The Accounting Podcast

If the FTX "balance sheet" is a joke, their internal controls are a nightmare; Blake's deep dive into the FTX balance sheet; metaverse accounting firm tied to FTX; AICPA leadership meeting in Dubai; Sage Q4 earnings

Show Notes

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Show Notes

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9:16 – FTX’s Balance Sheet Was Bad
https://archive.ph/2022.11.16-034331/https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2022-11-14/ftx-s-balance-sheet-was-bad?leadSource=uverify%20wall
 
13:00 – Twitter: How bad were FTX’s internal controls?
https://twitter.com/grdecter/status/1593272102047580161?s=12&t=Ar7b4TGm8sY-JyEkPV85DQ
 
23:00 – Meet the Metaverse Nightclub–Loving Audit Firm That Presided Over FTX’s Financials
https://www.coindesk.com/business/2022/11/11/meet-the-metaverse-night-clubloving-audit-firm-that-presided-over-ftxs-financials/
 
35:29 – Imagine McDonald’s makes its own money
https://twitter.com/lynaldencontact/status/1590063257158811648?s=12&t=KR_1sPxxABmrNI70Y8SoGg


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Creators & Guests

Host
Blake Oliver
Founder and CEO of Earmark CPE
Host
David Leary
President and Founder, Sombrero Apps Company

What is The Accounting Podcast?

The Accounting Podcast (formerly the Cloud Accounting Podcast) is the world's #1 accounting, bookkeeping, and tax podcast! Join us weekly for a roundup of accounting news, analysis, and interviews. Plus, earn free NASBA-approved CPE credits for listening with the Earmark app. Learn more at https://earmarkcpe.com.

Attention: This is a machine-generated transcript. As such, there may be spelling, grammar, and accuracy errors throughout. Thank you for your understanding!

David Leary: [00:00:00] Are you tired of dealing with unreliable, stodgy business banks that don't care about you or your small business clients? Then you'll love to learn more about really a no fee online banking and money management platform built for you and your small business clients. With Relay, you get to say farewell to broken bank feeds, password sharing expired two factor authentication codes and vague incomplete transaction data. Stay tuned to hear more from our sponsor Relay later in the episode.

Blake Oliver: [00:00:28] The older I get David, the more I realize that most people in positions of power have no clue what they're doing and don't do due diligence and just invest based on relationships. And they got there a lot of times because they got lucky with one deal. You know, if you're a VC and you make a bunch of investments and you get one unicorn like you invested in Google or you invested in Facebook or you invest in whatever, you get fabulously wealthy and now you have a lot of money and everybody thinks you're really smart, but maybe you just got lucky.

David Leary: [00:00:59] Coming to you weekly from the on recording studio. This is The Cloud Accounting Podcast.

Blake Oliver: [00:01:09] Welcome to the Cloud Accounting podcast. I'm Blake.

David Leary: [00:01:11] Oliver. And I'm David Leary.

Blake Oliver: [00:01:13] And we have way too much to talk about this week, David.

David Leary: [00:01:16] All right. Let's not talk about Twitter because that was very distracting last night. I'm trying to prep for the show and it felt like Twitter was going to be just turned off forever last night. But it was still here this morning.

Blake Oliver: [00:01:27] Yeah. Elon Musk and Twitter. Yeah. I don't want to talk about that because is there anything to talk about?

David Leary: [00:01:33] There was almost an accounting story, though, because apparently the whole accounting team and payroll teams all been locked out of the building. Maybe there's an accounting story, actually.

Blake Oliver: [00:01:41] So the one accounting story in that was Elon Musk was going to pay out the bonuses to the people who are getting terminated because he doesn't want to get sued. You know, like all their options and all that stuff, Right. Like that. We're set to vest really soon after he took control. Yeah. And so he actually asked who was ever hired to payroll to do an audit to make sure that all the people that are going to get bonuses actually exist. He requested a payroll audit to make sure there weren't, like, fake employees, which, you know, sounds a little crazy, but also sounds reasonable. If you just took over this company, you have no idea what's going on. Maybe an audit is in order.

David Leary: [00:02:20] So it's funny because I feel like at some level, Twitter hasn't done anything new since I've been on it in 2007.

Blake Oliver: [00:02:29] It worked, so it's still working.

David Leary: [00:02:31] If that's true, I think that the fail whales went away and they got it to work and that was it. And maybe it's good enough. But at the same time, I probably see the point of view of maybe there's a lot of bloat. You don't need that many people to run it anymore.

Blake Oliver: [00:02:41] Maybe not. Maybe not. Well, David, I had a really nice week and it's the beautiful time of year here in Arizona. Everyone is coming to visit. And this is one of the unexpected perks of moving to scottsdale from l.a. Is now a lot of people come to visit on vacation to the phenix area, and when they're in town, they say, hey, blake, i'm in town. Let's meet up. And so I got to meet up on was it wednesday with Joel hughes, ceo of wright networks, which will be familiar to our listeners as I think they're the largest host of QuickBooks desktop. And that was previously their claim to fame was if you needed to host QuickBooks desktop in the cloud, go get right networks. And they had I think I even used them at one point and it worked great. And you might be thinking like, Well, that's weird. Like why would somebody who's into cloud accounting like me be interested in QuickBooks desktop hosting?

David Leary: [00:03:36] But we've talked to we've talked about this show a lot. I feel like right now works big business acquisitions. They're they feel like they're the only desktop hosting company that's trying to be cloud, like they're taking the next steps.

Blake Oliver: [00:03:48] And so Joel Hughes came in, I guess, six years ago, and he has basically grown right networks from being very focused on that QuickBooks hosting market to being an MSSP. So they are the managed service provider for all of your I.T needs and that is growing like crazy. They are doing really well.

David Leary: [00:04:08] My understanding is when the pandemic hit, obviously there was these tons of firms that had zero in the cloud. Their only option was to go to somebody like that and get it all moved instantly.

Blake Oliver: [00:04:17] And even if you are purely cloud, let's say you've set up a bookkeeping firm that you know, you don't have to worry about the desktop tax software and you can do everything in your browser. You still need at a certain point, you need an MSSP to handle all your hardware because you still got to have computers for the staff and you have to secure those computers because those computers are the portal to all your online apps. So as much as we want to, we can't truly go 100% cloud, especially once you get to a certain size. So that was really fun to chat. And we just, you know, nerd it out all things accounting and technology and it's fun. So if you're ever in Phenix or Scottsdale and you want to meet up, look me up. I love getting out of the house.

David Leary: [00:05:02] Get me out of my house up. Maybe I'll drive up. I need a heads up on these things. I can't find out on the show.

Blake Oliver: [00:05:08] Yeah, You're 2 hours away, right? So is it 2 hours to Tucson?

David Leary: [00:05:11] Yeah. Basically, it depends on how we drive traffic, but there's always that drive, so you.

Blake Oliver: [00:05:16] Can't count. Well, so the big news, like big stories are FTC's. And the question is, you know, what do we talk about that hasn't already been talked about over and over and over again in the mainstream press because it's been huge news. It's been top of The Wall Street Journal, it's been New York Times, it's been every single blog. It seems like everyone, all the podcasts are covering it.

David Leary: [00:05:39] And so paint a picture of how big it was. It trumped Taylor Swift's ticket sales that went on this week. Like, if you really think about that, like Taylor Swift put her concert tickets on sale and that's a huge event and it barely flipped by because of this.

Blake Oliver: [00:05:55] Oh, well, I saw the story about how the shortage of tickets for Taylor Swift's concerts are driving prices up to tens of thousands of dollars for a ticket. Some some site had it for 78,000.

David Leary: [00:06:08] For That should have been the number one story this week. But I.

Blake Oliver: [00:06:12] Can't. You know what? Taylor Swift could have saved if she'd done a partnership with FTA to sell the tickets as tokens.

David Leary: [00:06:19] The only celebrity that didn't endorse FDX, apparently, though.

Blake Oliver: [00:06:23] So I want to talk a little bit about FTA and specifically the balance sheet and the internal controls, all the accounting stuff or the lack of accounting. I think that's fascinating and we'll save the other stuff. Everyone else can go to the other podcasts. You listen to a really good episode of Planet Money. David Right.

David Leary: [00:06:40] I listen to go to Planet Money's podcast. They have a I think it's the ME just confirmed. It's the second most recent episode and it gives a good overview and 17 minutes from day one of Sam Bankman-fried start in crypto to him losing everything. And it's it's a good listen if you want an overview of everything because we just can't do it in the podcast. I actually think it could be a week of podcasts. There's that.

Blake Oliver: [00:07:09] Could be. Thank you to everyone who has joined us live today. We stream live now every Friday, typically at 10 a.m. Pacific 1 p.m. Eastern, follow our YouTube channel Search for Cloud Accounting podcast and subscribe and you can get notified when we go live. And we've got Taylor who is listening in.

David Leary: [00:07:29] Taylor Swift jumped right on She heard a.

Blake Oliver: [00:07:31] Different different Taylor okay thank you Taylor Taylor is an Austin Taylor says I would come to Phenix, but I'm in Austin. Y'all should come to Austin. I love Austin. I go there whenever I possibly can. So, Taylor, if you can find an excuse for me to make a business trip to Austin, I will gladly come. And we should meet up. Yelena says hello. Blake and David sending you a huge hello while streaming from Croatia. Wow. Yeah. Yelena We go way back to the early zero days, so that's really awesome. Great to great to see you or chat with you. And I cannot wait to someday go to Croatia. My wife did study abroad in Croatia in college and still talks about it to this day. It was magical for her. We've also got Christopher. Hello, fellow cloud heads. Hey, Christopher, thanks for joining us. Christopher is in NYC, also one of my favorite places because my brother lives there. So Christopher, next time I'm going to New York City, I will. I'll try to give you a heads up on the show and you can we can meet up. And as always, if you want to email us, we are Cloud accounting podcast at earmark CPE. Com that goes to both me and David. And in fact, we have quite a lot of listener mail that we have saved up over the past few weeks that we need to get to both voicemails and emails. So where do we go from here? David What else other than.

David Leary: [00:08:55] I think you said you poured some Baileys in your coffee and sat down and looked at this balance sheet for me. So what did you see? Because I have yet to look at it. I just never got around to it. So what is in this magic balance sheet?

Blake Oliver: [00:09:06] I mean, it's hard to even call it a balance sheet. And I am looking at this right now on the live stream. I think I'm sharing my screen.

David Leary: [00:09:14] It's kind of hard to read it.

Blake Oliver: [00:09:16] Okay, It is. I mean, so this is what leaked this. What we're looking at right now is a spreadsheet that leaked to I think it was coindesk leaked it, I can't remember. And this is what set off the whole thing.

David Leary: [00:09:30] I went sell one. Just read the note and sell one.

Blake Oliver: [00:09:33] Okay, Sell one a says note. All of these are rough values and could be slightly up. Yes, there is also obviously a chance of typos, etc. They also change a bit over time as trades happen. So this is something that the founder of Sam Bankman-fried, SBF, whatever, founded by SBF, whatever his name is, right. The guy who walks around with the T-shirt and the shorts and he looks like Jonah Hill is going to play him in the movie, a version of this. Right? And it's just it's just a shit show. I am just like, it doesn't it's not a balance sheet because it doesn't balance. And that's what has been pointed out many times. I mean, I don't need to go through this, but it's basically there's a listing of liabilities that add up to something and then there's a listing of assets and there's they're classified as liquid, less liquid and illiquid. And then down on row 2425, there's another note that says there were many things I wish I could do differently than I did, but the largest are represented by these two things the poorly labeled internal bank related account and the size of customer withdrawals during a run on the bank. I mean, there's a row. 23 says hidden, poorly labeled fiat at account, and it's -$8 billion. I think that's so. So this I mean, okay, what's the takeaway here?

David Leary: [00:10:58] This is I don't think if a crazy person like this is I'm literally mentally this is completely if you just had somebody mentally unstable creating a just give them Excel to play with, this is what you get out of it. That's what this is.

Blake Oliver: [00:11:13] So I think I don't think SBF is crazy. I think he's just a young entrepreneur, business owner, and this is what you would get if somebody who doesn't actually know how to do accounting put together a balance sheet. They're clearly no accountants, clearly no accountants working at FTI. It's just impossible to imagine that. And something that makes me think that is this tweet thread that came out about their internal controls. So we've learned a lot about the internal controls or lack thereof that were FTC's because of the bankruptcy filing, which is being, I guess, managed the liquidation or the bankruptcy is being managed by the same guy who did Enron. And he wrote that it's like worse than anything he's ever seen in his whole life. So this is worse, far worse than Enron, because at least Enron was audited. Now, the auditors were unethical. Right. And were helping their client commit fraud. But in this case, we didn't even have any accountants involved.

David Leary: [00:12:11] Can you better explain this guy's rule? So is he kind of like a CEO for hire where he comes in to he's like the wolf in Pulp Fiction, like he came in to Enron and ran that during the bankruptcy. Is that his specialty or something?

Blake Oliver: [00:12:23] I guess. I guess so. Like and I know this this kind of role exists. Somebody has to take over when there's a bankruptcy. You can't like let the current CEO keep going. Right.

David Leary: [00:12:33] And so this guy's just waiting around for the phone to ring. And then it's like, all right, I'm in. He is the he's like the wolf.

Blake Oliver: [00:12:38] All right. All right. So let's go through this thread because it's really good. And this is by Genevieve Roach, Doctor Roach, Doctor CFA, I'm going to put this up on the screen here and we'll read through it. This is from at at g r Doctor at g r Doctor. I read the 30 page bankruptcy court filing. How bad were FTC's internal controls? Here are the worst examples.

David Leary: [00:13:02] I pause for one second. Click on her credentials. She's a CFA, so certified fraud exam Accountant.

Blake Oliver: [00:13:09] What is a CFA Certified Chartered Chartered Financial Analyst? I knew that. Chartered Financial analyst Okay, let's go back to this tweet thread. Okay. How bad were FTC's internal controls? One employees submitted expense reimbursements over chat. A random manager would accept or reject these reimbursements with an emoji. Now, I mean, anyone who has used Slack knows that that can that can happen. That's not. That's not. This is not. Terrible. But you would hope they would be using some sort of like system for this. But I guess not. Okay. Number two related party loans. Alameda Research. Ftc's hedge fund gave Sam Bankman-fried a $1 billion personal loan. They also loaned Director of Engineering Nishad Singh $543 million. Three very few records were kept. Most decisions were made over chat with the messages automatically deleted after a certain time. If you're going to commit fraud, that sounds like exactly the kind of system you'd want to set.

David Leary: [00:14:10] Up right there on the free plan of Slack. So that way you can't access the old messages.

Blake Oliver: [00:14:15] Well, so I know people who use signal and they it's encrypted and then you can set it so that the messages automatically self-destruct, self self-destructed. Which, you know, look if you if you it's a good thing. It's basically a way to create a phone call kind of situation where there isn't a record over chat, which you might want to have for legitimate reasons, but you also might want to have for bad reasons. Ftc's number for FTC's, a company valued at 32 billion, never had board meetings. Neither did most of the subsidiaries. Five had no cash management system management. This is the bad one. And this is goes back goes back to that balance sheet. Management had no idea how much cash was on hand at any given time or even where all their cash was. Six didn't keep proper records of who they employed. Employees and contractors co-mingled throughout the different companies without proper documentation of how they spent their time. Certain employees can't be located, which could mean that some employees were fake. Seven corporate funds were used to purchase personal use. Real estate and employees and executives put their names on homes purchased with company funds. Eight crypto deposited by customers wasn't weren't even recorded on the balance sheet. Presumably all crypto assets just went into one central slush fund used for whatever. That's that's that's nuts. Nine The filing makes clear that Sam Bankman-fried does not speak for the company and that his erratic and misleading public statements should be disregarded. So yeah, no internal controls really. And the cash management thing is just kind of shocking, right? Like and we're talking billions of dollars of funds in this exchange with no controls in place. I thought it could be this bad. We've talked about this since January, about how so much of this is unregulated and unaudited. And there's really no guarantees that any of the the reserves are real with a lot of these crypto exchanges, with a lot of these stablecoins. How do we know you're just trusting somebody in the Bahamas?

David Leary: [00:16:15] The Bahamas, it's always in the Bahamas to like.

Blake Oliver: [00:16:17] Who often has like a weird sketchy past. Right. And people are willing to do it. And I guess I guess the thing that this what really bothers me about this is that you would think that the public would be clamoring for auditors and demanding that we get an independent third party verification by a reputable firm of this stuff. Nobody cares. You go through Twitter and you search for like audit and you search for crypto and exchange and tether. It's like threads with like the biggest thread might have 100, 200 likes or something like that. Nobody it's not even on the radar of popularity on Twitter. And I wonder why is that? Because the audit profession has become so irrelevant that or just not understood that nobody even cares about this stuff anymore. I feel like we should be out there saying like, Hey, we have a solution, guys, some reasonable regulation, and get some independent third party auditors in here. And we can we can have crypto and we can eat our cake and, you know, have it too, and everything would be great. But nope. Christopher says even with internal controls, the controls would have been in place to likely facilitate this behavior anyway. Yeah, that goes to the back door. That SBF had programed apparently into their internal software so that he could move funds whenever he wanted back and forth through his, you know, related party entity. But I mean, I feel like if there had been accountants internal controls like that, you know like but what the.

David Leary: [00:17:51] Controls on the other side of this, on the VC side and the investor side I think Sequoia invested $200 million or 230 million, I guess into FDX, and then he invested 500 million into Sequoia. Like, how are these things not getting showing up on other people's audits, other people's books, other people's. Eyeballs, right? Like, is it just blind? Hey, we saw a slide deck. We get 15% guaranteed return. We're in.

Blake Oliver: [00:18:21] I think the older I get, David, the more I realize that most people in positions of power have no clue what they're doing. And don't do due diligence and just invest based on relationships. And they got there a lot of times because they got lucky with one deal. You know, if you're a VC and you make a bunch of investments and you get one unicorn like you invested in Google or you invested in Facebook or you invest in whatever, you get fabulously wealthy and now you have a lot of money and everybody thinks you're really smart, but maybe you just got lucky. And there's a lot of VCs out there who are playing with other people's money because remember, they're putting in their own money, but they're mostly using the money of.

David Leary: [00:18:59] The people's partners.

Blake Oliver: [00:19:01] Other people's money.

David Leary: [00:19:01] People's retirement funds.

Blake Oliver: [00:19:03] Yeah, right. So they're gambling with other people's money and they're doing 100. They're doing hundreds of deals. It's not possible for them to do actual due diligence on all of them. So they're basically just playing roulette. Right. Let's put a little money here, money here, money here, money here, and hope that we get rich.

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David Leary: [00:20:47] I said this a couple weeks ago as well. You know, when a big firm buys land and in the metaverse it all it legitimizes this. And so they use it as their marketing material to push it more. So I went on this journey and I tweeted out. I was like, Is there anything from an accounting leader that says, Hey, maybe be careful with crypto? And Seth Feinberg, who used to be at Accounting Web us, he sent me a link to an article that was March 13 of 2018. And this article is written by Brian Tankersley, CPA. So he titled this article Cryptocurrencies What Accountants Need to Know. Very second paragraph. Oh no, sorry. Very first paragraph. Wall Street has more gamblers than Las Vegas, and speculative investments in cryptocurrencies exploit the same fear of missing out by used using get rich quick scammers since the beginning of time. So he went on to an article about how thin this is and this is in 2018 before it got really crazy.

Blake Oliver: [00:21:49] Right. So there's one article there, but.

David Leary: [00:21:51] One where one person, one person in our industry from a position of leadership that said don't other than us, who we get called out for being morons and ignorant and don't know what we're talking about. Nobody, nobody at the top is.

Blake Oliver: [00:22:03] Where are the state CPA society leaders? Where are the boards of accountancy? Where is the AICPA saying, Hey guys, maybe you shouldn't be investing all this money into unregulated and unaudited investment, speculative investments and cryptocurrency exchanges like we have been saying it. But you know, we have a tiny audience compared to those folks, and instead they're pumping it up. And the the firms that have been involved in this have been pumping it up, too, which raises a lot of questions about independence. So so I was very excited to see my old accounting firm, ah, Nino in the news. Unfortunately, it was not exactly good news. The Wall Street Journal this came out, I think it was yesterday or the day before. The headline is FTC's auditors doubled as crypto industry Cheerleaders and you guess who's featured in this article? It is Armand Nino and David Full circle the Metaverse accounting firm Prager Mets. They also they also audited FDX. They were involved in well an audit is I think a very this is part of the problem is it's a very loose term here. Because they didn't actually ever get audited. I mean, look, if you can see on the screen, David, like Ahmadinejad had a Twitter account called at Ahmadinejad Crypto.

Blake Oliver: [00:23:30] And like back in December, they tweeted SBF FDX tweeting at the founder FDX. Let's go, buddy. You know, like there like that alone would be something as. As an independent auditor, you should never say that. Right. You don't promote your client that way. But here's the thing is that. All of these? Not all of them. Some of these crypto exchanges, some of these companies will say we got a third party audit like Tether, for instance. And then you go and you look at the report, it's not actually an audit, it's an, quote, attestation report, unquote. So some sort of agreed upon procedures, engagement, but it's not a full audit and it's not an audit of internal controls. And so it's very misleading. And I think we as a profession have created the situation where people are really confused because what is the difference between an attestation report and an audit? We've muddied the waters. Do you know what I mean? And people are pointing to these attestation reports and saying, Oh yeah, there's reserves there. But really all it's saying is at a point in time, one point in time, we we, you know, validated the reserves. It's not a full audit.

David Leary: [00:24:42] So it's yeah, it can't really be really muddy. It's the same thing with the advising. Right. Because I ask this on Twitter, I'm like, how come accountants or leadership telling accountants to tell their clients to stay away from this? And like, well, you know, we don't have a license. It's which we call it a security or we can't talk about securities and investments. I'm like, But it's not even a security. It's not a security. So you totally could tell your clients not to do this, but it's and then I'm kind of thinking, I Googled CPA oath. And then I'm wondering, like, shouldn't this fall under a some some of the oaths talk about public the public. Right. Protecting the public and some of them talk about integrity and what's the other word that was that came up in a lot of them. If you independence, oath.

Blake Oliver: [00:25:26] Independence, integrity, protecting the public.

David Leary: [00:25:29] It's those kind of yeah, it's the five of those things. It's like, where is this happening?

Blake Oliver: [00:25:34] It's not. And I think it was there for a lot of people to see. And and we have failed as a profession to protect the public, to remind them like this is important stuff.

David Leary: [00:25:45] And let me remind of a story from 2021 June. And we talked about this on the show. So. A lot of these companies, to be honest, are their half ass. It's very clear. So AICPA had this in their lap. It was so obvious how half and I don't remember which one of these coin companies it was. But AICPA engaged 2021 in June. The biggest sponsor was one of these coin. I don't know if it was Coin Tracker or Coinbase or one of these. I forgot the exact name, but they sponsored the lapels or the badges. Right? They, they, they had a keynote, spent tons of money. They had one of the biggest booth spaces on the floor. They show up, two dudes show up. They got no booth, they got nothing. It's just tape on a floor. Like they paid the most money to the CPA and basically showed up just like two dudes with backpacks. And it's like, so obvious how half assed that is. That like, how you know what I'm saying? Like, how does this happen? And then the thing that makes me really crazy, you know, that night, I think we are we're one of the clubs in Vegas. And this guy was definitely he was surrounded by like 12 hookers in a booth, like at this bar.

David Leary: [00:26:56] It was very obvious and kind of a disgusting looking weird dude. And you ask and like, Yeah, apparently he's like a bitcoin bro that made like billion dollars or something. And then so then following my next trip to Vegas in the summer, I'm in a taxicab leaving. This was Sage Intacct, and this is November of last year. So that's the peak of Bitcoin and the taxi cab drivers driving me back to the airport telling me about how much he's going to make on crypto and this and Bitcoin and to the moon. You know that typical verbiage and every time we have one of these collapses like this, I always think about that taxi cab driver. Yeah, like, like did he lose his house? Like, like is he divorced now? Like, because he wasted all the money? Like, I really. Because the real people are affected by this. Yeah, right. Real, real people. It's not just the investors because that's the difference with this Ponzi versus all others. This Ponzi is in the cash app. It's in Venmo, it's in PayPal. You can just spend $1,000 in crypto like that.

Blake Oliver: [00:27:55] Yeah, it's a Ponzi for the people.

David Leary: [00:27:57] Ponzi for the people. Yes.

Blake Oliver: [00:27:58] That's a.

David Leary: [00:27:59] Crypto. You have equality now. Everybody can be Ponzi.

Blake Oliver: [00:28:02] So here's the scary thing, right? Was the second largest exchange, the second largest crypto exchange, the largest one, Binance still hasn't gone through an audit and doesn't even have a proof of reserves report, which is that attestation that falls short of a full audit, which is supposed to show that they have the reserves to pay out their depositors should there be a run on the bank and they still don't have it. They claim that they can't find they can't get it done because their auditor that they want to use is busy doing proof of reserves for others. So that's great, right? That could mean that it was either Prager, Metis or Ahmed Nino that they want to do their audit.

David Leary: [00:28:46] And actually says that between Binance and FTX, like Binance was going to acquire FDX.

Blake Oliver: [00:28:51] Well, so there was hope that they would bail them out. But then when they actually looked at the books, they said, Oh, no, we can't, because there was such a hole. There was, you know, the 8 billion.

David Leary: [00:29:00] Almost start the run to begin with that happened FDX. Even before they looked at the books. And my suspicion is this they looked at their own books and realized, Oh my God, we're going to bust if anybody, or vice versa, right? And they're like, Well, let's kill them first before they kill us, causing a run on us.

Blake Oliver: [00:29:20] I just think it's so amazing that Prager Metis, you know, that first accounting firm to open an office in the metaverse that we were making fun of, they were involved in the audit of CFTC's trading. The main international operation.

David Leary: [00:29:31] And the Wall Street Journal calls out about their metaverse.

Blake Oliver: [00:29:33] Now. Now they were so they were audited, but it was only for 2021. So, you know, like as of the date, like it was only up to the end of that year. So everything that happened this year, there was never any oversight. There's never any third party verification. And they didn't do any internal control stuff because the only companies that have to do audits of internal controls are public companies, not private companies. And I mean, there's not even a requirement that the crypto exchanges get audited because they are outside of the rules. They live outside of the regulations that would apply to banks and would apply to anyone else.

David Leary: [00:30:07] Outside of the U.S. They literally live outside everything.

Blake Oliver: [00:30:11] So, you know, I think it's it's inevitable that regulation will come at this point, like because too many regular people are going to get fleeced and lose their. Lose their money. And we saw this in history, right? State banks back in the 1800s used to issue their own currency when there wasn't a federal currency. And eventually everybody realized that wasn't working because there were too many runs on banks. Banks collapse, people lost all their money. And then we eventually got federal regulation, right? We got a national currency. And so far, it's you know, it's got its problems, but it's still a lot better than this situation. So I think that's I don't know. Is there anything else to say about this? Have our listeners got any input on this? Let's see. Oh, Aaron said, please make Ponzi for the people. This episode's title. There we go. A Ponzi for the people.

David Leary: [00:31:03] Well, that was that wasn't that Freed's game thing. What was it called like? Move in money to the poor that he was doing something like.

Blake Oliver: [00:31:12] And that's the best part is he was considered to be like the savior of crypto, right? Like this is the irony of it is that he was going to Capitol Hill and testifying about how we want responsible regulation. It reminds me of Mark Zuckerberg asking for regulation. Right. Like his platform is being used to manipulate elections and he's the one calling for it. And meanwhile, we've got SBF calling for regulation. Meanwhile, his cryptocurrency exchange is the one that needs it the most. Christopher says influencers with their pump and dump is beyond insidious. This is crazy too. I since I started posting about FTC's on Twitter on every single thread, there's a bot posting some sort of pump and dump scheme.

David Leary: [00:31:53] I had to mute a bunch of phrases because it was just overtaking my whole Twitter experience. Yeah. As soon as you talk about crypto now if I talk about anything else. I don't get spammed like that. I'm pretty confident I could tweet the word porn and I won't get a bunch of spammers like it is. Only happens with the illegal dudes. Pump in and dump in whatever this new. Oh, it's this. Something's going off on Friday night. I don't even know. I had to just block it.

Blake Oliver: [00:32:18] Now, there's another way that this whole thing could affect our accounting technology space that Raphael pointed out to me. Thanks for joining us, Raphael. He said that FTC's and Alameda, whatever. These companies together have done a ton of their own VC investing and that it's possible that a lot of this money is going to get clawed back in Chapter 11. So we might see a bunch of these crypto startups, even ones that are like focusing on accounting and serving accountants go under because now their promised funding is going to disappear. So that could have roll on effects to the accounting profession. But yeah, it's.

David Leary: [00:33:00] Fraud, bleak like.

Blake Oliver: [00:33:01] It is. It is the golden age of fraud. As our friends on the OMI Fraud podcast have said. And if you haven't listened to Oh my Fraud, good, check it out. I'm going to demand that Greg and Caleb do an episode on FTC's because it's the biggest fraud in history. I think we can safely say, if it's bigger than Enron, it's got to be the biggest.

David Leary: [00:33:29] This episode of The Cloud Accounting Podcast is sponsored by Relay. The other day Chris Maskey of Prefix Accounting tweeted the following quote, Not so hot. Take If your business banking cannot maintain a stable QBO connection, you do not in fact have a business account that's a cheap knockoff of a real bank account, end quote. And I could not agree more. What's the point of a business banking account if it doesn't integrate with your accounting tech stack? Really is a no fee online business banking and money management platform built for you and your clients really integrates in your text act with direct integrations to QuickBooks Online, Xero and Gusto, and improves your workflows by allowing members of your team to have their own set of secure logon credentials to clients banking data. No more bugging your client for two factor authentication codes. And did I mention the ultra reliable bank feeds? And your clients get powerful online banking features like 20 individual checking accounts and 50 physical or virtual MasterCard debit cards, which can be assigned to their team members to stop fighting with, as Chris tweeted, a cheap knockoff of a real bank and instead get a business bank account that cares about you and your small business clients. Head over to Cloudaccountingpodcast.com Promo Relay that is Cloudaccountingpodcast.com Promo Ford slash Relay y Relay Business banking for your accounting tech stack. I don't have anything else on this. So, you know, I'm happy to see Tom Brady go down.

Blake Oliver: [00:34:54] Oh, God. Tom Brady. All the celebrities that were, you know, pumping up. The other thing that kind of sucks about this is like the employees. So apparently a lot of the employees were being paid. The international employees were being paid by deposits into their account.

David Leary: [00:35:09] Oh, yes.

Blake Oliver: [00:35:10] So they've lost not not only have they lost jobs, they've lost their life savings potentially. And that is truly sad.

David Leary: [00:35:16] And that happened a lot of Enron people, too. They had too much. There were, too, because Enron stock was going to the moon. And so they just put almost all their salary to Enron. And then they lost their job and their life savings all in one shot.

Blake Oliver: [00:35:29] Okay, one more tweet and then we'll move on, I promise. Lynn Alden tweeted ten days ago a really good explanation of what happened to EFT. And I think one of the fundamental problems of cryptocurrency. This is how she describes it. She said, Imagine McDonald's makes its own money, let's call them clown bucks, keeps most of it and sells some to the market. Mcdonald's then uses their remaining clown bucks as collateral for actual loans. And then the people remember clown bucks aren't real.

David Leary: [00:36:01] Well, not only that, they actually create a second cloud box in third cloud box with other names, and they just add those to their balance sheet. They just add them in like like they just don't exist. I am the clown Bucks.

Blake Oliver: [00:36:15] Clown bucks. Right. And that's what a lot of these tokens are. You So you can. This is this is the trick. This is the accounting trick. It's a brilliant trick. David. I'm going to create 100 Blake tokens, and I'm going to sell you ten tokens for $10. Okay? You buy my ten tokens? Now I have 90 tokens on my balance sheet and I'm going to say those are worth $90 because David paid a dollar each. See how I've invented an asset?

David Leary: [00:36:45] Yes.

Blake Oliver: [00:36:46] Yeah, that's what that's what these people are doing. It's that simple. And it could be even a smaller fraction. I could sell you one token for a dollar. And now I'm going to say I have $99 of black tokens.

David Leary: [00:36:59] But if I was your friend and I was like, Hey, Blake, let's get this scheme together, I will buy that first token for $100.

Blake Oliver: [00:37:07] Yeah. That's the scam. It's really simple when you get down to it. Blockchain crypto. Oh, it sounds so complicated. No, it's just. It's just another way of doing a really old scam. Hazardous items. Thank you for joining us again. Hazardous says so happy US millennials and Zoomers get to live through an actual Enron. Thank you, Marcus, for keeping us accountants employed. Actually, this if we see reasonable right cryptocurrency regulation, it could be a boom for the accounting profession. But then the question is how do we staff it? We don't have enough people to do all this stuff. So I guess a really good opportunity for our friends in the accounting crypto tech space because we're going to need technology solutions. You can't do it in spreadsheets.

David Leary: [00:37:53] Yeah, the accounting, like digital assets, are going to be flying around, right? Some crypto, some it's this you as a corporation are going to have it on your balance sheet eventually. Yep. And how do you account for that properly? And you're right, the those are going to be the winners in all this is because because I don't think it's ever going to go up 100% go away. There's always going to be some new digital asset coin token thing. Yeah, they're going to be flying around the Internet. It's just a bunch of electronic electrodes, ones and zeros, and you're just going to have to make sure it posts the debits and credits correctly and companies that can do that for you. Price stand to win the most in this whole thing. Unless those companies have been invested in by FDX, then so.

Blake Oliver: [00:38:31] So go and listen to our interview with Pat White and Raphael Casas at Bit Wave. It's one of our bonus episodes from Suit World Bit Wave. That was a really interesting conversation and really cool what they're doing with NFT marketplaces and just like accounting for digital assets, a lot of a lot of interesting stuff going on. And you know, maybe this is an opportunity, right? Like now. Now we can actually have some real crypto use cases and not just this fake fake value being created. I always say this. We we need to educate the public to think more like auditors. And when you're making investments, if you think like an auditor, it's really hard to screw up. And so how do I take what I've learned in accounting and apply that? How do I think like an auditor, I say, okay, who am I giving my money to? Like, who are they? Are they reputable? Can I trust them? Do they have a third party verification of some sort that they're going to do what they say they're going to do? And then I ask, what are they going to put the money in? Like, where are they investing my money? And then I ask the second question is, okay, now that I know where they are and I trust them and I know I know where they're putting my money, I ask, Do I understand how this investment generates returns? How does it give me interest.

David Leary: [00:39:53] Or produce value?

Blake Oliver: [00:39:54] How does it create? Yeah, how does it create value? There you.

David Leary: [00:39:56] Go. So that it will grow because it doesn't produce value. It should not grow well.

Blake Oliver: [00:40:00] And if the way that it grows is fundamentally by getting other people to buy in, that's a Ponzi scheme and that's what most of these tokens are. They generate a yield. That's what Alameda Research they were investing in yield farming. So they were buying tokens that generate a yield that give you interest. But the tokens didn't generate value in any in any way. So the only way that it could pay interest was if other people bought into the token. So it's it's actually basically a digital Ponzi scheme. That's what these tokens are. It's paying interest to the current token holders by getting new people to buy tokens. That's that's a Ponzi scheme.

David Leary: [00:40:41] Yeah. Well, and now guess what? I'm now one. What is it when you just hold it forever? What's the deal? What's the Hodl hashtag? Hodl.

Blake Oliver: [00:40:50] Yeah, Hodl.

David Leary: [00:40:53] It's like a misspelling. Means I'm going to hold it forever. Well, good news, everybody. I am now a crypto holder of the hell. That acronym is because my crypto balances are so low that I can't afford, I can't do the transfer to move it back to USD. So remember that time in February of 2020 I put $4 of cash in one of those coin machines at the grocery store and I bought Bitcoin at the grocery store that's now only worth a dollar 16 and I can't get it out. Back to cash.

Blake Oliver: [00:41:22] Well, you made a bet on Twitter with Michael Doan where? Yes, I think and I think I think he got the raw side of that deal because you said that you would bet him your entire Bitcoin balance or assets.

David Leary: [00:41:33] My whole and I have your whole portfolio. $3 here, DA 16 here. I have $7 over here. Yeah, well, you set it up $13 maybe.

Blake Oliver: [00:41:42] And then he accepted your bet. But I think he has a lot more crypto than you do. So if you win, you get his crypto holdings, right?

David Leary: [00:41:48] Technically, if he's not still in crypto nine years from now, my guess is he's not going to be.

Blake Oliver: [00:41:53] Well, then you wouldn't have anything to get, would you?

David Leary: [00:41:58] This episode of The Cloud Accounting Podcast is sponsored by Kanopy. Did you know that Kanopy has a partnership with the IRS? This means that you can now use Kanopy to pull your client transcripts. The integration is approved by the IRS and can be configured to automatically pull transcripts. You can easily monitor if and when something changes. Now, here's the best part. Once you have your client's transcripts, you can use canopies notices feature to help you resolve your client's notices. Kanopy has a library of 350 plus prebuilt federal and state notice templates that provide an overview of the notice type, as well as walk you through the recommended steps to resolution and Canopy can even create an auto fill your iris response letters. Canopy also integrates with QuickBooks Online Xero FreshBooks Crm's form builder, spreadsheets, calendars, Email, and Zapier. They even have a mobile app. Centralized file management Fillable, PDFs, a client portal, task management, and the list goes on and on to get a demo of Canopy and to receive a $40 Amazon gift card. Head over to Cloudaccountingpodcast.com Promo Canopy That is Cloudaccountingpodcast.com promo for Canopy. Why?

Blake Oliver: [00:43:05] Okay.

David Leary: [00:43:06] All right. No more.

Blake Oliver: [00:43:07] Can we do no more? So we do. Listener voice.

David Leary: [00:43:10] I'm just going to suggest that as long as nobody has listener mail about crypto, because I don't want to derail this. All right, so let me talk about workflow as though we got a great email about workflows, right?

Blake Oliver: [00:43:21] We got an email about workflows. We got an email about the 150 hour rule. We got some voicemails. I'm going to play a voicemail first.

David Leary: [00:43:29] All right.

Blake Oliver: [00:43:30] Because if you send us a voicemail, we're a podcast, right? So we like voicemail. So we we're going to give the priority higher priority.

Joe Rothman: [00:43:37] Blake. Hey, this is Joe Rothman. I just had to leave you a voicemail. So I'm in my fifties, you know, 30 year corporate accounting as a reporting person. And I just became aware of the Bach and Cloud Accounting podcast. And in that fraud podcast in the last couple of weeks, just can't get enough of them. It's still entertaining. So. So and then you have great guests. So even more learning than just the boilerplate stuff you hear on the big four pod podcasts or webcasts. Not that they're bad, but this is really good in addition to those and much more entertaining. And so I just spent the night in nine Box and started and really enjoy the content. Joe Gutman.

Blake Oliver: [00:44:32] Thank you, Joe. Really appreciate that. And as a reminder to our listeners, you can get free CPE credit on the earmark app for listening to this episode. So go do what Joe did and support us by subscribing to earmark. When you subscribe, you get unlimited access. Can take as much CPE as you need for listening to podcasts, and that is very relevant given we're almost at the end of the year and most people do their CPE in December, so get those hours. Here's a message from Samuel Samuel. I'm not going to say his last name because I'm never sure if if people want to be identified. David This is the one you were talking about, about workflow. So we were we were talking last week with Joe Woodard about workflow tools, and we saw a stat that 50% of firms don't have any workflow technology, nothing.

David Leary: [00:45:20] At least they're using Excel. They just build it all and they just have checklists and excel.

Blake Oliver: [00:45:24] But and then Joe.

David Leary: [00:45:25] Said, Not know what I'm talking about.

Blake Oliver: [00:45:26] Well, no, I would agree with you. I'd be like.

David Leary: [00:45:28] Somebody know you or Joe. Joe said, David, no, that's not true.

Blake Oliver: [00:45:32] Yeah, that was that was hard to believe, But Joe confirmed it. And you know, I'm going to believe Joe, right? Like, like Joe's been around in this profession for a while, and so Sam said, Hi, Blake and David. I listened to the most recent episode where you talked about half of CPA firms not having any workflow management tools. I just started a job at a CPA firm, and I was kind of shocked when I was being shown how they manage projects. They have one large folder and each staff member has their own subfolder within this folder. When a project is assigned to you, a control sheet will show up in your folder and you work on it. And once it's done, you put this document back into the manager's folder or whoever will be working on the next piece of the project. To answer David's question, no, they don't even use Excel to track them. I asked the partner who was training me if they have considered using any workflow management tools, and he acknowledged that it would be useful and they've had the discussions, but the six partners could not come to a consensus, and so they just keep doing it the way they've always done it. For context, this is a full service firm with about 50 employees and serves small to midsize businesses. Tax department did over 1000 returns. Sincerely, Sam.

David Leary: [00:46:43] So okay, yes, the workflow seems clunky in these envelopes, but it's the real issue in this email that because of the partnership model, you can't move forward and grow because you can't get consensus on six partners.

Blake Oliver: [00:46:55] David, you nailed it there. Yeah, that's it, right? They would do it, but they couldn't get all six to agree. This is the problem with the partner model. How do you implant implement new technology that's disruptive when there might be one person who's like, No, I like the way it's being done right? There's always that one person who's like, No, we don't need to change. We're good. That's the problem. It's sort of like it's like the filibuster in the Senate, right? All it takes is one senator to say, nope, and you can't move forward. That's what the partner model is. So thank you, Sam.

David Leary: [00:47:34] Email. This is.

Blake Oliver: [00:47:34] Just like.

David Leary: [00:47:35] Just like.

Blake Oliver: [00:47:36] Yeah, let's see. Let's go back to our messages here.

David Leary: [00:47:42] You said about 150 hour rule.

Blake Oliver: [00:47:44] Somebody here's here's one about the 150 hour role. Let's see actually we got to Jonathan said regarding your discussion of the 150 hour rule, which for those who haven't been following, that's the rule that if you want to be a CPA, you've got to get an extra 30 hours of 30 credit hours of education after your regular bachelor's degree, which ends up being about a year of school. So a lot of accountants, if you want to do the CPA thing, you've got to go get a one year masters, which adds a lot of cost to your degree. I personally think it's a reason why we are suffering in terms of recruiting. So Jonathan said, regarding your discussion of the 150 hour rule, I thought I'd give my experience. I graduated in 2006 when I started college. The 150 stuff was just really beginning and my university offered a 3 to 5 year program for a master's in accountancy but didn't really push it. So I graduated with 121. Okay, so he's doing that. They offered a five year program to do the 150 hours. I went to work in public in DC and Virginia. You could still take the exams at 120, but needed 150 to be licensed by 2010. I had passed all for the first time and had my work experience. I just needed my 150. I've never quite got there. Every time I start doing more education to get it, life just pops up and I get 3 to 6 credits and stop. Well, that is on me to a large degree. It also shows that I was 100% qualified to be a CPA, but because I can't get around to getting my basket weaving credits, I've never and likely never will be a CPA. 150 rule needs to go.

David Leary: [00:49:21] So can I admit something about 150 hour rule?

Blake Oliver: [00:49:23] Yeah.

David Leary: [00:49:24] Okay. So I was in discussion with Norma, who's one of the accounting twins, and she's the accounting twin that's in grad school. Right. The bell went off. For me this week and I look like an idiot now. But I thought you had to do another 150 hours. So they have a branding problem. They should just call it the plus 30 because you really have to do 30 March. This is called plus 30. They get rid of the 150 because already that's just that's just scaring people away. Like plus 30 still seems it seems. I can eat that apple plus 30 but they need to stop calling at 150 entirely. It's a branding problem.

Blake Oliver: [00:49:57] The whole credit hours thing doesn't even make any sense to me. Like, why? Why is it 120 credit hours to get you a bachelor's degree? Like 40 hours? Like this whole translation of college credits and hours? I've never understood it because. Is the amount you learn based on the amount of class time you spend. Like if we increase the amount of time you're in class, you're going to learn more. You know, I don't the whole thing is just completely. Anachronistic.

David Leary: [00:50:29] I just think it's a branding problem. It scares people away. It's too big of a number.

Blake Oliver: [00:50:32] Yeah.

David Leary: [00:50:33] And it adds plus 30, say, plus 30 plus 30.

Blake Oliver: [00:50:38] So don't don't help them, David. Don't help them extend this problem. Okay. So Tyler wrote in. He's written him before. Thank you, Tyler. He said, I hope you are well. I wanted actually, Tyler was on our show.

David Leary: [00:50:52] Oh, he's new, right? He's been, like, two years. He was?

Blake Oliver: [00:50:54] Yeah. Yeah, he does a lot of work. Yeah, he was. He was talking about being remote and working like his first accounting job remotely, and. And it was really interesting. So he said, I hope you're doing well. I wanted to share some thoughts after listening to episode 304 of The Cloud Accounting Podcast, especially after just recently passing my final CPA exam. Congratulations, Tyler. He passed, he says won the 150 hour rule is definitely something that hurts the amount of people interested. I was actually lucky with my experience. However, I went to a small school in Nashville and the School of Business actually allowed us to get our 150 hours and our undergraduate program. This helped me a ton because I didn't have to spend extra time on money on a graduate degree for the 150. I think a lot of big schools make the push to get the masters of accountancy just to make more money, when in reality students can get 150 hours in undergrad. Not to mention the masters of accountancy without passing the CPA exam is pretty much a waste of time, in my opinion, especially compared to the value of an MBA. Either way, I think the 150 hour will hurts our profession, but maybe with this option more widely promoted, it wouldn't be as bad. He goes on number two. I heard a listener mentioned that the score release periods for the CPA exam are going to only once a quarter.

Blake Oliver: [00:52:06] This is something that is really annoying. It was bad enough as it was. I actually had to wait over a month for three of my scores, which impacted my plan of studying because I couldn't afford to sit around for a whole month. With the time period of 18 months you have to pass all the exams. Why would they expect people to have to wait that long to get a score on a digitally taken exam when they put a time period on how long you have to pass? All of them, even just saying it out loud makes no sense and isn't fair at all. So yeah, they've actually made it harder to pass the CPA exam. Great. Three. As someone that is new to the whole profession, I may be having too big of aspirations, but at what point do we start working towards a continuous interactive 10-K report for public companies? Being an auditor, I know there are ways to automate reporting processes that could feed directly to an interactive, continuous ten K report in which auditors can audit the incoming data to the report. I think having deadlines every year for these reports is something of the past and it's something we can help change with the technology that is being brought to companies. This would improve audit quality as there wouldn't be hard deadlines and we can audit the incoming data throughout the whole year and wouldn't have to wait and try to crunch all of the work in at the end of the year.

Blake Oliver: [00:53:15] I also think doing this would make the ten K reports more relevant to people in my younger generation that likely don't even look at financial statements to do any sort of investing, especially since the reports are 100 pages long and look like boring research paper reports. Instead, imagine an interactive real time report where people can go in and look for the kind of data they want to see instead of having to read through a whole report hoping they find something they want to see. Maybe this is too far fetched, but I do not see why this is something we can't start making a push for. For the future. Sorry for the long winded email. Kind of just needed to rant about some of these topics and wanted to share some insight. As always, thank you guys for such an amazing podcast. Thanks. Tyler Kapowski. Great. Tyler. That's a brilliant idea. That last one. I haven't ever heard that from anyone. And the idea of a continuous audit, continuous public reporting, ten K like that's really neat. That would be something that would help these crypto exchanges, right? If somebody could continuously audit their reserves. The problem is that nobody's really figured out how to do it. But that's a big opportunity.

David Leary: [00:54:24] Yeah, like a big bank feed of their balance sheet. Yeah. Everybody gets to watch it all the time.

Blake Oliver: [00:54:29] Right. And it's not just this point in time. I think that's the big problem with, like, these proof of reserves reports is it's just one point in time. If they don't have proper internal controls, all that money can be drained out and put somewhere else. Oh, and then they go put it back. Yeah, that's right. It's like, take the money away, go play with it, do dangerous things with it, then. Oh, we need to get another audit. Okay, let's put all the money back. Let's get out of it.

David Leary: [00:54:52] All right.

Blake Oliver: [00:54:53] Uh, so thank you both. Really appreciate that. We got another voicemail. David, I think this is the last one, and then we'll go on to whatever's left in the time we have. This is from Heather Smith, our correspondent Down Under.

Heather Smith: [00:55:10] Hi, Blake. And David, it's Heather Smith here calling in from Brisbane, Australia. I know you love a good accounting conference and I've not heard you mention the biggest accounting conference in the world with COA or the World Congress of Accountants is known as the Olympics of the accounting profession, and it's happening this month, November 18th to the 21st in Mumbai, India. This year's theme is building trust, enabling sustainability. And rather than being a vendor led conference, it'll have leaders of the Global Accounting Associations representatives providing a unique opportunity to have big global accounting and business conversation. So it's likely your accounting membership fees will be paying for your USA accounting representatives to attend on your behalf. In 2018, I was extraordinarily fortunate to be an ambassador for Sydney with COA conference along with David Boyer and Paul Misner, host of From the Trenches podcast on behalf of the Chartered Accountants Australia, New Zealand, with 6000 delegates from 130 countries. It was on a scale that I'd never seen before. So to give you an example, we were invited to a cocktail reception on the beautiful Sydney Harbor. And as we settled in and I'm holding my bubbles and having a little talk with people, a submarine surfaced in the harbor and then it got covered in tap dancers who entertained us for the evening. I've never seen anything like it before. It really set the scene for the four day conference, multiple sessions running simultaneously, big conversations and accounting thought leaders from every corner of the world. Blake and David, I propose the Cloud Accounting podcast should add the 23rd Waikoloa to its conference bracket list. It shall be held on August 2026 in Busan in Korea. The theme of October 2026 is global Friendship through control technology thriving from innovative global diversity and living harmoniously with the modern AI convergence. Goodness, that's quite a theme, isn't it? But I do think that converges perfectly with the Cloud Accounting podcast. What do you think? Will I see you in Korea in 2026?

David Leary: [00:57:49] Well, maybe this conference because I'm Googling, I'm getting a world of coal and coal ash archives, so this is not it.

Blake Oliver: [00:57:58] So I think this is it. The World Congress of Accountants. And it says the WC.

David Leary: [00:58:04] So the WC.

Blake Oliver: [00:58:05] Oh.

David Leary: [00:58:06] Okay.

Blake Oliver: [00:58:07] Got it. 2022 Mumbai dot org. I had never heard of this before. I guess I need to get out of my U.S. bubble and go abroad. I would love to go to Korea for the 2026. So we've got four years, David, to raise our stature as a podcast so that we can.

David Leary: [00:58:26] Get.

Blake Oliver: [00:58:26] Somebody to fly us out there.

David Leary: [00:58:28] Well, you know, somebody did get out of what you what would you just say? Get out of your US shelter or your. Yeah, I don't know. We should rewind and see exactly what you said. But I did see somebody that did get out of their US offices and go somewhere, so. Is that an article in Golf News.com, World's largest accounting and finance body get convene in Dubai so that AICPA and the Sigma their board of directors are going to go have a meeting in Dubai from November 15th to the 17th. The gathering will discuss. I mean, obviously that just happened now, but the gathering will discuss how to prepare the profession for meeting the future challenges it faces, serving the public interest and driving trust, opportunity and prosperity for business, economies and society. Like seems like a good gig, man. Like, that's a trip to Dubai.

Blake Oliver: [00:59:16] Yeah. I mean, hopefully they'll talk about some of the issues that we've highlighted here on our show, including, you know, the the lack of trust in crypto markets and the future of our profession, which is threatened by a lack of people entering the profession. Or maybe they'll just go enjoy themselves. Who knows?

David Leary: [00:59:38] Maybe there'll be a report out and we'll be like, maybe they'll have a here's what we met about, there'll be a summary.

Blake Oliver: [00:59:43] But we'll cover it on the show for sure.

David Leary: [00:59:45] David You should get a gig on that book and then you could take no plus one trip to Dubai. I know. That's like a good racket.

Blake Oliver: [00:59:52] Well, David, that's also all the time we have for this week. Thank you, everyone who joined us live. A reminder, you can interact with us live, chat with us, let us know what you think about accounting and technology. We'll be back here next week. Are we going to be back here next week? David? The usual Fridays starts next week.

David Leary: [01:00:10] Thanksgiving week. Okay, This is good. That means it'll be a kind of a quiet Newsweek. Okay. And then we'll probably record on Sunday night. I think I'm going to go out of town and hopefully it's a quiet Newsweek and we can catch up on the stories that we didn't get to today. And like no more crypto bros. Stop crashing, man. Just like make it a week like that without more news, please. That's all. I don't want to come back next week and it's Beyonce or whatever that's down.

Blake Oliver: [01:00:34] So we'll catch up. We'll catch up on all the news we missed this week, next week. And yes, everyone, happy Thanksgiving. Who is in the US. I hope you have lots of turkey.

David Leary: [01:00:45] And if you're listening to this, don't forget to register. If you're going to connect to the Cloud Accounting podcast party that we're throwing with on pay guideline and Relay, it'll be a lot of fun.

Blake Oliver: [01:00:55] Oh yeah. I need to get. What's the URL for that?

David Leary: [01:00:57] David It is.

Blake Oliver: [01:01:00] Cloud assist, pod dot link.

David Leary: [01:01:04] Slash slash.

Blake Oliver: [01:01:05] Party. There you go. And you can see it on the screen here, Register for the party. It's on December 7th at 7:00 PM at QuickBooks Connect. We are going to be joining with on page guideline and Relay to put this together. It's at the Chandelier Lounge and the Cosmopolitan. It's a great venue. It's going to be a lot of fun. Meet us in person and yeah, come say hi. We love meeting our listeners.

David Leary: [01:01:29] And we've been served a little bit of food people are going to eat.

Blake Oliver: [01:01:32] Oh, good. Food is good. Yeah, it's always it's always a problem when there's no food at these events. So we're going to make sure this food. Good. See you. See you next week, David, After Thanksgiving.

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Greg Kyte: [01:02:44] I don't care where you live in the United States. If you're a CPA, you have to take ethics, continuing education. And I don't care who you are and where you live, you hate taking ethics, continuing education. That's why me, Greg Kyte and my buddy Adam Broad, we created a podcast called Drunk Ethics where we unfold and expose all of the inner secrets of not just ethics, but how to. Become more ethical and to promote ethical behavior at your workplace. And we do that while we are getting progressively more. Faced during the course of each episode, in each episode, we take seven shots every 7 minutes. And so at the beginning we are scholarly and by the end we are drunk, yet still scholarly. If you're interested in this podcast, which I know you are, anyone can listen to the podcast for free. It's out there, you can find it, but if you want CPE credit for it, Naspa certified CPE credit, it is a premium course on earmarks. So if you're already a subscriber to earmark, it's going to be more than that. But listen, it's worth it because for two reasons. First off, you know your company, you know, your firm's going to pay for it and not you. And second of all, it's worth it. Damn it.

David Leary: [01:04:06] Want to get the word out about your newsletter, webinar party, Facebook group, podcast, e-book, job posting, or that fancy Excel macro you just created. Why not let the listeners The Cloud Accounting Podcast know by running a classified ad with the shownotes for the link to get more info?