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Blake and David Leary dive into several hot topics in the accounting world including the IRS's renewed focus on enforcement, targeting high-income individuals and non-filers, as well as the push to regulate non-credentialed tax preparers. They also explore the ongoing US CPA shortage and discuss potential solutions, including changes to education and recruitment strategies. Moving on, there's talk about emerging threats to traditional accounting software from industry-specific solutions like Clio's new accounting package for law firms. All this and more, right here, right now!
Chapters
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Relay - http://accountingpodcast.promo/relay
Zoho - http://accountingpodcast.promo/zoho
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Lendflow - http://accountingpodcast.promo/lendflow
Chapters
- (01:00) - Global IT Outage Chaos
- (02:48) - Guess the Company Game
- (05:04) - Accounting Salaries and Compensation
- (14:47) - PwC Cutting Chinese Partners Pay by 50%
- (16:24) - Relay: The Ultimate Banking Solution
- (18:50) - Payday Advance Apps Under Scrutiny
- (21:40) - Trump's Tax Plan and Tariffs
- (29:03) - Community Engagement and Election 2024
- (29:48) - Zoho Practice Management Overview
- (31:34) - IRS Enforcement and Tax Resolution Opportunities
- (39:40) - Regulating Non-Credentialed Tax Preparers
- (43:09) - Corporate Tax Rates and Economic Impact
- (48:49) - Thank you to MakersHub
- (50:45) - Clio Accounting and Legal Software Innovations
- (53:41) - Addressing the Accountant Shortage
- (01:02:31) - Thanks for Listening and Remember to Earn Your Free CPE
Show Notes
July 19, 2024, global tech outage news
AICPA & CIMA Achieves Global Recognition as a Great Place To Work
Just How Much Have Accounting Salaries Increased in the Last Five Years?
You Need to Make Six Figures to Buy a Home in Almost Half of the U.S.
Number of the Day: $5.7 Billion - CPA Practice Advisor
I.R.S. Crackdown on Delinquent Millionaires Yields $1 Billion - The New York Times
The IRS Tidal Wave Is Here - CPA Trendlines
Tax pros: IRS improving, but getting the right answer takes too long
IRS advisory committee recommends regulating tax preparers | Accounting Today
Corporate Tax Rate Spurs Political Fight With More Than $1 Trillion at Stake - WSJ
Ohio's shortage of certified accountants is part of a national trend
Accountants sound the alarm over high-income residents leaving Massachusetts – New Bedford Guide
Trump floats tariff hikes to offset income tax cuts
The Accountant Shortage Highlights How Critical Accounting Is to Capital Markets | Smith School
#stitch with @Shanna Morris | accounting major | TikTok
Best Song Ever???
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Transcripts
The full transcript for this episode is available by clicking on the Transcript tab at the top of this page
Creators & Guests
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!
Blake Oliver: [00:00:04] It's insane to me that we don't regulate tax preparers in this country. Like anyone can become a tax preparer. You don't have to be an enrolled agent. You don't have to be a CPA. You don't have to be nothing.
David Leary: [00:00:20] Coming to you weekly from the OnPay Recording Studio.
Blake Oliver: [00:00:25] Hello, and welcome back to the accounting podcast, the number one accounting podcast in the world. I'm Blake Oliver.
David Leary: [00:00:32] And I'm David Leary.
Blake Oliver: [00:00:33] David, did you wake up today to the blue screen of death? You're a PC user, so I figured maybe that happened to you.
David Leary: [00:00:39] I went out of the way to check the record, the studio PC. It seems to be working fine, but I also have updates turned off on my recording studio PC.
Blake Oliver: [00:00:46] Oh, smart.
David Leary: [00:00:47] There, but I did go to Orange Theory at 6 a.m. and they were a little bit panicked because I guess things weren't working. Like, you can't phone home to the corporate office. I don't know if some things were wrong.
Blake Oliver: [00:00:56] Yeah, I was worried that we might not be able to record today because it is July 19th and last night in the middle of the night, a massive global IT outage occurred, causing widespread disruptions across multiple industries worldwide, including airlines. Our friend Michael is stuck at SFO. I wonder if he got out of there because the airlines can't, uh, can't can't get flights off the ground. Uh, banks and financial institutions around the world are facing service interruptions. Some media outlets, including broadcasters like ABC and Sky news, are unable to air content. Even hospitals and health care systems had to cancel surgeries. Today. It affected organizations across multiple countries, including the US, UK, Australia, New Zealand, India and many European nations, and this was caused by a faulty software update from cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike. So an update that is designed to protect us from this sort of attack ended up taking us down. It caused crashes on windows based systems, and my wife woke up this morning and went to her computer to get to work, and her computer had the blue screen of death there. Luckily it did an update, and then shortly thereafter she was able to get online. But condolences to any of our accounting firm friends who are stuck at the blue screen of death. Still, hopefully you get that sorted out soon.
David Leary: [00:02:19] That's that's went off in my head. I was like, oh my gosh, so many firms are on the Microsoft stack up, down, left and right. And like how many firms are down right now? Um.
Blake Oliver: [00:02:30] So what's next? David Luiz.
David Leary: [00:02:31] You. Oh, sorry, I thought I thought you froze. Actually, I got a little scared there, Blake. You paused and you didn't move, and I thought you froze.
Blake Oliver: [00:02:38] I wanted to have. I wanted you to have the blue Screen of Death experience there.
David Leary: [00:02:41] The true experience. I was a little. A little bit scared. Um, do you want to play a game? Maybe I.
Blake Oliver: [00:02:47] Love games. Let's play a game.
David Leary: [00:02:48] So I'm going to talk about a company that's in our industry. Right. Okay. A company could be, you know, anything, right? It could be a firm you don't know. So I'm going to there was a this company won a Great Place to Work award. They have 1200 employees. And you know they I'm going to read you some stats because they surveyed the employees. So this company has a long tradition of promoting from within. They offer competitive salaries, reward accomplishments. And so from the survey specifically, 74% of the employees spoke positively about the organization. They expressed a desire to give extra effort and stay long term. 92% said they were able to take time off when necessary. 84% they felt encouraged to balance their work and personal life. Um, one of the executives was quoted saying, work life balance is essential to employee mental health and wellbeing. Who is this? Do you think this is an accounting firm? Like who? What company is this?
Blake Oliver: [00:03:48] I feel like the easy answer would be one of the big four, because they always seem to win these awards, even though I don't know how. Uh, but it can't be because that would be too obvious.
David Leary: [00:03:59] It's the AICPA, the AICPA. Great place to work, a great place to work. Survey results. They won the award. So and this is now they're certified as a great place to work in seven countries US, UK, Ireland, South Africa, Malaysia, India and China. Um, do you care to guess what? I was curious because I was like, well, what's the salary? So I went and googled it. You take a stab at what the salary is the.
Blake Oliver: [00:04:25] Average average salary at.
David Leary: [00:04:26] The A. The average salary.
Blake Oliver: [00:04:27] Oh, I tell me, I'm really curious.
David Leary: [00:04:30] So according to my pay scale, payscale.com, it's $78,000 a year. Is the average salary okay, so some might be lower, some might be higher. But hmm.
Blake Oliver: [00:04:39] But they pay well is what this. Yeah. Survey says they pay. They pay a good rate. Yeah. That's interesting.
David Leary: [00:04:46] I find it interesting that the things that are all good at are the things maybe accounting firms aren't good at. Well.
Blake Oliver: [00:04:51] And that's when you said the pay. You know, that made me think, well, it can't possibly be an accounting firm because that's the main criticism of public accounting firms is that they don't pay their staff enough. Right? Enough.
David Leary: [00:05:03] That's the giveaway. True.
Blake Oliver: [00:05:04] And and I spotted an article on going concern featuring some survey data just about that. How much have accounting salaries increased in the last five years? Inside Public Accounting is set to release their top 500 list of firms, and they pose that question of whether the 2024, whether 2024 will see another significant rise in compensation. Because we do know salaries have gone up. And the article in Inside Public Accounting compares 2025 compensation figures for equity and non-equity partners, managing partners and professional staff at non Big Four IPA 100 firms to those from 2019. So we're comparing Non-big four firms using a trimmed average to exclude outliers. And it's comparing, you know, how much they make. And the takeaway is this, uh, well actually before I get to like how much it's actually changed, I just got to highlight this equity partner compensation. So the equity partners in 2023, they earn an average of $839,000 a year. That's that's a lot of money, right? That's and that's up from 620,000 actually round up to 621,000in 2019. So like another 200 more than 200 K added. And get this, non-equity partners make a whole lot less. They make 307,000. That's up from 275,000. So I mean you can have the same title of partner, right? But if you're an equity partner, you're making way more money than the non-equity partners. But we can't see that on LinkedIn. We don't know. Right? Nobody tells you if they're an equity partner or not. I find that why.
David Leary: [00:06:44] Some some people that work for accounting firms, they put shareholder.
Blake Oliver: [00:06:48] I think shareholder would be more meaningful. Yes. Because it indicates you actually own a part of that company. But yeah. Um, so professional staff, right. Make a lot less money than the partners. They have average compensation of $104,000. So you said at the ACPa, it's what, 70, 78, 78? Okay. So the staff are making more than the staffer, the staff and public accounting firms. Non-big four firms are making more than the staff at um, the AICPA. Um, but what we really want to know is, you know, what do how much have they increased? Oh, but before I get to that, the managing partners compensation. This is amazing. Do you want to guess how much managing partners make at these firms? 350 what? No, no. If the equity partners are earning, like, $800,000 a year, the managing partners have to be making more. Sorry.
David Leary: [00:07:44] I'm going up.
Blake Oliver: [00:07:45] Yeah, they're making 1.7 million, and that's up from 1.2 million, uh, just four years ago. Okay, so now here's what matters. Is the change, right? Has this gone up? How much has this gone up? Because everyone's saying it's gone up. Staff pay has increased since 2020. Staff pay has increased by 15.7%, but the partners have seen their pay go up 29.2%. So staff go up 1,516%. Partners are up 29%. And I'm thinking to myself, well, we've had a lot of inflation over the last few years. Right. So what is this in the context of all the inflation we've had. And Jack, see, professor Jack, see in the comments on going concern made a very insightful comment. He said. So if this is right, staff pay hasn't kept up with inflation over that time period, even if it is nominally higher because the fed inflation rates are 1.2 4.58% 4.1% over those time periods, right? That's a cumulative inflation of 18.86%. Staff salaries have gone up 15.7% less than the inflation of 18.886%. So actually since 2020, staff salaries have decreased.
David Leary: [00:09:05] Oh brother.
Blake Oliver: [00:09:07] And we wonder why we struggle to keep people in accounting. And that's what we've seen over decades since Barry Melanson became the president of the AICPA, staff salaries have actually declined when you adjust for inflation in many places in the country.
David Leary: [00:09:26] And but it's all marketed with the carrot of like, you could be the partner. Those big numbers, exactly what you try to get people to. It goes back. It's kind of a pyramid scheme, like like you always say.
Blake Oliver: [00:09:36] It's absolutely a pyramid scheme. And and the AICPA, I saw Barry up on stage give a presentation where he actually put a triangle on a screen. It looks like a pyramid. And so, you know, I think just if you are a young accountant and you're going to go into public accounting and you're ambitious, you should know that fewer than 1% of those who enter public accounting become partners. You have a 1% shot at it, so just be realistic, right? Um, now, I would argue that while it's nice to make that much money, I value my time more than that. Money? Like you could not. David, say, I'm going to start paying you $800,000 a year. But you have to, you know, work as much as these partners work, because we know they work more than anyone else in the firm these days. Right. That's the thing that's like scary about it. You have all this money, but you you have no time to spend it.
David Leary: [00:10:40] Yeah. You get pressure to work a lot of hours, which is the exact opposite of working at the AICPA.
Blake Oliver: [00:10:45] So I find that fascinating. Okay, so and also let's let's look at this, um, $104,000 average compensation number for these Non-big four top 100 firms. I don't know what the what's the term for that? It's like the the the 96 bottom top 100 firms. You have to exclude the big four because they distort everything so much. Right. So what does it cost to buy a home in the United States these days? I spotted a story on CPA Practice Advisor about how in nearly half the United States, potential home buyers need to earn a six figure salary to afford a median priced home. That's according to a recent analysis by Bankrate. Well, that number is actually $110,871. So let's call it $111,000. That's more than the average salary of a staff person in one of these accounting firms. So again, putting things in perspective, why do people leave public accounting. It's not providing that American dream that it used to. Right. It costs more. You have to make more to buy a home. Just an average home a median home in 2020 that was $76,000. And of course, we know that home values have increased by inflation. So like the inflation numbers they are distorted. Or I should say we have to put them in perspective because some things have gone way up in cost over recent years and over the last few decades. Home prices, the cost of education, the cost of health care. And these are like basic things that you need to be happy in life.
Blake Oliver: [00:12:38] And when all those things are way more expensive than even the average price of the average inflation, they've gone up more than I want to step back and say they've gone up more than inflation on average. It's no wonder that accountants are leaving the profession to go seek opportunity elsewhere, because you want that American dream. You want that house. You want those two cars. You want that dog. You want the two and a half kids. It's really hard to get it in accounting. If you work in public accounting for a large public accounting firm. Now, I want to say, if you run your own firm, if you can be the partner, then it's totally a different story. And if you can be flexible with where you live and relocate, then it's a whole different story, right? Go from California to Arizona like I did. So that is that's that's where we're at as a profession. We have to figure out, you know, how do we get those salaries up. And that's what I want the next leader of the AICPA to be focused on is how do we get average CPA compensation up? Because that is not what they have been focusing on. It's not what they've been working on. And in fact, they have been working on everything that suppresses salaries. They've been trying to keep them low in order to keep CPA firm profits high. And that's not a long term strategy for recruiting more CPAs into the profession.
David Leary: [00:14:04] Yeah. Because ultimately, uh, this is just a quick note that AICPA and Nasba, they're going to now start allowing you to take the US CPA exam in the Philippines. So Philippines accounts, but that's about driving lower wages. Exactly. So the focus of cheap labor in.
Blake Oliver: [00:14:20] Yeah all this focus on offshoring is suppressing US CPA wages. That's what it's about right. Keeping costs low for firms. Now I understand if you own a firm that's like legit, you should be trying to keep costs low. But I find it funny that like the professional association that's supposed to represent all CPAs is focused on this. Like, it seems like they've got their priorities kind of mixed up here. Yeah.
David Leary: [00:14:48] So PwC though may have listened to you. They're going to cut partner pay by 50% in China.
Blake Oliver: [00:14:54] Well that's because they just like messed up royally. Yeah. And had those massive audit failures and lost all their business in China.
David Leary: [00:15:02] I think you talked about the, uh, Evergrande Group, right, that the $78 billion property developer fraud.
Blake Oliver: [00:15:08] Yeah. I mean, massive fraud. Uh, I suppose it's still an allegation in China because it hasn't been proven. But, you know, Evergrande is this property real estate developer company in China that is just completely collapsed. And PwC was auditing them. And again, as we see over and over again, there were no warnings from the auditors that this was going to happen.
David Leary: [00:15:29] Pwc for 14 years. And so what's happened now because of this, uh, this probing from Chinese authorities that's occurring, clients are just fleeing PwC, um, in China and it's resulted in layoffs and now partner pay decreases. So they've asked them it could be anywhere from 30% to 50. And it's still rumors, but it's being confirmed now. Uh, but some other interesting facts. So PwC senior China Partners, they make about $688,000 each. Mhm. Um, and then mid-level partners get about half that. And then starting pay is about uh 25% of that. Um, and they, their website says they have 781 partners in mainland China. So let's just say they cut them 200 grand, 750 partners. That's 150 million bucks. And then the PwC in China had a revenue of 1.1 billion in 2022. So basically they're cutting costs 10%. But unless revenue is really taking a bigger hit you know.
Blake Oliver: [00:16:23] Mhm. Well David I think it's time for our first break. Let's talk about the sponsor of this episode. The lead sponsor is relay. Relay.
David Leary: [00:16:32] So we use relay. We have all these businesses, right? We have multiple bank. Accounts. Every time I turn around, we're creating a new business and we need to create. New bank accounts. And we need dozens and dozens of virtual cards and 20 checking accounts. And it's kind of a nightmare to manage. But because we're on relay, it's easy.
Blake Oliver: [00:16:50] It's an essential part of the tech stack that we use to run our business. Here at earmark and at the accounting podcast.
David Leary: [00:16:55] We don't have to share passwords. We can give log read only access to an employee that has to do a reconciliation. We don't have to text each other. What's the two factor authentication code like? All these problems you have with your bank, with clients really solved all those.
Blake Oliver: [00:17:10] And my favorite thing is that we never have to go into a branch because it's a virtual account. It's all on our phones. You can add an account with just a few clicks on the website if you have to. For instance, create a payroll checking account. Just click, click, click. And now you have a new bank account, new actual account number right there. And you can give that to your payroll provider. And you can securely run payroll without having to give access to your operating account.
David Leary: [00:17:36] Yeah. And debit cards. You can create, uh, virtual debit cards. Right. And I could just give those to the employees, and I can turn them on. Turn them off. I actually had to have my daughter go buy a printer, an ink cartridge, and I she took the relay card, I spun it up so it was allowed to have a $200 charge. She bought it, turned the card back off, and it's frozen when she's done with it. It's beautiful.
Blake Oliver: [00:17:55] It's wonderful. And and my favorite new feature, recent new feature is the automation. So you can automatically sweep funds from one account to another when it hits a certain threshold. And I love using that to sweep money from our operating account into our savings account to keep that money safe and secure. And yeah, just it works every night. So you can do that for profit first. If you do that, you can sweep money into payroll, into sales tax. You can do it based on like percentage rules, threshold rules. It's great. So if you want to learn about using relay for your firm and clients, head over to The Accounting Podcast dot promo slash relay. That is The Accounting Podcast dot promo forward slash r e l a y. And now David let's talk about the Trump tariffs.
David Leary: [00:18:40] Before you jump to that I have another salary related thing. We could talk. Okay okay. Just and that'll be it. We've knocked out anything salary or paycheck related.
Blake Oliver: [00:18:48] It's it better be good.
David Leary: [00:18:49] It's kind of good. So payday advanced apps. You know we've talked about these in the past before. So you work and you get to get your paycheck two days early. You've seen these apps, right? Yeah. They exist. I think they give names like Earnin and Dave and float me flex wage. Well, yesterday the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau said that these apps are basically providing loans. And because of that, they need to, uh, be subject to the truth and lending laws from 1968 where you have to disclose all the cost and fees. Um, so that's the news. But they also released a bunch of data about this. So about 5% of all workers in 2022, in America used one of these types of products. Um, 7 million were advanced $22 billion through these apps. Wow. That's a lot of money getting advanced and then pulled back out. Um, and then 3 million others were, uh, had 9.1 billion through direct to consumer, so 22 billion through their employers like Walmart offers this to their employees. And then another 9 billion. So EUR 30 billions of dollars has been advanced to employees. Right. Pulled back. And they have.
Blake Oliver: [00:19:55] Not counted as formal lenders up to this point. Correct.
David Leary: [00:19:59] And some of these employees are doing it 27 loans a year. So basically every if you're a biweekly payroll, you're doing this nonstop, right. And it's like a revolving credit card. But the interest rates are 100%. Who and most of the people doing this, Blake, are only making less than 50 grand a year. It's just it's kind of sad. Right? So so big tech came in. They stole customers from the payday loan places, which were already shady to implement a different kind of shady product for employees of companies. So I don't know. I remember in the old days, like when I was doing payroll, tech support, Intuit, you would help employers used to give their employees real loans. You would do advances on the pay stubs, and you'd have to help help them set it up in QuickBooks to pull the money back out and have it post everywhere so it doesn't mess up the 941 and all that type of stuff or their w-2s. But do companies just not care about employees anymore? Do companies give loans? I don't know, maybe people in the chat might know.
Blake Oliver: [00:20:55] Yeah, I mean it's a huge hassle to do that, right? So if you have some automated system through the payroll provider that does this some third party, then it takes all the risk off of you as the employer, which I totally understand. Right. Why you would want to do that. But it's so it's good. I think it's good that these companies are having to, um, are having to like, be honest, like and show what is the what is the actual like interest rate on these loans which can be usurious I think is the word right, like where it's just outrageous how much people are spending.
David Leary: [00:21:29] And going by the math and the number of workers. There's probably a lot of entry level accounting professionals that are probably using these apps to get access to their wages. Um it's sad.
Blake Oliver: [00:21:40] So, David, I want to talk about the, uh, I want to talk about Donald Trump's plan for taxes because something very troubling about this. And it's looking like, you know, Donald Trump is going to become the next president of the United States, right? I mean, I don't know how you how you feel about it, but I just it's sort of seeming like impossible that this is a snowball.
David Leary: [00:22:04] Of momentum seems to be in his favor right now. Yeah. Yeah. Correct.
Blake Oliver: [00:22:08] Yeah. So, you know, one of the proposals that really like worries me is this idea that we're going to replace income taxes. We're going to we're going to keep the Trump tax cuts in place, which are set to expire. And we're going to pay for that with tariffs. Right. And the math just does not work on this. This is according to analysis by the Tax Foundation, which is a right leaning nonprofit that does this sort of work. Um, they describe themselves as nonpartisan. Others describe themselves as sort of right leaning. And, you know, I think that's a fair assessment. Right. So this is not some like liberal group that's out to get Donald Trump. They're trying to create sanity in tax policy. And when you look at, like the math of tariffs and the math of income taxes, you just can't make up for the income taxes with tariffs, the individual income tax raises more than 27 times as much revenue as tariffs currently do. But it's not the gap in revenue levels that makes replacement impossible. The bigger issue is the relative size of the tax base. So American taxpayers reported almost 15 trillion of individual income tax while paying 2.2 trillion of taxes. That's an average tax rate of around 15%. Total imports in 2021 were 3.4 trillion, so way less than the 15 trillion of individual income. But that's a lot of services that are not subject to tariffs. The goods right are only like a little less than 3 trillion in tariff revenues are 80 billion. So 80 billion of tariff revenues compared to, you know, 2.2 trillion in income taxes. And you just look at this chart here on the screen and you can see that the tariff revenue is like nothing.
David Leary: [00:23:56] Yeah. To describe this to the listeners, they just darken the the bottom line of the bar graph like there's nothing there.
Blake Oliver: [00:24:04] Yeah. So this idea that we're going to replace income taxes with tariffs is insane. It's just nonsensical. It's like it's like saying you're going to put chocolate milk in the drinking fountains to get elected as school president. Right. And furthermore, we're dealing with inflation right now. Right. So what what what would what would tariffs do if you if you increase tariffs on all goods by 10%? David. What does that do to consumer prices.
David Leary: [00:24:31] It's going to increase them.
Blake Oliver: [00:24:32] Exactly. Because a tariff is actually a tax on the importer of the product, not on China. So what's going to happen is that the price of goods will increase probably by that amount or a little less, because most of it gets passed on to consumers in the form of higher prices. Just the way taxes work, that's tariffs are taxes. And I don't know, to me it seems like we accountants should be out there explaining how this would be a negative effect. And there's another analysis on the Tax Foundation website which shows that basically if we did a tariff plan like Trump is suggesting, it would completely offset all of the GDP growth of lower taxes. So there is there is no net benefit, even a net negative in terms of GDP growth. And you dramatically increase inflation, which is something we're trying to prevent right now.
David Leary: [00:25:32] Yeah. So I'm going to on one hand I'm going to have a little bit more money because I get this tax break this tax cut. But then I'm going to use it on Amazon Prime Day. But everything there because it's all imported from China is just going to be more expensive.
Blake Oliver: [00:25:43] And the tax cuts would benefit guys like you and me, David, who make relatively a lot of money.
David Leary: [00:25:48] Well.
Blake Oliver: [00:25:49] One day relatively know relatively entrepreneurs.
David Leary: [00:25:52] David. Yeah. Yeah, I think so. You know.
Blake Oliver: [00:25:54] Everyone King. Everyone likes to think that they're middle class. But you actually look at what a middle class income is in this country. And you know, accountants are not we're upper, believe it or not. Yeah, yeah. So anyway, that is what I wanted to share. If you disagree with me, let me know in the comments. David Scully says the math not working as a feature, not a bug. Bug. I just like to me, this is the thing about Trumpism that I really struggle with is like the complete. And it's not just Trump. Okay, look, this is politics in general, but especially with him. It's like the reality distortion field is extreme and we have politicians on like the Republican Party used to be the party of fiscal responsibility. Right? That that when I was in high school, that was what appealed to me. And that's why I was a registered Republican. When I turned 18, I registered as a Republican to vote. I used to write letters to the editor at the Sacramento Bee in high school, and I got published a few times. Amazing. Yes, I was the president of the Young Republicans Club at my high school. You know, at a time when, like it was, it was fiscal responsibility and, you know, reducing the debt. And that's all gone. And like, I'm like, where is that Republican Party? I'm still a registered Republican. I'm, I'm, I'm I'm like a Buffalo Bills fan, David. I'm, I'm in this for the long haul. Like it's going to come back someday. David. Right. You know what I'm talking about. How long has it been since the Buffalo Bills have won?
David Leary: [00:27:28] Oh, this is a stop.
Blake Oliver: [00:27:29] 40 years.
David Leary: [00:27:30] It's been. We've never won. We've never, never.
Blake Oliver: [00:27:33] Never won. No. Okay, so I'm better than a Buffalo Bills fan.
David Leary: [00:27:35] But but I mean, now that you live in Arizona though, you should join Arizona's biggest party, which are independents like and not not be a member of any party. Yeah, that's what most Arizonans do.
Blake Oliver: [00:27:46] Mad man Dan says in an election, math does not apply. It just needs to sound like it aligns with people's thoughts and wants, damned if it makes sense or not, or if they know it will ever pass. Lol. And that's my hope, is that this is all just election hype and it will never happen. But we saw Trump put the tariffs in place that we have today and those are economically damaging. We know as accountants who have at least a little bit of knowledge of economics that free trade is better for everyone in the long run. And yes, you need certain tariffs to protect critical industries, but like a 10% across the board tariff is an invitation for a trade war. And trade wars are what got us into the Great Depression. That's it is bad policy. We have plenty of history that tells us this. So anyway, that's my thoughts on this. You want to tell me what you think you should join the earmark community, go to earmark community and sign up and find the accounting podcast space and tell me if I'm right or I'm wrong. I want to talk about this with you guys. Like, I get to spout off my opinions on this show every single week, and you can join us in the live stream here on YouTube. But also you can have an extended conversation on our community now. Um, I'm really looking forward to that. So do join me. Earmarked community.
David Leary: [00:29:05] And we might have to make a special room just for called election 2024. So that way if people that don't want to be to take part, they don't have to go to that room, right? Yeah. Well, we need.
Blake Oliver: [00:29:13] To get this thing up and running and actually like people using it for before we have a problem with it. Right, David.
David Leary: [00:29:20] But we are though I'm getting emails every day like people are creating accounts saying hello the the I had to turn. I got enough emails that I turned the notifications off so that that's that's kind of a good sign I think.
Blake Oliver: [00:29:29] No, no. Keep those on okay. So that's the Trump tax plan which is completely nonsensical. And let's talk about more taxes. I got I got a bunch of stories about taxes David. Uh, but before that, do we want to do another ad? Yeah, let's.
David Leary: [00:29:48] Do another ad. So one of our other sponsors we need to thank is Zoho Practice. So Zoho, everybody is familiar with Zoho Expense, Zoho Books, Zoho CRM, and the other 90 apps that they have. But now they've introduced Zoho Practice for accounting firms, right? Tell me more. So it's an all in one practice management so you can automate reminders, request get documents and clarifications you need from clients. Your staff and your clients. Stay together through a collaborative, centralized communication hub. It has timesheets and billable hours, so you can just create the invoice from that robust document management. One of the things I really like is that it's free up to five users. So you can get this for your practice. Use it up with basically your team if we're a smaller firm.
Blake Oliver: [00:30:35] Did I hear you right? It's free. Free for five users. Five users. So if I if I have an accounting firm and I have like three staff, we can use this for free.
David Leary: [00:30:43] That's correct. You can get that's insane. Zoho Practice Management.
Blake Oliver: [00:30:46] All of the features.
David Leary: [00:30:48] Yes, all the features. So you're going to have, uh, client management, client collaboration, task management, time sheets and billing, document management, uh, financial insights and books review. So. And so you're getting that suite of, um, Zoho, uh, tools that pull together to make Zoho Practice.
Blake Oliver: [00:31:06] That's amazing. Well, give it a try. Where should people go if they want to try Zoho?
David Leary: [00:31:11] It's accounting podcast, dot promo slash, Zoho Accounting podcast promo, Zoho. And I put the link in the notes and.
Blake Oliver: [00:31:19] That is Zoho Cool. Check out our sponsors, use those links and let them know that we sent you there, because that's what they want to see and we appreciate you. That's how you can support our show, support our sponsors. And now, David, I would like to talk about taxes. I've got a bunch of tax stories related, um, to taxes. And let's start with the IRS. The IRS tidal wave is here. That's according to CPA trendlines. They wrote that the IRS has resumed enforcement actions, identifying over 11.3 million Non-filers and more than 15 million taxpayers with outstanding balances. And that's creating a surge in workload and opportunities for tax professionals. This is due to the reactivation of automated enforcement, which was paused during the pandemic and subsequent government funding delays. And the automated enforcement is now underway, which means your clients, your prospects are getting those letters, they're getting levies and lean filings, and that's a big opportunity for preparers to do tax resolution work. So if you're looking for a new line of work in your firm, if you're looking to expand your revenue, I would say start offering tax resolution services because, I mean, 11 million Nonfilers 15 million Americans with outstanding balances. Like that's a lot.
David Leary: [00:32:49] And this is a proactive way to reach out to clients and just let them know, hey, just FYI, the IRS stopped sending notifications for like three years because of Covid, but you might get one. So just keep me in mind, right? If you get one of these, you better call me right away. It's super important. It's urgent.
Blake Oliver: [00:33:03] Right now, the IRS is also focusing in particular on millionaires, delinquent millionaires, and so far they say that their enforcement has yielded $1 billion due to enhanced enforcement. They've focused on 1600 high income individuals owing significant tax debts. And they're also targeting over 100,000 wealthy individuals who have not filed taxes for years, increasing audits on hedge funds and real estate partnerships, and addressing misuse of corporate jets for personal travel. So it's it's the regular folks, but it's also the high earners as well. In Hunter in the live stream says, how would you charge for tax resolution? Do you think the hourly model or retainer would be more effective? Now this is just me spouting off because I've never done tax resolution, but I think a subscription plan would be fantastic for tax resolution. You know why? Because it takes forever to get these issues resolved. And the way that you can manage capacity in your firm is to simply designate somebody in your firm, or maybe a team in your firm. Depends how big you are. That just does tax resolution. And you can then decide how many tax resolution clients do I need on a subscription to cover this person's cost. So it's it's not about hours anymore.
Blake Oliver: [00:34:30] It's about here is this fixed cost I have for this person or this team or maybe a part of this person's time? And here's how many tax resolution clients we need to obtain in order to cover our costs. And then here's how many we need to generate the profit that we're looking for. And you can probably ballpark just how much time each of these clients is going to take. Right? Because, you know, if you've done this before or if you start doing this, you'll know, like here's how many notices they tend to get. Here's like, how much time does it take to handle one of these clients on, say, a monthly basis? Because chances are you're not going to be doing it like every day, right? It's get a notice, respond to it, get a notice, respond to it, do this court thing, whatever. Right. So I would say think about it that way. Um, and I know there are folks out there who offer like training on how to do tax resolution. Um, if you want to sponsor our show and you're listening, you know, put an ad on the show and tell our listeners about, you know, how they can learn how to do this.
David Leary: [00:35:25] And I would try to price it into like a as a service for all your clients, just not ones you're going to do it for, because you could use it as like a threat marketing or scare them into buying this extra subscription. And most won't ever need it because they're already working with you. So they're never going to get a notification because they're working with you. The expert.
Blake Oliver: [00:35:43] Right now, going back to our ad for Zoho. Thank you, Zoho for sponsoring Heather Smith in the live stream says OMG, I just interviewed Zoho this week and they never told me about their practice management software. Can't believe it. David I believe it because these companies get so big that like the different parts of.
David Leary: [00:36:02] Zoho, literally has 90 apps. Like somebody, somebody does not know all 90 of them. And they're going to forget one. Yes.
Blake Oliver: [00:36:09] So going back to this, uh, IRS enforcement, enhanced IRS enforcement, this is in part due to the increased funding that the IRS received, the $57.8 billion allocated from the Inflation Reduction Act, which used to be like $80 billion, but got cut a bit in negotiations between the two parties. Um, so far they have used about 10% of that money, $5.7 billion. And of that 5.7 billion, 2.3 billion went towards operations support, 1.4 billion for taxpayer services, 1.3 billion for system upgrades and 691 million for enforcement activities. So think about that. People were so scared that this money would go all to enforcement, but actually most of it, the vast majority of it has gone to upgrading services, operations, systems, upgrades, and they've actually spent less on additional on enforcement activities than they made from the, the, the millionaires with that extra billion dollars they got back, which proves the truth of the matter, which is that for every dollar you spend on additional IRS enforcement at this point in this country, you get way more than a dollar back because there are a lot of tax cheats in this country, unfortunately.
David Leary: [00:37:29] And that's what that was. The two numbers that stuck out to me. So there was, uh, 1600 individuals they were going after that owed their millionaires, that owed the IRS more than 250,000, and they had assigned 1500 officers to that, to those cases. So it's almost like a one on one. Like if you if yeah, if you cheat the government of a significant amount of money, you're going to get a personal IRS agent just for you. But it's intensive, right. If those are the numbers and that's the ratios. Yeah.
Blake Oliver: [00:37:58] Now I said that they have spent a bunch of money on improving operations. And we are seeing that the AICPA has reported that the IRS is improving, uh, on correspondence, providing substantive responses to correspondence they take. Let's see what is the number here? I got to pull up the Journal of Accountancy article. So two thirds of tax pros say that it takes over 90 days for the agency to provide a substantive response to correspondence. Okay. That is actually down. It used to be 81%. So we've gone from 81% saying it takes over 90 days to 63%. So they are improving their response time. But it's still double where they were at in 2019. So they have a long way to go. They need to get back to people faster. And this is why the subscription based tax resolution service, I think, is the way to go on this. Right. Because you get your clients paying you monthly on a retainer, basically. But I wouldn't even call it a retainer, because it's not like you're going to bill against it with hours. Right? You're just that's just the cost to for me to work on your tax resolution. Um, it's going to take a long time to get it resolved. All right. That was kind of a I guess I don't know. Is that good? Is that bad? I suppose they're improving, but it's still bad, right. When when two thirds of taxpayers say it takes 90 days or more to get a response.
David Leary: [00:39:28] Valuable. You want you want answers. We live in this instant economy. Like you don't want to wait 60 days, 90 days. It's got to be in a week. Yeah, two weeks, 48 hours.
Blake Oliver: [00:39:37] Continuing on in IRS news and IRS Advisory Committee has urged Congress to regulate non-credentialed tax preparers and increase funding for the IRS and the National Taxpayer Advocate. Uh, so this is something that the IRS has tried to do in the past, but has gotten smacked down for not having the legal authority to do it by the courts. And so this advisory committee, it's called the Internal Revenue Service Electronic Tax Administration Advisory Committee. That is quite a mouthful. Um, they did this in their annual report, and they're saying Congress needs to regulate non-credentialed tax preparers. The committee also suggests the IRS should enhance electronic filing processes, improve information sharing with states and industry partners, and develop a more secure alternative to the current self-select pin. The report highlights the lack of federal education, certification or training requirements for tax preparers, which can lead to unqualified individuals providing poor tax advice and services. Recommendations include enabling API access to taxpayer information, conducting a cost benefit analysis of free tax filing services, and standardizing validation rules for user provided data to improve accuracy and integrity. I thought that API access thing is interesting and they actually put that in the report. Api access to taxpayer data, um, which I believe the IRS is working on. They have to modernize their databases to enable that.
Blake Oliver: [00:41:05] But eventually through these portals that they're building out, tax pros will be able to get the information they have to call in to get or write in to get. Yeah. Or fax to get. Yeah. Um, but I think that like going to this regulation of tax preparers, it's insane to me that we don't regulate tax preparers in this country. Like anyone can become a tax preparer. You don't have to be an enrolled agent. You don't have to be a CPA. You don't have to be nothing. So how do we end up with so many bad tax preparers, unethical tax preparers, tax preparers who file fraudulent returns and steal millions and millions and millions of dollars and then harm millions of taxpayers as well. It's because we don't regulate them at all. It's nuts. And if I were the president of the AICPA, I think this is something obvious to lobby for. Let's lobby Congress to say CPAs and other credentials that specialize in tax should be allowed to have the monopoly on tax preparation. You should have to use an enrolled agent or a CPA, and maybe there's some other credentials in there too, in the mix, right? But like there should be a list and those folks should be allowed to prepare taxes.
David Leary: [00:42:29] Yeah, especially I mean, ultimately you're letting people gunk up your system with bad data, right? If it's fake and fraudulent data. So you you'd want to have a guardrail against that coming in for sure. Yeah.
Blake Oliver: [00:42:41] It's just it's nuts. I mean, so but you know, given the current political situation, it's unlikely that we will have anything happen until after the election.
David Leary: [00:42:52] And that's going to be really interesting based on the momentum. Like if Trump does win, like what is the impact of the IRS? Like what is all this going to get rolled back, this This progress they're making it we're going to be talking about this a lot on the show, because there's no doubt the IRS will be impacted based on who wins the election.
Blake Oliver: [00:43:09] Well, so a good thing. You know, I talked about the insane things that are in the Trump tax plan, like the tariffs. Right. Bad idea. Tariffs are bad for business generally. Um, but like the corporate tax rate it's currently at 21%. This is a big part of the tax debate right now. Democrats want to increase that to 28%. Republicans want to reduce that to as low as 15%. And this is something where the Republicans are right that lower corporate tax rates are better for the economy. And it it it's really like I have a hard time justifying a corporate tax rate of more than 20%. Right. To me, that is too much like you make the corporate tax rate too high, and all it does is incentivize corporations to hire a bunch of accountants and lawyers to figure out how to get around them, which is what we see happens. Right? You raise taxes. It just creates more loophole opportunities through lobbying. So it's better just to have corporate tax rates that are closer to the average individual income tax rates, which we discussed earlier, are actually around 15% on average. Yeah. So you know, I, I agree that's that's something that like this is why this election is so difficult I think for people is because there's just there's good points on both sides.
Blake Oliver: [00:44:36] Right. Right? Um, I think where it's at right now would be great. I don't want I don't think it should change. Right. Like maybe take it 20% versus 21%. Who cares right? Gator NYC says the money never flows to the workers when you lower the rates. Um, that is like that's I agree with that. Actually. Like this whole idea of trickle down economics has been mostly disproven that, like some of it trickles down, it's not like none of it does, but a lot of it does not. Um, but also raising corporate tax rates is not going to dramatically increase, uh, revenue. And it is not going and it will depress economic growth, which in the end hurts those workers. Yeah. So the best situation in tax policy is to have broad, low taxes on a lot of different things so that there's this not this incentive to create loopholes to get around them. Right. You want it to be the tax is low enough where, you know, it's sort of like, uh, I don't know what would be a good example, David. It's like there's there's taxes that like all the time that you could, like, cheat to get around, but you're like, yeah, whatever. It's 5%, 10%.
David Leary: [00:45:54] The incentives. Right. It's like you have to it's a market, right, people. If the if the tax is so high, they're going to figure out ways around it or cheat or do whatever. But if it's lower, they're less likely to do it.
Blake Oliver: [00:46:06] Great example California and legal weed. California put really high taxes on legal weed. What does that do? It suppresses the legal industry and keeps the illegal business around. Right. You make the taxes too high. There will be a black market. Same thing happens in tax policy. And it's not a black market. It's just a loophole market. Right. A lobbying market. Um, and we're going to see this happen. I mean, this is a beautiful, beautiful thing about our federal federalist system of government where we have states that can do different things and try them out, and we see what works and what doesn't. Right. And in Massachusetts right now, we're going to see what happens when you do a high income resident tax, Massachusetts put a new 4% surtax on high household incomes exceeding $1 million annually. So that's for the high earners, right? And the Massachusetts Society of Certified Public Accountants is now saying that 90% of high income clients are contemplating leaving the state, with New Hampshire, Florida and Texas being the top destinations. Now, Massachusetts has collected an extra $1.84 billion in the first nine months of 2024, and they project that annual collections could surpass $2 billion. But that's all going to be offset if these high income people decide to relocate, and then the tax goes away because their income goes away and goes to another state.
David Leary: [00:47:41] Or probably is worse, because we already talked about how in Boston, the real estate market, and they traditionally have made a lot of money or taxing office rent. And so if more people leave, there's even less ability to fill those offices, which is even now. What do you keep raising on your citizens and in the private sector? I don't know.
Blake Oliver: [00:47:58] So this is a great like service actually by a state society. Good job Massachusetts Society for putting out this survey of your members advocating on behalf of their clients for reasonable tax policy. Now we'll see if those high income clients actually leave. Right. But I'm going to bet substantial number of them will because they have the means to do it. It's like when Jeff Bezos decided to leave Washington, they did a onerous tax on billionaires and he said, okay, I'm going to move to Florida. He just took his. He just started living on his yacht or whatever. Right. So like, there's only there's only so much you can do. Yeah. Um, but that stuff wins politically because people like tax the rich, right?
David Leary: [00:48:47] We should, uh, jump into another ad. All right. Next sponsor.
Blake Oliver: [00:48:51] Let's thank our third sponsor of this episode, Makers Hub.
David Leary: [00:48:55] So Makers hub, what they do is they're really, really good at scanning your bills. And when I say good at it, they have a hundred data fields of all the fields on your bills and incoming purchase orders, and they get all that down to the SKU level, the payment terms, the discounts, the vendor details, and they sink all that into QuickBooks. So if you have complicated bills, construction, I think manufacturing, we have all these line items, all these parts and you got a job cost it to classes and projects. This is the product you want to use. You want to get Makers Hub to do scanning of super tedious, detailed bills, or you have stock of Home Depot receipts for five different projects you worked on. Right? That's a you can scan them in. It's easy. A lot of it. A lot of apps will just scan it with the date and the amount. But that's it. You usually need all that details and that's the hardest part.
Blake Oliver: [00:49:44] All the line items maker stuff gives me all the line items.
David Leary: [00:49:47] Yeah. And then once you have that now you can bid your next job with confidence because you know your actual costs, right. And then they also, you know, they can collect your w-9s bill and payment approval. So it becomes your AP workflow of your for your entire company. But if you need complicated messes scanned properly, make your subs the way to go.
Blake Oliver: [00:50:08] You can support our show by visiting The Accounting Podcast dot promo slash makers hub that is accounting podcast promo for Makers Hub. Thank you, Makers hub. And now I want to play a video for you. David and I should have prepped this during the last, um, during what you were just doing, because I think there's an ad at the beginning of it, and we don't want to play somebody else's ad.
David Leary: [00:50:40] So while you're prepping that, you want me to do a story.
Blake Oliver: [00:50:43] About.
David Leary: [00:50:44] I have a story I can cover. So, yeah. Cleo, their, uh, legal software to run your law firm. Right. They have now launched an accounting package called Cleo Accounting. And it's pretty interesting a price wise, it's priced almost identical to Qbo. Like very similar prices. You get a dashboard, right? But they have bank sync, right? They have accounts receivable, expense management, financial reporting, all the typical stuff you'd expect from a GL app. Right. But really, really is interesting is reconciliation. So they can reconcile both the trust account and operating bank accounts that are in compliance with legal industry standards. And they can perform three way reconciliations to track your trust request. Deposits. Disbursements. Disbursements, transfers, withdrawals. So if you think about this and I remember Amanda Aguilar at we're actually at the Clio conference she was talking about when she has law firm clients, she get two versions of zero, right. Or 2 or 2 versions of QuickBooks. So ones for the trusts and ones for your actual firm's books. Right. And they would. That's two sales. But now if you're a you're already using Clio to run your firm, why not just use Cleo accounting so you don't have to buy extra software now? You don't need QuickBooks, you don't need Xero.
David Leary: [00:51:55] And this is this is a threat. And I've had a story sitting in my story since last quarter from Legalzoom. So Legalzoom they are talking in their conference call, was talking about how great their full books to tax offering is at Legalzoom. So you have Legalzoom is kind of attacking the QuickBooks Live model. You have Cleo attacking QuickBooks itself, right? But this is like a big threat because it's not just Cleo or the legal softwares. Shopify has the ability to do this. Toast now has payroll built in, right? Or square really any app that somebody's using eight hours a day to run their business. If they had a GL, that's a really big threat for Intuit. And this is why I feel like you can smell based on Intuit Connect rebranding from QuickBooks connect and the verbiage they use that. This is why Intuit's probably on the march to push more for mid-market, because they're being attacked on the low end everywhere. And this is the it's really a risk for somebody like Intuit and Xero. Yeah.
Blake Oliver: [00:52:55] Well, and if you serve legal clients, law firm clients become an expert at this accounting software built into Clio. And you can be an early adopter. You can get the the huge benefit of having perhaps Clio send you leads. Get to know Clio, get to know the partner program at Clio, and try to get them to put you on like a directory that you're an expert. I mean, if you get it.
David Leary: [00:53:23] All now because Clio basically just copied the Intuit model. So everything Intuit's ever done, they just copied and brilliant they've built out. They have a CRM now. They have the full stack for law firms, amazingly.
Blake Oliver: [00:53:35] All right. David, uh, to take us out here today, I want to play a video that I spotted. Uh, it's called Ohio. Shortage of certified accountants is part of a national trend.
Ohio News Clip: [00:53:47] More news this afternoon. The nation's accounting profession is in desperate need of more money managers. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there are 340,000 fewer CPAs than there were five years ago. Now, that shortage can lead to mistakes and mistakes that can hurt a business's bottom line. In Ohio, there are 33,000 CPAs just like the rest of the country. Ohio's dwindling number of accountants is raising concerns in the profession. More accountants are leaving the profession for retirement, and the advance of AI has reduced the demand for data entry accountants. The Ohio Accountancy Board blames low pay, student debt and long hours as reasons why many chose not to join the profession.
TikTok - Savannah Bananas: [00:54:30] So the average person coming out with a master's degree across the board, their average student loan debt is $61,000. So that is not an insignificant amount of money. And if you come into the profession, you have the potential to earn that much. But it might take a little bit of time. So the profession is starting to address that by offering higher salaries.
Ohio News Clip: [00:54:53] Well, the Ohio Accountancy Board is addressing the issue by increasing scholarship money to help people pay for schooling or pay for their CPA exam. There is a job fair planned at Ohio State coming up in September.
Blake Oliver: [00:55:07] So that's the plan is apparently increase scholarships for education. And that's the plan we've seen from the AICPA, from Nasba, from a lot of these state societies is, oh, let's subsidize this education. But we all know that subsidies do not solve the problem. It actually just increases the cost. Right? Because you're just giving more money to the universities, which are overpriced.
David Leary: [00:55:36] 30 years of universities figuring this game out. Right. They're the experts at it now.
Blake Oliver: [00:55:41] Yeah. So traditional education is the problem. And the reason that salaries are low is it's not the firms fault. It's it's that these graduates are coming out and they don't have skills. They have to be trained for like 2 or 3 years to be useful to anyone, at least a year. So I, I say this is a problem of higher education. This is and the reason that we struggle to modernize it is because we've locked the education into law. All these required courses you You still got to learn all this material and and it's it's it's all laid out so that instructors don't have flexibility to modernize. You can't change the curriculum like you have to take all these little specific courses. And yeah, it's it's a problem. So I feel like the state board is not looking in the mirror. They need to look in the mirror and figure out how to streamline this for new folks.
David Leary: [00:56:45] When I saw that article fly by because I saw the article, but then I went to watch the video and then I think, you know, sometimes these smaller local news stations in their websites, it plays a different video. I wasn't I was like, all right, I can't bring this show. But what really struck me is this where we're at in the news cycle on this? At first it was just dorks like us and insiders talking about the accountant shortage. Then Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, all the big New York Times, all the big media started picking up on it. But now we're down to where the accountant shortage is the topic of the 530 local news channel. Like that's where we're at. Like it's now. It's not it's like that mainstream now. Like because if one local news channel covers this, they're all going to run the same similar stories like this.
Blake Oliver: [00:57:24] Now, if you want to increase the image of accounting, you want to promote accounting as a great career. Uh, here's one way that state societies and boards might want to do it. This is a video I spotted on TikTok. Give it this a watch.
TikTok - @nycoleemccrary: [00:57:39] I went to school as a music major, and once I realized that that was not going to give me the life that I was looking for, I changed my major to accounting. I had never heard of accounting before. I did not know what that entailed, but when I looked up salary ranges, it was where I was trying to be. So indeed, you don't go to school for what you like. You go to school for what you can tolerate, to work as a career and this other shit that you like to do, do it on the side because it's a hobby. It is.
Blake Oliver: [00:58:15] So what I love about that is it's just brutally honest. And it's the same calculation that I made as a music major. Now, I didn't switch majors. I had to go back. Right. But stop trying to make accounting sexy. Stop trying to make accounting cool. It is not. It never will be. Embrace the nerd glasses. That's what we are. Okay. Green shades, glasses. Somebody has to be that. There's nothing wrong with that. Okay? And it just it's just so it's so cringe when ever anyone in a leadership position tries to say accounting is cool.
David Leary: [00:58:50] Or make accounting sexy. Yeah.
Blake Oliver: [00:58:52] Oh, God. I it just hurts my brain so much. So stop doing that. Just point out that if you majored in something that's way lower on the pay scale and you want to increase your earnings like those are the people we should be reaching out to. But the problem is we make it really, really hard for those people to switch majors. We make it really hard for the people who majored in, I don't know, social work or whatever. Like I'm just thinking of all the, like, careers where you're making like 50 K, right? You want to make 100. Those are the people we need to reach out to, but we make it really hard for them to change careers, because you have to go back to school and you have to get all these specific courses. You can't just learn it on the job and then take the CPA exam. You know, all this nitpicky stuff that we do that excludes folks like myself and like the creator of that TikTok video, right, who probably had to do a lot to go back and get it. And, um, yeah, it doesn't like there are plenty of people in this country who could fill this gap in accounting, and we don't have to go offshore to find them. We could do it here.
David Leary: [00:59:56] And you're right. Like right now the focus is like, oh, we're losing people to tech and finance. Well okay, fine. Those people are stealing from the accounting industry. Then go steal from somebody else's industry. Exactly right.
Blake Oliver: [01:00:07] Like go, go raise up people. Right. Don't hold. Don't pull them back down.
David Leary: [01:00:13] Right down. Yeah.
Blake Oliver: [01:00:16] All right David, great talking to you as always. And thank you to our livestream viewers for joining us on this Friday. If you're listening to us on the podcast feed and you want to join us live, subscribe to us on YouTube, search for The Accounting Podcast on YouTube, subscribe. Hit the notifications button and you'll get notified when we go live and chat with us offline. Well, I guess it is online, but it's off the show. Chat with us in our community, earmarked community and post in there. Say hello, I will talk to you. You have questions about pricing. You have questions about podcasting. You have questions about whatever you want to ask me a question. I will be in there on a daily basis answering your questions. So consider me like a free resource to you. I'm not going to charge you for it, and my rates are pretty darn high these days. So it's a deal. It's a real deal, guys. Go on in there.
David Leary: [01:01:07] Heather I used it to post the story we never got to write. That's right. The story last week. I never made the air. I'll put it in there so people could still see it.
Blake Oliver: [01:01:15] And don't forget, you can earn CPE. For listening to this episode. Go to Earmarked app, create a free account and you can get CPE credit for all of our episodes. And if you have feedback on the app, you want to tell us how we can make it better. That's also what the community is for. Go to Earmarked Community and join the app feedback space and let us know what you think. What should we build next? We are planning that out, right? We've kind of frozen the feature development major stuff for the rest of the year while CPE goes into high earning mode, but we're going to plan out what we want to build for 2025, and we want your input.
David Leary: [01:01:49] I have one last announcement before we just cut off. Go for it. Those of you who are on social media, you've probably have seen or are aware of the Savannah bananas. You've seen they for for some of us that are older, it's like the Harlem Globetrotters of the new. But their baseball team, right. And super crazy celebrities, very viral. I think they have a million people on their waiting list to go to games. But Blake is going to interview the CFO. So get the earmark app in the app, it lists all the upcoming events. This is an event, and you can register to the webinar where Blake is going to interview the CFO of Savannah Bananas. I'm super pumped. This is going to be exciting.
Blake Oliver: [01:02:27] Should we play one of these like Savannah Banana social clips?
David Leary: [01:02:30] So TikTok. Yeah, absolutely.
Blake Oliver: [01:02:32] All right. I'm gonna take us out here. They are amazing. That's how I discovered them. I think everybody discovered the Savannah bananas this way. Let's see if I can buy one of these.
TikTok - Savannah Bananas: [01:02:43] You know, I know you know I remember you. And I know you know, I know you remember me. And you know I know you know I remember you. And I know you know I remember how.
Blake Oliver: [01:02:58] They're doing a dance number right now on the field.
TikTok - Savannah Bananas: [01:03:01] Right. Like. Like. How we dance on the best song ever. We knew every note. Can't remember. No, no I know I won't forget. We can't stop thinking about it like this. Oh, you're the best. And yet in your head we never get it.
Blake Oliver: [01:03:28] All right, There you have it. The baseball team that has minor league baseball team that has just popped off on TikTok. I don't even know if that's the right phrase, but that's what I'm saying. David, see you here next week. Thanks, everyone who joined us live. And, uh, have a great weekend. Bye.