my all star could do 40 to 60.” The idea of 300 clients per person? “You would have too many questions coming in emails,” Blake explains. “I don’t think there’s an AI tool that can do that.”

Blake’s ideal practice would have ten outsourced controller clients, meeting weekly with each. “Once I got the ten clients, I could probably do it in four hours a day.” That’s realistic. Managing 300 clients with AI? That’s fantasy.

The hosts haven’t seen AI actually eliminating jobs. “I have yet to talk to an accountant that says, oh, we implemented this thing and now we got rid of two of my staff,” David states. Even at their own company, which uses AI extensively: “We’re not getting rid of anybody. We just hired more engineers.”

The $300 Trillion Oops

Just when you thought it couldn’t get wilder, David shares the stablecoin story that should terrify everyone.

Paxos, which provides stablecoin infrastructure for PayPal, accidentally minted $300 trillion in stablecoins. Not million. Not billion. Trillion. For context, the US deficit is $2 trillion.

“You understand how a stablecoin works in theory.” David says. “A dollar goes in, you get a stablecoin worth a dollar back. What if I told you none of that is true?”

The company claimed it was a “technical error that briefly appeared for 20 minutes,” then they “burned” the excess tokens. But as David points out, if companies can just create and destroy them at will, this proves stablecoins aren’t actually backed by dollars.

This matters because Ripple just bought a treasury management firm for $1 billion, putting cryptocurrency at the center of corporate cash management. “Accountants are going to be touching this stuff,” David warns. “It’s going to be here next year.”

Time to Pay Attention

This episode of The Accounting Podcast is a reality check for a profession facing multiple crises simultaneously. The IRS is being restructured to avoid constitutional oversight. Professional organizations can’t maintain basic data integrity. AI is being forced on businesses with disastrous results. And small towns can’t find CPAs to do basic audits.

“We don’t need a king,” David emphasizes about Bessent’s comments. But between government overreach, organizational incompetence, and technological snake oil, the profession is being pulled in all the wrong directions.

The hosts’ frustration is justified. When Blake asks why the AICPA won’t stand up for constitutional principles, when David wonders how organizations go years without audits, when they both laugh at the idea of one person managing 300 clients, they’re asking the questions the profession should be asking itself.

Listen to the full episode to hear Blake and David’s complete breakdown of these interconnected failures. In a profession built on trust and verification, their willingness to be brutally honest is exactly what’s needed.

After 50 Years in Internal Audit, Richard Chambers Sees the Profession’s Greatest Risk Yet

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“Who’s going to provide the skepticism, the intellectual curiosity, and the institutional knowledge to our audit teams in ten years? Because the rest of us are going to be gone.”

Richard Chambers drops this stark warning after 50 years in internal audit. His concern isn’t about losing jobs to technology. It’s about the growing gap between how we’ve always trained auditors and what the profession now demands.

On this episode of the Earmark Podcast, host Blake Oliver sat down with Richard, Senior Advisor for Risk and Audit at AuditBoard. He brings a unique view of internal audit’s transformation. When he started in 1974, fresh out of college and working in a bank’s internal audit department, the job was all about checking financial records and looking backward. Today? Financial risks make up only 25% of audit plans. The rest involves cyber threats, AI governance, supply chain chaos, and what Richard calls “perma-crisis”—our new normal where tariff rates can change three times in a single day.

Most companies use AI, but only a quarter have set up proper governance over it, according to AuditBoard research. That gap presents massive risk and opportunity for internal auditors who can bridge it.

From Bean Counting to Risk Navigation

Internal audit has changed dramatically since Richard joined that bank in 1974. Back then, it was all ledgers and reconciliations—purely financial work focused on last year’s numbers. Today, financial risks are just a quarter of what internal auditors examine.

“The profession has matured,” Richard explains. “While we still do some work in the financial space, that’s really a small percentage of internal audit’s focus.”

The real game-changer has been what Richard calls “perma-crisis.” It started with the COVID-19 pandemic and hasn’t stopped. “We’ve been lurching from one risk-induced disruption to another,” he says, listing the cascade: pandemic, forty-year-high inflation, supply chain breakdowns, wars in Europe and the Middle East. “We’re in our sixth year of it, and I would submit this is the new normal.”

This constant chaos makes traditional planning almost useless. Richard found that nearly 60% of internal audit departments had already changed their 2025 plans by May. When tariff rates can swing wildly in a single day—Richard recalls hearing three different numbers from Washington in one day—annual planning is dangerous.

“You can no longer have any confidence that one scenario is the only one you have to worry about,” Richard emphasizes. Organizations need what he calls “scenario risk management,” or planning for multiple possible futures at once.

This need for flexibility shifts how internal audit works with other departments. The old model was called “three lines of defense”: management controlled risks (first line), oversight functions monitored them (second line), and internal audit was the last barrier before disaster (third line).

But pure defense isn’t enough anymore. In 2019, the Institute of Internal Auditors dropped “defense” from the name. The new message? “Independence does not mean isolation.”

Richard uses a ship analogy that really hits home. Organizations are like vessels at sea that need lookouts watching in all directions and talking to each other. “If your internal auditors are looking in one direction and your risk managers are looking in another,” he warns, “but they aren’t sharing what they’re seeing, then you don’t know whether there are gaps.”

AI: The Top Risk and Best Opportunity

Three years ago, AI wasn’t even on internal audit’s risk list. Today, it’s number one, pushing even the talent crisis to second place.

“Pre-2022, before ChatGPT came out, we weren’t asking about it,” Richard admits. Once he started surveying the profession, AI rocketed up the list: middle of the pack the first year, third place the next, then straight to number one.

This isn’t just another tech disruption. After watching five decades of change, Richard doesn’t mince words: “In the five decades I’ve been in internal audit, there’s never been a greater risk to this profession in terms of becoming irrelevant.”

The scariest part? When Richard asks why audit teams aren’t using AI more, the top answer is, “We don’t really understand it enough.” That hesitation could be fatal.

Yet Richard himself uses AI daily as his “research assistant.” He asks it to identify industry risks, outline articles, analyze data. “It takes me longer to write the prompts than it takes to give me the answer,” he notes.

The use cases are obvious and powerful. Risk assessments that used to happen annually can now be continuous. AI can scan for threats humans would never spot. Data analysis that took weeks happens in minutes. Even audit reports can be AI-generated.

But the trap is that AI excels at exactly the work that trains new auditors. Entry-level graduates traditionally learned by doing routine tasks. Now AI does those tasks better and faster.

“College graduates have traditionally been able to ease into professions by doing some of the more rudimentary tasks,” Richard explains. “But AI is prime for rudimentary tasks.”

This creates a vicious cycle. Companies hire fewer entry-level auditors. Without that pipeline, who develops the judgment for complex work? Richard’ solution: “We shouldn’t refrain from hiring them. We should be willing to bring them in and help them leap the learning curve.”

“AI won’t replace internal auditors,” Richard predicts, “but it will replace internal auditors who don’t use it.”

The Human Superpowers AI Can’t Touch

“To assess culture, you also have to be able to rely on your sense of smell.”

A chairman of the board of a large Indian company shared this wisdom with Richard years ago, and it perfectly captures what separates humans from AI. Technology can analyze documents and data. But it takes human instinct to sense what happens when nobody’s watching.

Richard identifies three “human superpowers” that AI cannot replicate: professional skepticism, intellectual curiosity, and relationship skills. These aren’t soft skills; they’re the core value of internal audit.

Take culture assessment. Richard has done two major research projects showing how toxic culture can destroy organizations. But judging culture requires reading between lines, sensing unspoken tensions, and understanding human motivations. As Blake pointed out during the conversation, “The body language, the way people talk to each other, all of that is context that AI just cannot have access to.”

The audit committee relationship shows this even more clearly. Richard chairs an audit committee and knows these relationships need more than data transfer. They require courage to “grab them by the face” and focus them on hidden risks.

“If we’re content to just answer the questions they ask,” Richard warns, “then we’re not really serving our organizations well. We have to help them understand the questions they need to be asking.”

This shift, from giving answers to finding the right questions, represents a huge evolution. While AI can list potential questions, there’s something fundamentally human about knowing which questions matter.

Most critically, Richard identifies one role that must stay human: assessing AI’s own governance. “I shudder to think that there may be a day where we ask AI to assess its own governance,” he says. “We would never do that with anyone else.”

The challenge is developing these human skills when the traditional path is disappearing. Without routine work to learn on, how do new auditors develop judgment?

We need to help new auditors develop skepticism, intellectual curiosity, and institutional knowledge from day one. Teach them to ask “why” before teaching them “how.”

As Richard reflects after 50 years, “What a difference from the bean counter view of internal audit. You get to be so curious as an internal auditor these days.”

The Next 50 Years Start Now

Richard’s journey from a bank to internal audit’s leading voice shows a profession that has transformed before and must do so again.

The collision of perma-crisis and AI doesn’t doom internal audit. It clarifies its purpose. When tariffs change three times daily, cyber threats evolve by the hour, and AI makes decisions we don’t fully understand, organizations desperately need professionals who ask the hard questions.

Not “What does the data say?” but “What isn’t the data telling us?” Not “How do we implement AI?” but “How do we govern what we can’t fully understand?”

The saying “independence does not mean isolation” applies to both organizational relationships and the human-AI partnership. Tomorrow’s successful auditors won’t resist AI or surrender to it. They’ll orchestrate a sophisticated dance between computational power and human intuition.

The fact that entry-level work is vanishing while judgment becomes more critical demands new thinking about professional development. Organizations can’t wait for fully-formed auditors. They must cultivate intellectual curiosity from day one.

For accounting and tax professionals watching internal audit’s future, Richard warns those who avoid or fear AI will become irrelevant. But he also extends an invitation: those who combine technology with human capabilities will find themselves at the center of organizational decision-making.

Listen to the complete conversation to understand why this moment represents internal audit’s greatest challenge and its most exciting opportunity. After five decades in the profession, Richard reminds us the question isn’t whether internal audit will survive the age of AI. It’s whether individual auditors will choose to evolve with it.

From Random Acts of Advisory to Strategic CFO Services

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“The darkest times for an industry are the times in which an accountant is most valuable.”

Chris Macksey, CEO of Prix Fixe Accounting, learned this firsthand during the COVID-19 pandemic. While restaurants nationwide struggled to survive, his specialized firm actually grew—not despite the crisis, but because of it. Restaurant owners desperately needed help navigating Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) loans, Economic Injury Disaster Loan (EIDL) applications, and industry-specific relief programs that their generalist accountants couldn’t handle.

In this live recording of the Earmark Podcast from Boston’s Advisory Amplified tour, host Blake Oliver explores how accounting firms can evolve beyond traditional services to become true strategic partners. Joined by Chris and James Erving, Head of Sales, Americas at Fathom, the conversation shows that delivering valuable advisory work doesn’t require advanced certifications or complex methodologies. It just takes a willingness to form opinions and use modern tools to turn financial data into business guidance.

What Advisory Really Means (And Why Accountants Struggle With It)

The accounting profession can’t even agree on what advisory means. James cuts through the confusion with a simple definition: “Being involved in the decision-making process rather than just the delivery of information.”

Chris takes it further. At Prix Fixe Accounting, he treats advisory as completely separate from Client Accounting Services (CAS), even assigning different team members to each. “It’s any of the work that you can’t scope really very easily,” he explains. Unlike predictable bookkeeping tasks, advisory demands flexibility and judgment.

The real challenge is having an opinion. “I have run into so many accountants who just won’t have an opinion about anything other than the accuracy of the financial statements,” Blake says bluntly.

Chris shows what having an opinion looks like in practice. When a restaurant’s food costs creep up from 23% to 28%, he doesn’t just report the variance. He digs deeper. “Is it that something’s changed in the kitchen, or is it just inflation that’s causing that number to gradually rise over time?” That shift from reporting what happened to explaining why it happened (and what might happen next) is where advisory begins.

But not every client needs this level of service, and knowing when to offer it makes all the difference.

Finding the Right Clients for Advisory Services

James identifies three clear signals that a business needs advisory support. First, rapid growth that outpaces the owner’s ability to manage finances. Second, reaching a size where DIY financial management becomes overwhelming but hiring a full-time CFO doesn’t make sense. Third, major events like acquisitions or exit planning.

This targeted approach beats what James calls “random acts of advisory”—the unpaid, unstructured advice many firms already provide without recognizing its value. By identifying specific triggers, firms can systematically deliver advisory services rather than hoping opportunities appear.

The conversation also reveals an important distinction between types of forecasting. James explains that small businesses often need short-term cash flow forecasts to predict cash positions in the next week or two. Larger or more stable businesses benefit from FP&A-style planning with three-to-12-month horizons and scenario modeling.

Understanding which clients need which services allows firms to focus their efforts where they’ll have the most impact, and where clients see enough value to pay premium fees.

Why Industry Specialization Accelerates Advisory Success

Chris’s restaurant-only focus demonstrates the power of specialization. His firm doesn’t just understand debits and credits; they understand why champagne and caviar became popular during the pandemic, how street construction affects revenue, and when consumers will pay for fine dining versus seeking value menus.

“Right now, consumers really feel a lot of pain in the pocketbook,” Chris explains. “The auto loan default rate is up. Credit card balances among consumers are at their highest levels. Consumer confidence is down.” This economic insight shapes his current advice: forget the $175 prix fixe menu and focus on feeding a family of four for under $75.

The specialization advantage goes beyond knowledge. Chris spent over a decade as a chef before becoming an accountant. “It’s a little bit of a cult industry,” he says of restaurants. “If you’re in, you’re in. If you’re out, you’re out.” This insider status builds trust that no amount of technical expertise could match.

His firm even mandates their approach. “The tech stack is set. There really aren’t any options. And there’s only one price point, it’s prix fixe. And you’re just going to have to enjoy the ride.”

This confidence comes from aggregated data across similar businesses. When restaurants see sales drop 20%, Chris can show clients it’s an industry-wide trend, not a personal failure. “When you can actually see that data and validate it for yourself, you know that no, it’s not you. It’s just the economy.”

The depth of specialization creates value generalist firms can’t match, but you don’t need a decade of industry experience to start delivering meaningful advisory services.

Making Advisory Practical: Tools, Metrics, and First Steps

“Once they actually do it for the first time, they realize, oh, I’m just looking at the last three years. I’m kind of rolling it forward, making an educated guess on what it’s going to be. And that’s really all it is.”

Chris uses this approach to explain forecasting for his team. Rather than treating it as an advanced skill only partners can handle, he involves staff accountants in creating annual budgets. They examine historical data, consider market conditions, gather client insights, like upcoming construction that might impact foot traffic, then make informed projections.

The key is matching the service to the business reality. Chris doesn’t do detailed cash flow forecasts for restaurants because “they have such tight cash flow that you’re off 5% and your cash flow projection’s shot.” Instead, he focuses on annual budgets with monthly check-ins.

Visual presentation transforms complex data into insights clients can actually use. “Our client base is largely visual people, and the financial literacy is usually pretty low,” Chris notes. He spent over a decade cooking before seeing a P&L statement, so he understands the challenge. Charts showing 12-month trends for metrics like food costs communicate far better than spreadsheets full of numbers.

Non-financial metrics add crucial context. For lodging clients, Chris tracks occupancy rates, average daily rates, and rooms sold. These are “numbers that you will not see surfaced in QuickBooks.” When revenue changes, these metrics reveal whether it’s a pricing issue or a volume problem.

James emphasizes the importance of using proper tools. “You don’t have to build an entire Excel model customized to a client to get started.” Modern platforms like Fathom automate much of the work, creating professional forecasts and visual dashboards without custom spreadsheets for each client.

For firms ready to begin, Chris and James offer practical advice. Start with forecasting, since it’s a natural extension of work you already do. Pick one or two industries where you have multiple clients and build expertise gradually. Ask more questions about your clients’ businesses. And remember, clients don’t expect you to know everything. They value accountants willing to connect financial data to business decisions.

Your Path from Compliance to Advisory

The shift from traditional accounting to advisory starts with three elements: forming opinions based on financial data, developing knowledge of specific industries or situations, and using modern tools to make forecasting efficient rather than overwhelming.

Chris’s experience during the pandemic proves the value of this transformation. While generalist firms struggled to help clients navigate crisis programs, his specialized knowledge made Prix Fixe Accounting indispensable.

The firms making this transition today position themselves for a future where their value only increases. Economic uncertainty creates more need for strategic guidance. Industry disruption demands advisors who understand both the numbers and their context. Business owners facing unprecedented challenges need professionals willing to venture beyond historical facts into forward-looking advice.

Listen to the full episode to hear additional insights on pricing advisory services, overcoming staff resistance, and managing the cultural shift within your firm. Chris and James’s conversation offers a practical roadmap for any firm ready to move beyond “random acts of advisory” to systematic, profitable guidance that transforms both your practice and your clients’ businesses.

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.

Smart Accounting Firms Are Done Being Yes People

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Picture an  accounting firm that keeps partner salaries locked away like state secrets. Staff spend years wondering what partnership actually pays. Meanwhile, another firm down the street posts everyone’s salary on a public leaderboard. The path to partnership comes with clear milestones and transparent rewards.

This stark difference shows just one way “renegade” firms are shaking up the accounting profession.

In episode 104 of the Earmark Podcast, recorded live during the Advisory Amplified tour in Austin, host Blake Oliver digs into what it means to be a “renegade” in accounting. He’s joined by Madeline Reeves, founder and CEO of Fearless Foundry, and Wesley McDonald, go-to-market leader at Relay. Together, they explore how forward-thinking firms and tech companies challenge everything we thought we knew about running an accounting practice.

What Makes a Firm “Renegade”?

So what exactly is a renegade firm? Reeves has worked with many of them, and she has a clear answer.

“A renegade firm is leading their clients to somewhere new and is not settling for the ways things have always been done,” she explains. These firms challenge the status quo. They see tech companies as partners, not just vendors. And they push their clients and technology partners to do better.

These firms also stand out in unexpected ways. Take Lance CPA (now part of Revel CPA). When they signed new clients in the brewery and hospitality space, they didn’t just send a standard engagement letter. They delivered beautiful welcome kits complete with custom beer glasses and cool socks. It was their way of saying this isn’t your typical accounting relationship.

But being a renegade goes deeper than nice gestures. These firms also excel at saying no.

“A lot of firms are dedicated to being acts-of-service people,” Reeves notes. “They become a little bit of “yes people” or people pleasers. But the real renegade firms are like, ‘I do not do that service or I do not work with that industry.’”

They’re not trying to be everything to everyone. They focus on being exceptional at what they do best.

Taking the Lead with Clients

Traditional firms often let clients call the shots. They use whatever software the client prefers. They adapt to the client’s processes. They follow rather than lead.

Renegade firms flip this completely around.

Reeves puts it perfectly: “When I go to the dentist, I’m not telling the dentist, ‘No, don’t use that drill in my mouth.’ I don’t know how to do dentistry. So if you’re an accountant, it’s your job to lead your clients.”

These firms come to the table saying, “This is how we do this job well and effectively for you. If the goal is advisory services, this is how we get there better, faster.”

When you’re the professional, you set the standards for how the work gets done.

Breaking Open the Black Box of Compensation

One radical change happening in renegade firms involves money—specifically, who knows what about everyone’s pay.

“On the most successful sales teams I’ve been a part of, there’s a leaderboard that shows exactly how much people have attained in their salary in that quarter,” McDonald shares. “Which is a wild concept to think about in some industries.”

Oliver points out the obvious problem with traditional secrecy: “One of the biggest secrets is how much the partners make. But if we want everybody to want to be a partner, why don’t we tell them?”

It’s not just about knowing the numbers, though. Reeves emphasizes that firms need “not just pay transparency but pathway transparency.” People need to see the clear steps to advancement, not just the end goal.

McDonald, drawing from his tech experience, says promotions shouldn’t be about time in seat. “You’re ready to move to the next level as soon as you’re performing at that level.”

This represents a huge shift from the traditional model where you might wait five years for a promotion regardless of your performance.

Building Teams That Actually Want to Work Together

The old model pits high performers against each other. Remember those weekly emails showing who billed the most hours? Competition is the traditional way to drive performance.

Renegade firms take a different approach.

“If you have people on your team who think the only way up is their own performance, your whole team is going to be fighting against each other,” Reeves explains. She learned this building sales teams. When she tied part of compensation to team performance, not just individual metrics, “We saw performance double because people were suddenly willing to turn to the teammate next to them and show them what was working.”

This collaborative approach is essential for attracting younger professionals. As Reeves notes, “There are a lot of young people who are coming out of school, and there’s nothing exciting to them about working 90 hours a week during tax season. They’re like, ‘hard pass.’”

“You can tell people to do the work and you can pay people to do the work,” Reeves says. “But to actually get people to want to show up and fully do the work, it has to align around the things that genuinely motivate them as a human.”

When Banking Becomes a Partnership

Banking isn’t usually seen as innovative. But companies like Relay are changing that, starting with how they work with accountants.

Most people choose banks for passive reasons. “It’s because I know that bank exists or they’re down the street or my parents bank there,” McDonald observes.

But what if your bank actually worked for you and your accountant?

“Relay is purpose built for our accounting partners and their clients,” McDonald explains. Traditional banks gatekeep information. Relay surfaces it to accountants so they can actually help their clients.

The difference is stark. “I’m not even sure how I would give feedback to Chase or Bank of America or Wells Fargo,” Oliver admits. In contrast, McDonald says, “If a partner of ours has an idea and they bring it to us, we will act on that idea.”

This isn’t just talk. Being a champion for SMEs and their partners is one of Relay’s seven core values. They were the first banking platform to go to market specifically through accounting professionals.

Reeves shares her own frustration with traditional banking. She wanted to support a local community bank that shared her values. But they had no online banking. Getting statements required writing emails to a banker.

“If you’re really serving small business at the core of who you are,” she says, “making me have to email a banker to get a bank statement isn’t serving small business. That’s creating extra manual work for me or for my accountant.”

Learning from Renegade Mistakes

Being a renegade means trying new things. And that means making mistakes.

Reeves shares a particularly painful one. She built what she thought was an innovative compensation model, paying top performers a percentage of deals they closed. Then she discovered a senior employee was committing fraud, jacking up prices in their proposal system to increase her cut.

Reeves recalls discovering the fraud just before a major conference and having to lock down all her banking immediately. The experience taught her to “trust but verify.” You need systems to ensure people act the right way, even those you trust.

McDonald shares his own revelation about breaking from the traditional path. He started his career as a fixed income broker. But as he earned promotions, he looked around and realized, “everyone there had been doing it for 30 years. I thought, ‘Can I do this for 25 more years?’”

He chose the non-linear path instead, moving between sales, consulting, and building teams. “I had stopped my learning journey,” he reflects. “I want to be a lifelong learner.”

Oliver’s “mistake” was majoring in music at the most expensive university in the country. But the experience taught him how to teach himself anything—a skill that proved invaluable in accounting. “If you can sit in a practice room for six hours a day and learn how to play a concerto, that’s all just breaking problems down into literally measure by measure, note by note.”

The Path Forward

The renegade firms discussed in this episode aren’t making small tweaks to the traditional model. They’re rebuilding it from scratch.

They’re becoming strategic leaders who guide rather than follow clients, creating transparent cultures where collaboration beats competition, and embracing technology companies as true partners rather than necessary evils.

With younger professionals rejecting traditional firm culture and clients demanding strategic guidance over compliance work, the old model is dying. The renegade approach offers a sustainable alternative that actually addresses why people leave accounting.

These innovations are happening right now at thriving firms. From brewery-themed welcome kits to banking platforms built for accountant collaboration, these changes prove accounting firms can create experiences that rival any modern service business.

Want to hear the complete conversation? Listen to the full episode. You’ll get the full story of how Reeves uncovered fraud through her proposal system, Olivers’s journey from professional musician to accounting innovator, and detailed strategies for implementing renegade principles in your own firm.