David Leary

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

Earmark Team · July 29, 2026 ·

“One day, the board is going to ask the CEO, ‘I see you spent all that on tokens. What was the result?’ And they’re not gonna be able to answer it.” That’s David Leary on Episode 496 of The Accounting Podcast, and in one line he captures the tension running under nearly every story he and co-host Blake Oliver covered this week.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Checkbox Compliance vs. Real Protection

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Accountability Layer

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

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

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

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

AICPA Puts a Deadline on the Work Most Accountants Do Today

Earmark Team · July 28, 2026 ·

The accounting profession’s own leadership just put a timeline on when most of what accountants do today will be done by machines, and it’s sooner than you might think.

In this week’s episode of The Accounting Podcast, hosts Blake Oliver and David Leary returned from AICPA Engage in Las Vegas with some eye-opening news. The AICPA released a major report declaring that by 2040, routine compliance work like tax returns, audits, and bookkeeping (which make up about 80% of what accounting firms do) will be largely automated. Some industry leaders think it’ll happen even faster, maybe by 2030.

But that’s just one of the big changes coming. Private equity firms are pouring billions into accounting firms, and David has a theory about why that should worry everyone. Plus, Blake scored an exclusive interview with Shelly Weir from the Florida Institute of CPAs, who spent two years fighting legislation that would have eliminated their Board of Accountancy. She hadn’t talked to any media about it until now.

The Clock Is Ticking on Compliance Work

The AICPA report, Rise 2040: Shaping the Future of Finance and Accounting, surveyed thousands of accountants worldwide and concluded the bread-and-butter work of the profession has maybe 15 years left in its current form.

“Some timelines are even more aggressive,” Blake noted during the episode. “Allan Koltin recently said it’s by 2030.”

So what happens when machines take over compliance? According to Tom Hood from AICPA and CIMA, accountants will shift to four main roles: strategic guidance, AI oversight, data translation, and human-centered advisory. Basically, we’ll supervise the robots instead of doing the work ourselves.

David pushed back on the human advisory part. “I completely disagree,” he said. “I think the clients themselves would rather just chat it out with a bot. They don’t want to talk to the human.”

But Blake raised an important point. “If you don’t have the knowledge about what that AI is talking to you about, how do you know when it’s right and when it’s wrong?”

He’s got a point. Tax professionals are already finding major errors in AI-prepared returns. The analysis looks perfect, but the AI uses the wrong tax brackets or dates. It’s convincingly wrong, which might be worse than obviously wrong.

AI in Accounting Just Crossed a Major Threshold

David met up with three AI accounting founders at Engage: Jeff Seibert from Digits, Sasha Orloff from Puzzle, and Agree Ahmed from Flowglad. They’re all doing something David calls “hidden vibe coding.”

“You chat with these tools, and on the back end, they’re basically building code that’s custom to you and your workflows,” David explained. “Even though you’re not ‘vibe coding,’ you’re vibe coding an app under the covers and don’t even know it.”

The key difference is these tools run the same way every time, unlike chatbots that give different answers to the same question. Blake called this shift from probabilistic to deterministic outputs a game-changer for a profession built on accuracy.

The proof is already out there. OpenAI’s finance team runs with just 200 people. For a company that size, that’s tiny. Sarah Friar, OpenAI’s CFO, called it “really lean.” Industry benchmarks suggest they’d normally need 500 to 1,000 people. Zapier is even more extreme, with seven humans managing nearly 200 AI agents for internal accounting.

So why isn’t everyone jumping on board? The Rise 2040 report is brutally honest: 93% of participants said the biggest barrier to progress is the profession itself. We’re resistant to change. Yet 80% are optimistic about the future, which suggests accountants know change needs to happen even if they’re dragging their feet.

David offered a helpful reframe. “Everybody just got a silent promotion. You’re now being promoted to be a mid-level accounting manager, and you’re going to manage some AI employees.”

Private Equity’s Real Game

While AI is changing what accountants do, private equity is changing who owns the firms, and David has an interesting theory about it.

Take Crowe’s new $3 billion investment from KKR. That’s huge money, but what caught David’s attention is KKR owns companies in ERP systems, IT automation, cybersecurity, healthcare payments (WebMD), and healthcare staffing. And Crowe’s strongest vertical is healthcare.

“They’re not buying accounting firms because they think the accounting firms will make them money,” David argued. “They’re making money because the accounting firms are going to move their other product offerings.”

He compared it to Red Lobster’s bankruptcy. The PE firm that owned Red Lobster also owned shrimp boats and forced the restaurant to buy overpriced shrimp from those boats. The PE firm made money on shrimp; Red Lobster went under. Now, Red Lobster’s new owners, through a complex chain that traces back to Abu Dhabi’s sovereign wealth fund, which has made massive AI investments, want to make it “the most AI-forward restaurant that exists.”

The pattern shows up elsewhere. Sikich got PE funding from Madison Dearborn Partners, which has big investments in construction and real estate. Those are exactly the niches where Sikich is strong. David envisions accounting firms doing CFO work encountering a client problem and “just happening” to have a sister portfolio company that provides the exact solution needed.

CPAs aren’t blind to this. A recent survey found 57% think PE threatens the CPA brand. And yet many would still take the money if offered.

Florida’s Two-Year Battle to Save the CPA License

Perhaps the biggest threat is deregulation. For two years, Florida fought legislation that would have eliminated its Board of Accountancy, wiped out CPE requirements, and paved the way for the dismantling of CPA licensure.

Shelly Weir, who led the fight, gave Blake her first media interview about it. The bill was massive, with 550 pages targeting CPAs, architects, engineers, veterinarians, realtors, and several other professions. It flew through the House in just 18 days.

“We were literally physically pulling senators off the floor,” Shelly recalled about the final day of the 2025 session, which went until midnight. “I’m like, if there’s one lifeboat, I’m getting on it. Good luck to you people.”

Florida deployed serious resources, including nine lobbyists, public affairs firms, and polling projects. But their smartest move was personal. They found CPAs who knew legislators personally, like college roommates, church friends, and siblings, and had them make the case directly.

Their winning arguments were clever. First, they showed how eliminating the Board would actually create more red tape by breaking the interstate mobility system CPAs have built. Second, instead of just saying no, they developed their own modernization proposals.

“We were the only profession in this particular bill that had taken a moment to self-reflect,” Shelly said.

They beat the bill twice, but Shelly doesn’t think it’s over. “I do not think the issue of deregulation is going away,” she warned.

What Keeps Firms Up at Night

The AICPA also surveyed firms about their top concerns for 2026, and the results show a clear divide by firm size.

Small firms (solos and 2-10-person shops) worry most about keeping up with tax law changes but aren’t concerned about technology adoption or staff workload. Bigger firms have the opposite problem. They can handle tax changes but struggle to retain staff and implement technology.

“I’m wondering if the smaller firms, because they’re capable of adopting technology better, have less workload on their staff,” David observed.

Mid-size firms (11-100 people) are most worried about finding staff. They’re stuck in the middle: too big to be nimble, too small to have big-firm resources.

Only the largest firms (500+) worry about retaining staff, likely because they have many people nearing retirement.

Signs of Hope Amid the Chaos

Despite all these challenges, there are positive signals. Accounting enrollment jumped 8.9% this spring, way above the 1.3% growth for all majors. That’s impressive given the “accounting is dying because of AI” headlines.

The AICPA launched its “Trusted CPA” campaign at Engage, complete with a national TV commercial. David wondered whether this was a legal hack, since some states restrict how CPAs may use the designation. “You can’t put CPA on your LinkedIn page, but you can use the hashtag #TrustedCPA?”

More importantly, 43 states have now passed alternative pathway legislation, and Vermont, Missouri, and Louisiana just joined them. After years of tension between state societies and the AICPA over the 150-hour rule, there’s finally alignment.

“It feels like maybe they’re marching in an aligned point of view,” David observed. “Elevate the CPA brand, don’t let it get deregulated by states.”

Oh, and Someone Stole $7,000 Cash from a Brooklyn Accounting Firm

In lighter news, David shared a bizarre story that had him scratching his head. Police are looking for someone who walked into an accounting firm in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, and stole $7,000 in cash right off an employee’s desk.

“First off, what accounting firm has $7,000 just sitting on a desk?” David asked. “What does this accounting firm do that they have this cash lying around? Something doesn’t add up.”

Blake’s take is, “It’s an indication of how much of the profession is still operating 20 years in the past.”

The accounting profession faces three simultaneous pressures from the automation of core work, private equity ownership with potential conflicts, and deregulation threats to the license itself. But the profession is responding. Enrollment is up. States are modernizing pathways. AI tools are getting good enough to actually trust.

Treat this moment as a chance to redefine your value. Don’t wait for someone else to dictate the changes, or you might find there’s nothing left to save.

Want to hear the full discussion, including more details about AI developments and Shelly’s complete interview? Listen to Episode 492 of The Accounting Podcast.

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.

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.