Ernst & Young Archives

A former Big Four auditor traded spreadsheets for turntables and now commands 11.8 million monthly Spotify listeners, sells out Madison Square Garden, and has racked up over two billion career streams. His name is John Summit, and he might just be the most famous accountant in the world.

On a recent episode of The Accounting Podcast, hosts Blake Oliver and David Leary dove into John’s remarkable transformation from EY auditor to global EDM superstar. His career change story captures something profound happening in the accounting profession right now.

From Audit Room to Arena Stage

“If you’re into electronic music, then you know who John Summit is,” Blake explained to David during the episode.

The numbers tell an incredible story. John—born John Walter Schuster in Naperville, Illinois—followed the traditional accounting path at first. He earned his undergraduate and master’s degrees in accounting from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. From 2018 to 2019, he worked as an auditor at EY in Chicago, starting at $65,000 a year while DJing on weekends.

Blake even pulled up John’s CPA license during the show. “I went to the Illinois Department of Financial and Professional Regulation, and I looked him up by his original name,” he said. The license was active in 2018 and expired in 2022, right around the time John’s music career went stratospheric.

Today, John’s success metrics are staggering. His debut album “Comfort in Chaos” hit number two on the Billboard Top Dance/Electronic Albums chart and cracked the Billboard 200’s top 40. He headlines festivals like Coachella and Tomorrowland, and his own festival, Experts Only, draws 50,000 attendees.

Leaning Into the Accounting Story

What makes John unique is how he’s embraced his accounting past. His new album “CTRL Escape” drops on April 15th, Tax Day, and the cover art shows him sitting atop office ceiling tiles, the corporate world below giving way to open sky above.

“He’s dropping one track from the album every Wednesday,” Blake noted. “And the reason he’s doing it on Wednesday is that he remembers Hump day being the toughest day in the office.”

The album’s merchandise had David cracking up. “Crappy accounting firm swag. This is great,” he said, looking at the offerings. “It’s a backpack that says Summit CPAs, a pen that says Summit CPAs. This is so great he’s leaning into it like that.”

The music video for “Lights Go Out” drives the theme home. John appears in an oversized tan suit at “Summit CPAs,” working at an old green-screen computer before leading his fellow office workers in what Blake described as “basically like an accounting firm turning into a rave.”

The Profession John Left Is Disappearing

Blake and David’s conversation takes a darker turn when they discuss Botkeeper. One of the original “AI bookkeeping” startups announced it was shutting down after 11 years.

“They did the typical tech company ‘fake it ‘til you make it,’” David explained. Botkeeper promised AI-powered bookkeeping but was actually using offshore accountants in the Philippines. When real AI technology finally arrived through companies like OpenAI and Anthropic, investors weren’t interested in funding a company that had burned through capital on the false promise.

It wasn’t just Botkeeper. Jenesys, a UK-based AI bookkeeping startup, also entered a formal sales process after key investors pulled out. Clearly, the old model of pretending to have AI while using human workers is dead.

Meanwhile, companies with actual AI capabilities are thriving. Tax AI startup Accrual raised $75 million, Audit AI startup Fieldguide raised $75 million, and Pilot announced what it called an “AI accountant,” a fully autonomous system capable of running end-to-end bookkeeping with “zero need for human intervention” in typical cases.

Why Tax and Audit AI Are Different

Blake explained why investors are pouring money into tax and audit AI while bookkeeping AI companies struggle.

“When we moved to cloud bookkeeping and accounting, we were able to set up rules-based systems,” he said. “You can still automate 80% of bookkeeping work today with just the old tech.”

But tax and audit are different beasts. “Those areas of accounting were not automatable with rules-based tech, because there are too many gray areas, there’s too much complexity. But AI is starting to handle it really, really, really well.”

To illustrate the point, Blake shared his own experience with Claude, Anthropic’s AI assistant. He gave it access to a folder of scanned documents that his scanner had poorly named and asked it to organize them.

“It created a whole logical folder structure. Different types of files, receipts, legal documents, statements,” he said. “And then it put all the documents into those folders and renamed all the documents based on the content of the PDFs. And it did this in minutes.”

“You can get that if you’re a pro subscriber for like $20 a month. It’s incredible.”

The Entry-Level Jobs Are Vanishing

This AI revolution is having a profound impact on accounting careers. Technology is automating routine tasks that once defined entry-level positions at breakneck speed.

“We’re seeing reductions in entry-level jobs, not reductions in mid-career or later-stage career positions,” Blake observed. “It’s really, really hard to find a tax manager. Nobody can find a tax manager for their public accounting firm.”

The work being automated reads like a first-year auditor’s job description. “Requesting documents from clients, receiving and organizing them, rolling forward prior year workpapers, ticking and tying. AI is starting to do all of that stuff.”

As a result, “it’s really hard to get a job as a staff accountant because nobody wants to train you and they don’t have work to give you to justify the cost of training you for several years.”

Even the Big Four Feel the Pressure

In an ironic twist, even KPMG International is feeling the AI pressure. The firm recently pushed its own auditor, Grant Thornton UK, to lower its audit fee by 14%, arguing that AI-driven efficiencies should reduce costs.

“The negotiations reportedly included pressure tactics, where KPMG threatened to switch auditors if Grant Thornton didn’t agree to a significant reduction,” Blake said, citing Financial Times reporting.

The fee went from $416,000 in 2024 to $357,000 in 2025. As Blake wryly noted: “I think KPMG ought to watch out, because now clients are going to ask for the same fee reduction.”

The Pyramid Is Crumbling

This pressure on fees creates a domino effect. Lower fees mean less money for staff. Fewer entry-level positions mean the traditional pyramid model of public accounting, where large numbers of junior staff support a small number of managers and partners, is collapsing.

“The whole model is going to have to shift,” Blake said. “The pyramid model of accounting is going away. And that’s going to fundamentally change our profession, because that’s been the way everyone got into accounting for a hundred years.”

Blake predicted that within five to ten years, timesheets and time-based billing will disappear entirely. The firms that survive will abandon the old model of counting hours and bodies.

There is a silver lining for those who adapt. Blake shared his own experience. “I saw a 5x increase in my revenue just as a freelancer” after embracing cloud technology. His effective hourly rate went from $20 to $100, and his workload actually decreased.

The Escape Route Is Closing

John Summit celebrates his escape from accounting through music that resonates with millions who understand the cubicle grind. He drops tracks on Wednesdays because that was the hardest day to push through. He releases albums on Tax Day. He sells fake accounting firm swag as merchandise.

But the entry-level accounting experience he’s immortalizing—the fluorescent lights, the routine tasks, the path that led him from college to Big Four—is rapidly disappearing. Future accountants may never know that particular grind because the jobs simply won’t exist.

Accounting will likely survive with higher earnings for those who remain and adapt. But the traditional path into the profession will evolve.

As David suggested during the show, if you’re Summit CPAs—a real accounting firm that happens to share the name—you might want to figure out how to capitalize on all the traffic coming your way. Because in a profession being reshaped by AI, you need to grab opportunities wherever you find them.

For the complete discussion of John’s journey, the AI transformation of accounting, and what it means for the profession’s future, listen to the full episode of The Accounting Podcast.

In a recent episode of The Accounting Podcast, we explored alarming trends in audit quality shaking the foundations of our profession. The numbers are stark: the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (PCAOB) found that Ernst & Young (EY), one of the Big Four firms, has a staggering 37% deficiency rate in its audits. Even PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), the “best” performer among the Big Four, has an 18% deficiency rate. These deficiencies are so significant that, according to the PCAOB, the auditors should not have issued their opinions.

As audit deficiency rates remain stubbornly high and scandals shake investor confidence, the accounting profession must confront systemic issues undermining audit quality—including misaligned incentives, inadequate staffing, and outdated practices—to restore trust in financial markets and secure their future relevance.

The Alarming State of Audit Quality

When we discuss a crisis in audit quality, we’re not exaggerating. The deficiency rates reported by the PCAOB paint a troubling picture of the state of auditing in the United States:

EY has a 37% deficiency rate—the highest among its peers.
PwC, despite performing “best” among the Big Four, still has an 18% deficiency rate.
BDO, a top 10 firm, has an alarming 86% deficiency rate.

But what do these numbers mean? A Part 1.A deficiency indicates that the auditor “had not obtained sufficient appropriate audit evidence to support its opinion(s) on the issuer’s financial statements and/or ICFR.” In other words, it means the auditor should not have issued their opinion, and potentially, investors should not rely on it.

This is not just a minor oversight—it’s a fundamental audit process failure. When nearly four out of ten audits at a Big Four firm like EY are deficient, or when 86% of BDO’s audits fail to meet standards, we’re looking at systemic issues that threaten the foundation of our financial markets.

The most common deficiencies relate to basic audit tasks:

Performing substantive testing.
Testing controls over data accuracy.
Evaluating the effectiveness of internal controls.

In essence, auditors are failing to perform the core responsibilities that investors rely on them to perform. These high deficiency rates directly erode investor confidence. When investors can’t trust the audited financial statements, the entire financial reporting and investment system becomes compromised.

Why are these deficiency rates so high? We need to examine the business models and incentives driving audit firms to answer that.

Misaligned Incentives and Flawed Business Models

At the heart of the audit quality crisis lies a troubling truth: audit firms’ business models are fundamentally misaligned with the goal of producing high-quality audits. Instead, they incentivize practices that prioritize profit over thoroughness and accuracy.

One primary strategy audit firms employ to maximize revenue is understaffing. Having the fewest people work on the audits leads to overworked staff and rushed audits, increasing the likelihood of errors and oversights.

EY provides a stark example of this strategy in action. The firm boasts the highest revenue per employee among the Big Four at $383,900. While impressive from a business perspective, it raises serious questions about the firm’s ability to allocate sufficient resources to each audit.

Another concerning practice is the lack of transparency around materiality thresholds. Auditors use these thresholds to determine what issues are significant enough to report. However, these standards are not publicly disclosed and can be manipulated. It’s possible to cover up something undesirable by deeming it “immaterial.” This lack of transparency allows auditors to ignore or downplay significant issues, further undermining the reliability of their opinions.

However, the biggest problem is that auditors lack the financial incentive to detect fraud or significant issues. They have every incentive to do the audit quickly, even if it means overlooking critical problems.

These misaligned incentives and flawed business models directly contribute to the high deficiency rates. They create an environment where cutting corners is rewarded, and thoroughness is penalized, contradicting the fundamental purpose of an audit.

The Supermicro Scandal: A Case Study in Audit Failure

The recent Supermicro scandal provides a vivid example of how systemic auditing issues can lead to significant market disruptions and erode investor confidence.

Supermicro Computing, a major player in the tech industry, recently announced an accounting delay that caused its stock to plummet 19% in a single day. This followed a report by Hindenburg R e search, which alleged dubious accounting practices at the company.

Based on a three-month investigation, the Hindenburg report uncovered glaring accounting red flags, including:

Undisclosed related-party transactions involving nearly $1 billion were paid over three years to suppliers partly owned by the CEO’s brothers.
Rehiring executives involved in previous accounting scandals less than three months after paying a $17.5 million SEC settlement for widespread accounting violations.

But where was Deloitte, Supermicro’s auditor, in all of this? Despite charging $4.5 million annually for their services, Deloitte failed to identify or report these significant issues. Their audit letters for 2022 and 2023 were nearly identical, focusing only on inventory valuation as a critical audit matter.

Adding to the concern, an AI system developed by Hudson Rock had identified potential accounting risks at Supermicro two years before these issues came to light. As my co-host, David Leary, points out, “If AI can surface these audit problems before companies can, people aren’t going to want to pay $4.5 million for an audit.”

The emergence of AI challenges the traditional audit model and demands a reevaluation of how we approach financial oversight.

A Call for Reform

The audit profession stands at a crossroads. The alarming PCAOB deficiency rates, misaligned incentives driving audit firm business models, and high-profile failures like the Supermicro scandal all point to a systemic crisis in audit quality.

This isn’t just an issue for accountants and auditors—it’s a threat to the integrity of our entire financial system. Investors rely on audited financial statements to make informed decisions, and when those audits fail, the consequences can be catastrophic.

The emergence of AI as a potentially more effective tool for detecting accounting irregularities further challenges the traditional audit model. Significant changes are needed—from realigning incentives to embracing new technologies—to restore trust in the audit process and secure the future relevance of the profession.

But change won’t happen without a concerted effort from all of us in the accounting world. We must confront these challenges head-on, push for meaningful reforms, and reimagine what high-quality auditing looks like in the 21st century.

To hear our full analysis, including potential solutions and ways you can make a difference, listen to this episode of The Accounting Podcast.

From Ticking and Tying to Selling Out Arenas: How One Auditor Became EDM Royalty