Blake Oliver

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

Earmark Team · July 22, 2026 ·

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.

The IRS Answered Only 21% of Your Calls This Season, and It’s Getting Worse

Earmark Team · July 22, 2026 ·

During the 2026 filing season, the IRS received 48.1 million phone calls but answered just 9.9 million. That’s only 21%. As Blake Oliver put it on Episode 495 of The Accounting Podcast, “79% of the time when you call the IRS, you hang up before you get somebody because the wait times are that long.”

Blake and David Leary recorded this Independence Day episode on Friday, July 3rd, covering everything from the IRS’s service failures to Trump accounts going live on July 4th. They even shared a wild story about EY staff accessing Australia’s Prime Minister’s bank account. But it’s the IRS story that really captures where the profession stands right now, caught between a federal agency that can’t serve taxpayers and new AI tools that are changing how tax work gets done.

The IRS Report Card: Success and Failure at the Same Time

The National Taxpayer Advocate, Erin M. Collins, issued her midyear report with a positive-sounding headline: the IRS “largely succeeded” in the 2026 filing season. That’s actually impressive given that the agency faced a 27% staffing reduction, major tax law changes, and leadership turnover. Technology modernization helped keep things running.

But while the IRS kept the machinery working for routine returns, anyone needing individual help ran into serious problems. More than 14 million of the 139 million individual returns filed got suspended for additional review. Over a million taxpayers waited beyond normal processing times for refunds, with delays averaging about 5.5 weeks. Identity theft victims face an average of 20 months for case resolution, with over 500,000 cases still pending at the end of the filing season.

The Trump administration’s push to move federal agencies away from paper checks created its own mess. The IRS sent about 4 million notices to taxpayers whose returns lacked valid direct deposit information. The problem is, most of these taxpayers are unbanked, elderly, or living abroad, don’t have online accounts, and struggle to create them. The notices had poor instructions about requesting waivers, and as Blake pointed out, they didn’t even mention that taxpayers could request a paper check waiver by calling the 1040 phone line.

Speaking of that phone line, the numbers are getting worse, not better. The IRS answered 21% of calls this season with an average hold time of 14 minutes. Last season, they answered 25% of calls, with an average wait of eight minutes.

Every Door Is Broken

If you can’t get through on the phone, maybe you could walk into an IRS Taxpayer Assistance Center for in-person help? The Treasury Inspector General decided to find out, conducting 91 unannounced “secret shopping” visits at 82 different centers nationwide.

Of the 91 visits, 30 failed completely. Either the building was unexpectedly closed, security wouldn’t let them in, or they couldn’t get a real answer. Of the 61 “successful” visits in which someone actually spoke with an IRS employee, 28 received incorrect assistance. That’s nearly half.

“That’s like almost half the time if you go to an IRS Taxpayer Assistance Center, if you get in the door, you’re probably going to get the wrong answer,” David said.

A review of the IRS’s expanding chatbot and live chat options found that 60% of live chat assistors were handling multiple chats at once. That’s normal for a call center, but one report claimed an assistor was handling 603 chats simultaneously. Both hosts found that number impossible to believe. The automated chatbot wasn’t much better, failing to provide enough information or recognize what taxpayers were typing in 29 responses and 44 keywords or questions.

Behind all this is another problem because the IRS can’t even track its own data. A new Inspector General report found the agency has about 1,124 data-sharing agreements with different states and agencies. Ohio alone has 42 separate agreements. But the kicker is, 30 of these agreements are completely unknown to the IRS’s own privacy office. As David explained, “There’s just IRS data going out to third parties, other government agencies that the IRS does not know is happening.”

AI Tools Fill the Void

“Hey, all of this means tax professionals will continue to be in demand,” Blake observed. And increasingly, those professionals turn to AI tools to handle the grunt work.

Blake described how he treats Claude as a coworker. Using Wispr Flow dictation software on his Mac, he can now just hold down the function key and speak to the AI. “It’s way faster than typing,” he said.

The hosts shared a listener example. Florida’s Board of Accountancy requires CPAs to enter each CPE course separately into its web portal. The listener had manually typed about 80 different courses last year. This year, he pointed Claude’s Cowork at a folder containing all his CPE certificates and had it create a consolidated Excel list, validate it against the PDFs, then log into the portal and enter everything automatically. The AI even caught and corrected its own duplicate entries without being told. “Cowork took care of this tedious task in the background while I caught up on the show Severance on Apple TV,” the listener shared.

KPMG is taking this further with Tax Sim, an AI simulation tool that trains tax professionals through rapid scenarios, replacing the routine prep work that junior staff used to learn on. As Blake explained, it’s like a high-performance racing simulator where users encounter many scenarios quickly and improve through feedback.

The Bigger Picture

The 2026 filing season tells two stories at once. The IRS survived a brutal year institutionally, but it’s failing the individual taxpayers who need help. For tax professionals, this creates an opportunity and a responsibility. Taxpayers need someone who can actually answer their questions and resolve their issues. The responsibility is hard to ignore. The people hit hardest by these failures are often those who can’t afford professional help.

As Blake and David make clear throughout the episode, pairing human expertise with AI tools that can handle the tedious compliance work will help firms thrive. The void the IRS leaves behind becomes a competitive advantage for the prepared firm.

Want to hear the full discussion, including more details on Trump accounts, the Australian scandals, and practical AI workflows? Listen to episode 495 of The Accounting Podcast. You can even earn free CPE for listening through Earmark.

How Florida CPAs Beat Back a Bill That Would Have Erased Their Own Licensing Board

Earmark Team · July 20, 2026 ·

Shelly Weir stood in the rotunda of the Florida Capitol building. The House floor was on one side, the Senate floor on the other. The clock was ticking toward midnight on the final day of the legislative session. Shelly was physically pulling senators off the floor while CPAs across the state called and texted lawmakers. These were college roommates, siblings, fellow churchgoers, basically anyone with a personal connection to a senior member of the Senate.

Around her, realtors, engineers, and harbor pilots were lined up too, all fighting for their professional lives inside the same 550-page bill. “If there’s one lifeboat,” she recalls thinking, “I’m getting on it. Good luck to you people.”

That was the scene at the end of Florida’s legislative session, and it shows just how close the CPA license came to being dismantled.

On this episode of the Earmark Podcast, host Blake Oliver sits down with Shelly, president and CEO of the Florida Institute of CPAs (FICPA), for her first live interview about a two-year battle most of the profession has never heard about. The legislation she and her team fought would have eliminated Florida’s Board of Accountancy, wiped out continuing education requirements, and paved the way to eliminate licensure education requirements.

FICPA beat it twice.

What’s remarkable is how they won. The strongest defense wasn’t digging in, or what Shelly calls “the agent of no.” It was showing up as the efficiency experts CPAs claim to be. By combining a hard-nosed commerce argument with a genuine willingness to modernize the profession’s outdated rules, FICPA turned an existential threat into an opportunity to reform accounting on its own terms.

The 550-Page Threat That Almost Changed Everything

To understand what FICPA faced, you need to know how Florida makes laws. The state legislature meets for just 60 days a year. As Shelly puts it, “for 60 days, it’s fast and furious. That’s when you get bills passed, or you don’t.”

The warning signs had been there for years. “Anytime you have a piece of legislation that is this significant, there are normally signals it’s coming,” Shelly explained. “There are chess pieces that get put onto the chess board.” She’d been talking to her board and national entities about the threat for years before the bill actually dropped.

When it finally arrived in early April 2025, about halfway through the legislative session, it was a 550-page “behemoth,” in Shelly’s words. Accountants weren’t alone in this fight. The bill included architects, engineers, veterinarians, realtors, and harbor pilots (which, Shelly notes, are “really important in Florida”). The bill bundled them together with a single goal of eliminating their regulatory boards.

For CPAs, that meant three devastating changes. First, the Board of Accountancy would be gone. Second, all continuing education requirements would disappear. Third, it would clear the path toward eliminating licensure education requirements. “Everything we’ve spent the last few years talking about relative to 120- and 150-hours would go away,” Shelly explained. Instead, licenses would be awarded based only on work experience or on passing an exam.

The bundling of professions frustrated Shelly. “Respectfully, hairdressers are not the same thing as a CPA or an engineer.”

FICPA saw two distinct dangers. The immediate threat was breaking Florida’s mobility infrastructure. That’s the system that lets CPAs work seamlessly across state lines. That would cause damage “on day one.” The long-term danger was even worse. The license would either be eliminated or become “so degraded that it carried very little value.”

Why Lawmakers Wanted to Kill Professional Licensing

Shelly’s insight is crucial for understanding how FICPA fought back. Deregulation, she stresses, is bipartisan.

In red-leaning Florida, it’s about free-market enterprise. Republicans believe licensure creates too many barriers, too much red tape, and too much government interference. They want consumers to have more freedom of choice. They want more people to move to Florida and find work easily. They want more businesses to relocate there.

In blue and purple states, Democrats frame it as an issue of access and equity. If barriers are too high, they limit opportunities for disadvantaged groups. But the common thread between the two parties is the workforce. Everyone wants more people working and more businesses thriving.

“If you can take your CPA hat off for a moment, which I know is hard to do, you can understand where they were coming from,” Shelly said. She even acknowledges that “not all deregulation is bad and scary and ugly. There are a lot of deregulation proposals that, frankly, our profession and our license would be highly supportive of. We don’t want to be a barrier to entry. We’re the champions of efficiency.”

This particular bill, however, was “the most extreme version the profession had seen.”

After surviving the 2025 session by the skin of their teeth, FICPA had only a couple of months before facing the same threat again in 2026. They had to beat it twice, back-to-back.

The Two-Pronged Strategy That Saved the License

The bill moved at lightning speed. “From the time the bill was introduced until it passed the House floor was 18 days,” Shelly recalled. “It flew through three different committees, went to the House floor for a vote, and then got sent over to the Senate.”

FICPA knew early that the Senate would be their battlefield.

The resources they marshaled were impressive. Nine registered lobbyists worked the FICPA account, which included four in-house staff members (including Shelly herself) and an external firm they’d partnered with for 25 years. Two public affairs firms shaped their message in political trade journals. Voter polling projects studied constituent opinions. Members wrote letters, made calls, and traveled to Tallahassee.

But the smartest tactic was personal. FICPA hunted through its membership to find CPAs with genuine relationships with legislators. “We found college roommates, sisters, people that went to church together, anything you can imagine,” Shelly said. Why? “Hearing from a lobbyist is very different than hearing from, say, your own CPA on this issue.”

With these resources deployed, FICPA ran two strategies simultaneously.

First came the commerce argument. Florida’s system of mobility and practice privileges creates open borders for CPA work across state lines. It puts choice in consumers’ hands, which is exactly what deregulation advocates claim to want. So FICPA flipped the script. Pass this bill, and you don’t reduce red tape; you create it. “Florida’s going to be at a disadvantage,” they told lawmakers. “That’s not what you want.”

The argument “landed really, really well” and came up repeatedly in committee hearings.

The second strategy separated FICPA from every other profession in the bill. Instead of just defending the status quo, they modernized their own rules before the fight even started. “We asked ourselves before the bill even dropped: where and how can we, as a license, be more efficient while still upholding the integrity of our license and protecting the public?”

They examined everything from reciprocity and mobility to the licensure processes and introduced their own legislation to streamline it all.

Take reciprocity as an example. Currently, a CPA from another state must complete about nine steps to get licensed in Florida, including having their college transcript reviewed for specific courses. Shelly asked, “If they have a license in good standing from a board of accountancy that has a regulatory board, do we need to look under the hood and go through all of these different steps?”

Cutting that red tape “only helps people get to work easier and faster and lowers barriers,” which is exactly what legislators wanted, achieved on the profession’s terms.

Playing Offense and Defense at the Same Time

Shelly has a perfect analogy for what FICPA had to do. In Top Gun: Maverick, the pilots play “dogfight football” by running offense and defense simultaneously and trying to score while blocking linebackers coming after them. “That is the definition of what we’ve been doing over the past 12 months,” she said.

The key was avoiding becoming “the agent of no.” As Shelly explained, “I never want a legislator to see us walk in the door and be like, ‘Oh my God, here come the CPAs again, they’re going to complain about X, Y and Z.'”

Instead, the profession leaned into its identity as efficiency experts.

The Pathways initiative became powerful proof. The bill’s supporters argued that students learn more on the job than in the classroom, so why require education at all? FICPA didn’t have to argue theoretically. The profession had already created a work-experience pathway to licensure. It was a nationwide modernization effort states had rallied behind together.

FICPA could tell senators: we agree there should be freedom of choice, and here’s a pathway that prioritizes work experience. “It’s not an or, it’s an and. Let’s work together.”

That framing “landed very, very well” because it met lawmakers’ goals while protecting the system of commerce and the license’s integrity.

What made the difference was posture. FICPA was “the only profession in this particular bill that had taken a moment to self-reflect and taken a moment to modernize.” They were the only ones offering both sides a win.

The Midnight Drama and What’s Coming Next

Despite all the strategy, the fight came down to that single agonizing day, and it was the toughest of Shelly’s career. In Florida, any bill not passed by midnight on the session’s 60th day automatically dies.

On the final day of the 2025 session, with the House having already passed the bill, FICPA was “hanging on for dear life to prevent it from passing in the Senate.”

Standing in the Capitol rotunda, Shelly orchestrated a desperate defense. “We were literally physically pulling senators off the floor and just doing everything we could. I had every single CPA that personally knew one of the senior members of the Senate calling and texting and just physically pulling them aside.”

She credits Senator Joe Gruters, who is himself a CPA, as a crucial ally in that final stretch. Shelly calls him “the staunchest advocate for the profession.” The outcome stayed uncertain until the very end. The session ran “all the way to midnight,” and FICPA didn’t know they were safe until late in the evening.

But surviving twice doesn’t mean it’s over. “I do not think the issue of deregulation is going away. Absolutely not,” Shelly said.

Florida faces an election year with a new governor, speaker of the House, and Senate president coming. It’s “an all new deck of cards,” as Shelly puts it. She expects licensing reform task forces, reduction requirements, and especially the CPE issue to resurface in Florida and other states.

The CPE fight shows exactly what’s at stake. Shelly’s concern wasn’t that lawmakers wanted to examine continuing education. It was that they went straight to elimination. “They weren’t talking about modernization. They wanted to get rid of it altogether.”

FICPA isn’t opposed to CPE reform. “I think there’s a lot that we can do to modernize it, to make sure that the purpose of it is to make a more competent CPA,” Shelly said. But she insists any change must happen collectively across states, just like Pathways, so it doesn’t break the system of commerce.

Whether the board-elimination proposal itself returns is harder to predict. Fresh lawmakers create what Shelly calls “an amazing opportunity” to find common ground before a bill ever gets filed. But she won’t count it out. “That idea has been planted, and it’s landed. There are a lot of people who are still interested in that.”

The Playbook Every State Society Needs

FICPA’s survival story offers lessons that reach far beyond Florida. When faced with a bill that treated a CPA license as no more important than a cosmetology certificate, the instinct to dig in and fight everything would have been understandable and probably fatal.

What actually worked was the opposite. By combining a commerce argument that addressed lawmakers’ concerns with genuine reform of reciprocity and licensure rules, FICPA found common ground while still protecting the public and the integrity of the license.

The profession wins by acting like the efficiency experts CPAs tell their clients they are.

Deregulation is bipartisan and gaining momentum nationwide. Every CPA, EA, and bookkeeper has a stake in whether the license keeps its value. State societies stand on the front lines when these bills drop.

As Shelly put it, “pressure is a privilege.” The profession’s willingness to be efficiency experts rather than agents of “no” may determine whether the license survives the next wave.

This is Shelly’s first and only live interview on a two-year battle that barely made the national press. To hear the full strategy, the midnight drama, and her warnings in her own words, listen to the complete episode on the Earmark Podcast.

The Big Four Keep Publishing Fake AI Citations and It’s Getting Embarrassing

Earmark Team · July 20, 2026 ·

A solo accountant can complete two years of bookkeeping in a few hours using Claude Cowork. But KPMG had to pull an entire AI report after 89% of its citations turned out to be fake. The AI revolution in professional services is already sorting winners from losers.

In episode 493 of The Accounting Podcast, hosts Blake Oliver and David Leary tackled a cluster of stories that paint a clear picture of how AI is restructuring professional services right now in real workflows, real paychecks, and real embarrassments for the Big Four.

There’s a growing divide between professionals who use AI carefully with human oversight (and get massive productivity gains) and those who rush to market themselves as AI experts while failing basic verification. This episode covers the Big Four’s repeated AI failures, the incredible productivity gains available to practitioners who use AI right, and the broader industry signals showing how AI is reshaping everything.

The Big Four’s “Vibe Citation” Problem Keeps Getting Worse

KPMG’s 2025 report, “Total Experience: Redefining Excellence in the Age of Agentic AI,” was supposed to showcase its AI expertise. Instead, it became the latest example of Big Four firms publishing AI-generated content they apparently never checked, also known as “vibe citations.”

GPTZero, a platform originally built to help teachers detect AI-generated text, analyzed KPMG’s report and found out of 45 citations, only five were accurate. Twenty-eight pointed to real sources but had made-up details. Twelve were too vague to verify. At least 16 were complete hallucinations. The tool rated the report 89% flawed.

The fake details weren’t subtle. KPMG claimed an Austrian utility called Verbund was using AI for real-time household energy optimization. In reality, the citation was about Verbund investing in a startup that might do this someday. They said Emirates airline had a chatbot named “Sara” that could change flights. Sara was actually a robot assistant from 2023 with no flight-change capability. The biggest gaffe was claiming East Japan Railway was using AI agents in 2019, before this type of AI even existed commercially.

UBS, NHS Greater Manchester, and Transport for London all said KPMG’s claims about their use of AI were “completely false or misleading.”

“We have to create a database and just track these because the Big Four just keeps doing it over and over again,” David said, noting similar recent incidents at EY and Deloitte.

The irony is KPMG’s website features an article titled “Essential Elements of Responsible AI: How Solid Guardrails Can Help You Scale AI Faster.” They’re selling AI expertise while failing at basic fact-checking.

David’s sarcastic take nailed it. “The only way I could think this could work is if the Big Four can go to the Fortune 500 and be like, ‘Look, we know all the mistakes that can be made. Now listen to us because we know what not to do.’”

How to Actually Use AI: A Real-World Success Story

While KPMG was publishing fantasy case studies, Blake was using AI to do real client work and showing what responsible AI use looks like.

He needed to complete two years of write-up work for a service business: 2,200 transactions across nine accounts, with source documents in a messy mix of PDFs and CSVs from different banks. In the old desktop days, this would have taken days of manual entry. Even with cloud accounting, it would take many hours of importing and coding.

Using Claude Cowork, he finished everything in about four hours, including gathering documents.

His approach was smart and deliberate. He pointed Claude at folders of bank statements and had it extract all transactions into Xero-compatible import files. It did OCR on PDFs, merged CSVs, and organized everything by account. Then he gave Claude the prior year’s general ledger and asked it to categorize transactions, but with a key addition: a confidence score for each categorization.

“I could open that up, sort by that score, and look at the transactions that are less than 90%,” Oliver explained. Instead of reviewing 2,200 items, he focused on exceptions.

The results were impressive. Claude missed just six transactions out of 2,200, and two of those were due to credit card statement date issues, not AI error. When a $5,000 clearing account discrepancy appeared, Claude opened Xero in a browser, analyzed the details, and identified the problems itself. One was a returned payroll miscoded to transfers. The other was more complex: undiscovered transfers to a business line of credit. Claude suggested this possibility, Oliver confirmed by pulling statements, and Claude then created the loan account, separated principal from interest, and fixed everything. That kind of discrepancy usually requires hours of investigation.

“I didn’t just say, ‘Here’s the GL detail, here are the transactions, go code them all and enter them into Xero,” Oliver emphasized. “I wanted to review it first, and I caught significant stuff.”

This capability is becoming more accessible. Microsoft’s Copilot Cowork is now available, with over half of Fortune 500 companies trying it during preview. Microsoft says it’s 30-40% cheaper per prompt than Claude, and since most accounting firms use Microsoft 365, it might already be on your computer.

Not everyone’s getting it right, though. David shared his frustration with QuickBooks AI. When he uploaded a PDF containing 12 monthly bills, QuickBooks mashed them into a single bill with line items from each invoice. No questions asked.

“It should say, ‘Hey, I noticed there are 25 bills in here. Do you want one bill or 25 separate bills?’ And I would just answer,” David said, comparing it to AI coding tools that ask before acting.

The Market Is Already Picking Winners and Losers

Meanwhile, CPA firms are seeing interesting pricing patterns. According to CPA Trendlines, overall pricing is up 4.2% year-over-year, reversing last year’s decline. But looking more closely at the breakdown, tax prep and planning jumped by nearly 8%. Advisory work rose over 6%. Audit only increased by 2.3%.

Clearly, clients will pay more for services requiring human expertise and judgment. Tax planning and advisory command the biggest premiums. More routine, standardized work, like audit, lags behind.

“Clients are willing to pay for tax planning advisory, for the human in the loop to make sure that the numbers are right,” Oliver said. “AI isn’t putting pressure on those fees at this point. And I don’t expect it to.”

The Real Divide: Verification vs. Vibes

The stories from this episode are different views of the same shift. KPMG publishes an AI report that’s 89% wrong while a solo practitioner uses AI to finish two years of work in an afternoon with near-perfect accuracy. CPA firms raise tax planning fees by 8% because clients value human judgment.

AI compresses the value of routine, unverified work while amplifying the premium on carefully applied expertise.

The divide in professional services is between those who verify and those who just publish. Between practitioners who build workflows with confidence scores and exception review, and firms that let AI-generated content sail through with fake citations. Between organizations that treat AI as a force multiplier for human expertise and those that use it to substitute for expertise they never had.

The practical takeaway is to learn the tools, whether that’s Claude Cowork, Copilot Cowork, or whatever comes next. But build human checkpoints into every workflow. Use confidence scoring. Review exceptions. Don’t set it and forget it. The productivity gains are potentially five to ten times traditional methods, but they disappear the moment you skip verification.

The market is already pricing this reality. Clients pay more for advisory, planning, and the assurance that a qualified human reviewed the work. Firms and practitioners who master this balance will command premiums. Those who don’t will find themselves on the wrong side of a restructuring that’s happening right now.

To hear Blake Oliver’s complete breakdown of his AI workflow, David’s full critique of accounting software AI, and more details on KPMG’s “vibe citation” disaster, listen to episode 493 of The Accounting Podcast.

AI Models Now Outperform Human Bookkeepers and One Controller Proves a Finance Team of One Actually Works

Earmark Team · July 8, 2026 ·

A controller at a SaaS company that processes $50 million a month through its marketplace went on a two-week vacation. When he returned, his AI agents had already coded, categorized, approved, and synced 2,000 transactions. He reviewed just 67 (about 3%) by hand, and the entire cleanup took 30 minutes.

James Agius, Financial Controller at Skool, described his actual workflow on a recent episode of The Accounting Podcast. And it landed alongside benchmark data proving that, for the first time, off-the-shelf AI models from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google are outperforming human accountants at basic bookkeeping tasks.

Hosts Blake Oliver and David Leary unpacked a series of developments that signal a genuine turning point for accounting. New studies from Digits and Ramp put hard numbers on AI’s bookkeeping abilities. A venture-backed startup led by a former PCAOB board member is building an AI-first audit firm. And KPMG’s entire US management committee flies to Silicon Valley every five to six weeks to meet with startups it views as potential threats.

But AI isn’t arriving to replace a surplus of accountants. It’s showing up amid a talent crisis that has more than tripled the number of unfilled accounting roles in a single year.

The Numbers Don’t Lie: AI Now Matches Human Bookkeepers

For years, the accounting profession has heard promises about AI. Now there’s data to back them up.

Digits just released the fourth version of its benchmark study, and CEO Jeff Seibert shared the results in an interview with David, which is featured on the episode. The test included categorizing over 2,000 transactions across multiple businesses into the correct chart of accounts. They tested all the major AI models (OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude, and Google’s Gemini) against outsourced human accountants.

“All of the major model providers have, for the first time, beaten real, outsourced human accountants at bookkeeping tasks,” Jeff told David. The humans scored about 79% accuracy. The AI models came in between 79.4% and 80.7%. The margin is small (about 1.6%), but the direction is clear.

Before anyone dismisses 79% as a low bar, Jeff offered important context. That’s actually typical for outsourced accountants who understand general accounting principles but don’t know the specific business. “They don’t know anything about that business or its industry, supply chain, geography, or customer base,” he explained. That missing context accounts for the 20% error rate.

What’s striking is how similar all the models performed. They’re all within three percentage points of each other. As David put it, basic transaction categorization “is kind of a commodity now.” It’s something everyone will essentially get for free from these models right out of the box.

But purpose-built systems go much further. Digits’ own AI, which learns from each business’s transaction history and can’t hallucinate by design, hits 97.8% accuracy. “Digits mimics the knowledge of a dedicated accountant who you’ve worked with for a number of years,” Jeff said.

The picture changes when you look at more complex work. Ramp tested its new Stack platform on 237 accounting tasks across eight synthetic businesses for categorization and financial close work. Its system scored 65.8%, beating the raw models but well short of perfect. This matches what most accountants experience. AI is great at pattern recognition but still struggles with judgment-heavy tasks.

AI still falls short in complex accruals, according to Jeff. Journal entries, fixed asset schedules, and prepaid expenses are the remaining frontier. Digits responded by launching automated accrual schedules where the AI identifies potential prepaids or fixed assets, drafts the schedule, and the accountant approves it.

Jeff drew an interesting parallel. At his tech company, engineers went from zero AI use to 100% in a single quarter. Jeff himself hasn’t written code since December, despite coding being his passion since age 12. “We have not fired our software engineers,” he said. “They are still critical, but the day to day has changed completely. Instead of them writing the code, they’re guiding the agents.”

One Controller, Zero Staff, $50 Million in Monthly Transactions

James Agius proves what these benchmarks mean in practice. He’s the financial controller at Skool, a SaaS company running online educational communities. The company handles over $5 million in monthly spend with nearly $50 million flowing through its marketplace each month.

James is also the company’s entire finance department. The company doesn’t have any staff accountants, AP clerks, or analysts. It’s just him and seven specialized AI agents, plus an eighth admin agent that checks the others’ work and enforces controls.

When Agius took two weeks off, those 2,000 transactions piled up. His automations handled almost everything, from coding, categorizing and approving to syncing to the ERP. When he returned, just 67 transactions needed human judgment. The cleanup took 30 minutes.

“His job changed from doing the work to reviewing the work,” Blake explained on the podcast. That shift freed Agius for forecasting, cash management, and strategy. It’s the work finance leaders always say they want to do but rarely have time for.

The timing couldn’t be more ironic. Just as AI enables one person to run an entire finance function, the profession can’t find enough people to fill open roles.

A Personiv study cited in Accounting Today found that the number of unfilled accounting and finance positions per company jumped from 5 to 17 in a single year, more than tripling. Eighty-four percent of finance and accounting leaders say there’s a talent shortage. The hardest role to fill is the senior accountant role, cited by 43% of respondents.

The drivers aren’t mysterious. The profession has talked for years about how 75% of CPAs were approaching retirement. “Well, now they’re doing it,” Blake said. And the pipeline is thin because staff accountants have been leaving after just a few years.

As David pointed out, senior accountants are exactly the people who would manage AI agents, so the talent shortage and the AI transition are colliding at the worst possible moment.

Firms are responding by racing to adopt AI. Sixty-three percent of leaders use AI to ease hiring pressure, up from 23% last year. For example, Bennett Thrasher moved talent acquisition from HR to the growth function, treating recruiting as strategically as business development. “The human labor becomes more valuable because it’s augmented,” Blake noted.

The Race to Reinvent

The competitive landscape is shifting as fast as technology. New entrants and incumbents alike are making moves that suggest they see this transformation as irreversible.

Christina Ho, former PCAOB board member and past podcast guest, joined Oath, a venture-backed firm building an AI-native audit practice from scratch. No legacy systems or technical debt. It’s AI-first from day one. They raised $6.6 million in seed funding and aim to automate 80% of audit work by 2030.

Oath plans to connect directly to clients’ accounting systems for continuous verification rather than year-end evidence gathering. CEO Lucas Ward emphasized audit remains “a human accountability function” even as machines handle verification. They’re recruiting “accounting engineers,” hybrid roles combining accounting expertise with computer science skills.

The Big Four are taking notice. KPMG’s US CEO now takes the entire management committee to Silicon Valley every five to six weeks, meeting with venture firms like Andreessen Horowitz and Bessemer to identify potential disruptors. They’re open to partnerships or investments, anything to avoid being blindsided.

On the platform side, Ramp’s new Stack product shows where AI agents might actually live in the workflow. Stack connects to existing tools like QuickBooks and accepts plain-language instructions, like “This client allocates revenue by location, not department. Split it across six cost centers.”

As Blake observed, “The GL is not the best place for agents to live. You want the agents at the point of the transaction.” Ramp already sits at the point of spend, giving its agents rich context about each business. The market agrees. Ramp just raised $750 million at a $44 billion valuation.

Not every AI adoption strategy works, though. KPMG rolled out a dashboard requiring employees to use AI for roughly 75% of their working time. Predictably, employees immediately gamed it. They had AI summarize emails they’d already read or generate random drawings — anything to hit targets. Blake called it “token maxxing,” comparing it to padding billable hours. Amazon shut down a similar program after seeing the same behavior.

What Humans Still Own

Where does human value go when AI handles the routine work? Jeff identified three things AI can’t replace.

Judgment. “AI goes off in weird directions,” he said. Experienced professionals must guide it through ambiguous calls.
Trust. “The AI will tell you anything you want. You can never trust AI.”
Accountability. “It’s never going to be liable for the numbers it gives you. What are you going to do, sue your AI?”

These are the differentiators for accountants who want to stay relevant as machines take over the rest.

All of the evidence from this episode points to AI crossing the competence threshold for basic bookkeeping and advancing toward complex tasks. One controller already runs a $50 million operation solo. Yet unfilled roles have tripled. Senior accountants are impossible to find. The retirement wave is here, and the pipeline is thin.

To thrive, you need to bring what AI can’t: judgment, trust, and accountability. The transition is here.

Listen to the full episode for the rest of Jeff’s interview, details on KPMG Australia’s whistleblower scandal fallout, and a discussion of the IRS leadership vacuum.