'The Dying Language of Accounting' (wsj.com) 173
Paul Knopp, KPMG US CEO, writing in an op-ed on WSJ: According to a United Nations estimate, 230 languages went extinct between 1950 and 2010. If my profession doesn't act, the language of business -- accounting -- could vanish too. The number of students who took the exam to become certified public accountants in 2022 hit a 17-year low. From 2020 to 2022, bachelor's degrees in accounting dropped 7.8% after steady declines since 2018.
While the shortage isn't yet an issue for the country's largest firms, it's beginning to affect our economy and capital markets. In the first half of 2024, nearly 600 U.S.-listed companies reported material weaknesses related to personnel. S&P Global analysts last year warned that many municipalities were at risk of having their credit ratings downgraded or withdrawn due to delayed financial disclosures.
Our profession must remove hurdles to learning the accounting language while preserving quality. In October, KPMG became the first large accounting firm to advocate developing alternate paths to CPA licensing. We want pathways that emphasize experience, not academic credits, after college. Most people today must earn 30 credits after their bachelor's degrees -- the so-called 150-hour rule -- work under a licensed CPA for a year, and pass the CPA exam to become licensed.
Research by the Center for Audit Quality finds that the 150-hour rule is among the top reasons people don't pursue CPA licensure. A December 2023 study found that the requirement causes a 26% drop in interest among minorities. There is a consensus for change, but we can't waste time. Many state CPA societies are working on legislation to create an alternative path to licensure. State boards of accountancy should replace the extra academic requirement with more on-the-job experience. A person who is licensed in one state should be able to practice in another even if reforms create different licensing requirements.
While the shortage isn't yet an issue for the country's largest firms, it's beginning to affect our economy and capital markets. In the first half of 2024, nearly 600 U.S.-listed companies reported material weaknesses related to personnel. S&P Global analysts last year warned that many municipalities were at risk of having their credit ratings downgraded or withdrawn due to delayed financial disclosures.
Our profession must remove hurdles to learning the accounting language while preserving quality. In October, KPMG became the first large accounting firm to advocate developing alternate paths to CPA licensing. We want pathways that emphasize experience, not academic credits, after college. Most people today must earn 30 credits after their bachelor's degrees -- the so-called 150-hour rule -- work under a licensed CPA for a year, and pass the CPA exam to become licensed.
Research by the Center for Audit Quality finds that the 150-hour rule is among the top reasons people don't pursue CPA licensure. A December 2023 study found that the requirement causes a 26% drop in interest among minorities. There is a consensus for change, but we can't waste time. Many state CPA societies are working on legislation to create an alternative path to licensure. State boards of accountancy should replace the extra academic requirement with more on-the-job experience. A person who is licensed in one state should be able to practice in another even if reforms create different licensing requirements.
Raise the pay (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Raise the pay (Score:5, Insightful)
Colleges want tuition money from everybody, including potential CPAs. If the licensing requirements (which happen outside of the college courses anyway) are causing discouragement and hence lower enrollment, then colleges have a direct financial incentive to want that adjusted.
This doesn't make it a good reason, but it absolutely makes it a motivating reason.
We have seen the exact same thing happen to computer science courses, where they have been significantly watered-down in order to cash in on the high level of interest from students. The fact that many of these students wound up totally unprepared for the working world and never got or held a job in the field is not the college's concern.
One good way to increase interest would be to pay CPAs more. But of course, none of the powers-that-be want that!
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One good way to increase interest would be to pay CPAs more. But of course, none of the powers-that-be want that!
..were at risk of having their credit ratings downgraded or withdrawn due to delayed financial disclosures.
Wonder what kind of salary can be justified when the alternative is the corporation earning that downgraded interest rate on the new eight-figure corporate expansion loan.
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Not sure how it works for accounting, etc. but I know the health science programs at the school I work for - radiology/nuke med techs, resp. therapy, etc - are all evaluated/judged by the board exam pass rates of their graduates (as well as job placement, etc) by their various accreditation agencies
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We have seen the exact same thing happen to computer science courses, where they have been significantly watered-down in order to cash in on the high level of interest from students.
Have we actually seen that?
I've been in this business since before it got really popular (my first programming job was in 1988), and as far as I can tell the situation has always been the same: employers have always viewed most CS degrees as a good-or-maybe-required element, but have always expected that lots of fresh grads can't actually do the job. As a result, CS grads have always struggled to get that first job, because they have no track record and employers don't like to take a risk. But among the
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If those requirement are actually necessary to ensure that CPAs are high quality, then sure, I agree. But to the extent that the requirements are just...stupid boxes to check, then by all means, eliminate or reduce them.
In software engineering, it's well-known that certifications say very little about a developer's abilities and quality. I suspect that this is true in accounting as well.
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"I'd like my accounting done by someone who has met lower standards."
Imagine choosing our surgeons like this.
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"I'd like my accounting done by someone who has met lower standards."
Imagine choosing our surgeons like this.
Or our engineers.
Surgeons determine the outcome of your life during a specific, narrow time frame. Every time you start your car, drive over a bridge, step in a building, ride in an elevator, fly in a plane, you're putting your life in the hands of engineers. With luck, you'll never have to hope your surgeon went to Harvard Medical School, but you'd better hope the people who designed the things you entrust your life to on a daily basis went to MIT.
Re:Raise the pay (Score:5, Insightful)
A friend of mine is a retired surgeon. He is of the opinion that most routine surgeries don't need an MD. An 18-month trade school and an apprenticeship should be more than adequate. Not only would we get more skilled surgeons, we'd dramatically reduce costs.
This is way outside my area, so my opinion on that doesn't matter, but I can say that some professions really do have unnecessary barriers that exist only to keep the number of qualified practitioners low and wages high.
A skilled CPA can be worth their weight in gold, but not everyone needs a CPA. Smaller organizations can get by with an accountant or even just a bookkeeper. There is nothing wrong with this. The average small business doesn't need the best of the best; they don't have complicated needs, so anyone that's both honest and competent will be perfectly adequate.
"I'd like my accounting done by someone who has met lower standards"
There's nothing wrong with that, but why frame things that way? You wouldn't hire a mechanical engineer to change your spark plugs, you'd hire a mechanic. Would you really say "I'd like this work done by someone who has met lower standard" or the far more appropriate "I don't need a qualified engineer for this, so I'd like the job done by a mechanic"?
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professions really do have unnecessary barriers that exist only to keep the number of qualified practitioners low and wages high.
I think every profession has some barriers for that purpose and the higher paid, the more of those barriers there are. Or maybe the other way around.
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One of the pioneers of cardiac surgery, Vivien Thomas [wikipedia.org], was a carpenter with no formal training whatsoever.
On the other hand, my best friend is a family physician. Her training is extensive: five years of undergrad (philosophy major, so needed an a
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I'll bite - how would that dramatically reduce costs? Doctors' salaries account for about 6% of America's 4.5 trillion/year healthcare spend.
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If they want more accountants, they should increase the pay or improve working conditions.
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I see this comment a lot on Slashdot in recent times. "Pay them more!"
You can't fix all problems by throwing money at them.
Paying people more does not make them better at their work. Paying job-x more attracts people who want money, not necessarily people who are good at the job. Paying everyone more is just inflation.
They just want to bring in H1B's (Score:3, Informative)
This is one of the reasons we actually need real unions. Unions can cut through the bullshit and focus on direct financial benefit to their members. They can form voting blocks that can actually be effective. And they can organize people to vote in primary elections to select candidates who will actually do useful things for their members.
It's not perfect. But it's a hell of a lot
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Is it always like that? I just posted that I hope my kids want to be accountants.
There are a couple at my company and they're employees like everyone else. Except they have corner offices and nicer cars.
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My ex wife works with accountants and all the ones I met at all the little dinner functions we had to attend were doing just fine in life. Better then average I would say.
Since most jobs are just that, jobs, I'd rather be at a well paying job I don't want to do then a low paying job I don't want to do.
Beats digging a trench in frozen ground ... (Score:3)
Keeping track of someone else's millions of dollars has got to be pretty high on the list of "boring and depressing careers", regardless of what it pays.
The guy digging up and repairing a burst water main at 2am during a blizzard, so the accountants and other office workers can take a hot shower at 6am, is probably diverging with your expectations. Matter of fact the guy is probably thinking about putting the pay from this overtime work aside to pay for his kids accounting classes.
You'd have to pay me upwards of a half million dollars a year to have even a remote interest in such a thing.
Unless you have a touch of OCD and love things that balance out perfectly. Who love the idea of seeing where everything came from, where some of those things went, and where the r
Easy solution (Score:2)
Let AI handle it. Accounting isn't much more than a series of if statements and a look up table: You paid this fee. Is there a tax deduction for it? If no, go to the next line item. If yes, calculate appropriate deduction.
Of course this would remove much of the shenanigans going on now in financial statements, but who's counting?
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That's an interesting idea. But, I personally am not a CPA, so I have no idea what they spend most of their time actually doing in order to deliver value.
Are you a CPA?
Over a nickel, why? (Score:2)
That's an interesting idea. But, I personally am not a CPA, so I have no idea what they spend most of their time actually doing in order to deliver value. Are you a CPA?
I know one. They freak out when accounts are out of balance by a nickel and spend days investigating. Over a nickel, why? Because they fear there is not one $0.05 error, but that there are two or more errors of large amounts that coincidentally balance each other out to this small value.
Also, they spend some time deciding if something can be accounted for this way or that way, depending on generally acceptable accounting procedures, or federal, state, or local law. Ex. That fraction of a bitcoin you spen
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It's similar to engineering. Hey look boss, I put the airplane together and I've got these eight extra bolts! What do you mean we need to figure out why, there are like half a million parts in this plane, so what if we're plus or minus 8?
Re:Easy solution (Score:4, Informative)
Let AI handle it. Accounting isn't much more than a series of if statements and a look up table: You paid this fee. Is there a tax deduction for it? If no, go to the next line item. If yes, calculate appropriate deduction.
Your primary experience with an accountant may be tax filing, but that's far from the full scope of an accountant's training. Literally just looking at the CPA Exam's four sections, you can see that tax is only 1/4 of the sectional focus. Every CPA has to pass all three of the following 3-4 hour exams:
* Auditing and Attestation (AUD)
* Financial Accounting and Reporting (FAR)
* Regulation (REG)
They also have to pass one of the following:
* Business Analysis and Reporting (BAR)
* Information Systems and Controls (ISC)
* Tax Compliance and Planning (TCP) --- Potentially just one of the exams.
Accounting isn't just filing taxes or auditing. It's making sure financial transactions and planning is orderly, predictable, and auditable. When it's not sufficiently orderly, it's going back and cleaning everything up which can mean reading 100 different types of invoices in various file formats.
This isn't something AI can do yet. It is so complex and nuanced that no AI developer will be willing to allow its AI to be responsible for just how important accounting is.
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This isn't something AI can do yet. It is so complex and nuanced that no AI developer will be willing to allow its AI to be responsible for just how important accounting is.
AI can already read x-rays better than humans to identify tumours and pre-tumorous lesions. You're telling me that accounting is harder than that? More important than the life-critical evaluation of whether someone has a fatal cancer or just a cyst?
Allow me to guffaw loudly.
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Your method for ranking the difficulty of problems doesn't produce very good results.
You can train pigeons to identify cancer on histology images. Things like that are well-defined problems and perfect performance is not expected.
The routine bits of accounting (the "adding") are already done using conventional software. The hard bits are nagging people to report the information to put into that software, troubleshooting when things go wrong, and addressing ambiguous and unexpected sitations.
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Except that accounting is supposed to be accurate. Accuracy is anathema to AI.
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Right, you use the AI to create the Business Intelligence that is specifically created to handle every situation in the accounting world that is covered in your rules.
It starts from nothing. Ingests all the accounting rulebase and documents. Go to town.
Then you use the AI to create the bridges between departments to autopull the required data, instead of having to request it.
You could be down to one accountant who handles vetting the BI output, and one AI Engineer responsible for all the BI apps out there.
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You're assuming it will work. LLM based stuff is not there yet. It's mostly right, by accident, but not because of any logic being used. It's mostly right due to selecting desired outputs that its training thinks are good, but is unable to check that the answers are correct. So those annual Sarbanes-Oxley reports will still require a team of accountants merely to double check. Just like people using AI to code will need a lot of coders just to double check (possibly more coders than were laid off due t
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Let AI handle it. Accounting isn't much more than a series of if statements and a look up table: You paid this fee. Is there a tax deduction for it? If no, go to the next line item. If yes, calculate appropriate deduction.
You'd want to use traditional algorithms for things like this, not AI.
Of course this would remove much of the shenanigans going on now in financial statements
I wouldn't bet on it.
Drop the standards? (Score:2)
There's no accounting for taste. (Score:3)
And I have no taste for accounting.
150 hours? (Score:2)
The 150 hours of classes seems peanuts compared to the year of indentured servitude they call apprenticeship.
No surprise there (Score:4, Interesting)
Th e accounting courses I took in university helped me manage my small consulting practice and stay on top of the pros who were doing my business taxes. But in a world where the likely answer to the hiring question 'what is one plus one' is 'what would you like it to be', the profession is yet another endangered species. In the court of the red queen a sane person will soon go mad.
Illegal activity paid too well (Score:2)
Next, how about kill the language of legalese! (Score:5, Insightful)
The language of CPAs might be obscure and hard to follow. But it's nothing compared to the language of law. That language is even more destructive and useless, serving only to keep lawyers employed at ridiculously high pay rates. Lawyers claim that by spelling everything out in technical terms, that they are protecting their clients. Actually, it does not such thing, all the fancy language does nothing to prevent another creative lawyer from finding a loophole to drive a Mac truck through.
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I'm a tax lawyer who spends most of my work life with accounting (and though I'm not a formally trained accounting, I've picked up quite a bit of it through the years).
Believe it or not, the primary goal of legal language is clarity and consistency. When you read a sentence that determines the tax treatment of a complex financial arrangement, the idea is that any trained person should be able to understand it on a consistent basis. The problem with trying to put it in "layman's terms" is that avoiding terms
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Believe it or not, the primary goal of legal language is clarity and consistency.
You're right, I don't believe it. Here's why.
Clarity is never achieved through long-winded documents. Our Constitution is clear not because it's long, but because it's short. The Bill of Rights is clear not because it's long, but because it's short. Now I'm sure you'll counter that the Constitution and the Bill of Rights leave lots of room for ambiguity because of their brevity, and this is true. But ambiguity isn't solved through many words. If many words were able to remove ambiguity, why then do lawyers
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I'd say the "actual law" you learn for the bar exam is too reductionist to be of much use except in the most basic of circumstances. While I hear your point about the inefficiency of the case method, I think it is actually good training. In the real world, you don't always get a Lexis summary that is right on point and you do need to try to synthesize poorly-written case law that is the only law on point.
My experience in law school was also a bit different because I focused on tax (with a joint LLM) so most
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It sounds like you are arguing that legalese is anything *but* clear and consistent. On that point, I agree with you!
Let the Market Work (Score:2)
The world needs good accountants. Public companies cannot survive without good accountants. However becoming an accountant is not seen as attractive as a career, particularly for the up and coming generation. That's not a bad thing, it means we had too many.
However, as fewer accountants drop out, the demand for the remaining will go up significantly. well skilled accountants, familiar with complex tax codes and GAAP principles and audits will charge a pre
I can't think of a better use for AI (Score:2)
then doing our taxes. The only reason our taxes are at all difficult is because of the government making them that convoluted. If the tax code wasn't full of so many loop holes for special interesting, it would be painless to do taxes.
If you simplify the tax code, the amount of CPAs required would drop dramatically.
If they treated accountants better... (Score:2)
My uncle was an accountant for KPMG for a long time at the end of his career. The year before his retirement plan fully vested they laid him off, along with most everyone else who wasn't client-facing and was one year away from vesting, and hired a bunch of fresh grads to replace them. They did it in some sneaky way so that suing them would have been a nightmare.
They brought this whole mess upon themselves, by using bean-counter tactics on their bean-counters; no one is ever going to tell kids to get into a
Shortages fix themselves (Score:2)
Especially white collar, licensed professional shortages.
Lawyers regularly charge 400/hr.
Physicians *start* in the low-mid six figures out of residency in saturated markets like Boston and can get high six figure starting salaries in ruralish places out west where there are "shortages"
If CPAs really get scarce, soon enough people will be going into accounting for the money, the way many people go into law, medicine, or blue-collar stuff like mining, oil-and-gas, and plumbing for the money.
Change back to the 120 hour rule (Score:2)
It scares me a little that a person who is supposed to be good with numbers didn't state this obvious solution. They do not nee
Too much computing power (Score:3)
There used to be old days when the compute power was very expensive forcing sysadmins at our computing center to run the unix process accounting. At the end of each month, we processed all accounting logs and sent the bills to each department based on CPU hour time used. However, our servers got much faster now, and we have finally retired the last of our Sparcstation 10s. We stopped running unix process accounting and fired all accountants.
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I don't think you will find any public company that simply "fired all the accountants." There are a lot of accounting tasks that cannot be performed automatically.
AI does have a lot of potential in accounting, but pure LLMs can't do it because someone needs to check their accuracy, and checking properly can often take as long as doing it yourself. There is also a lack of training data. Companies are not willing to give AI access to their ERP systems because they cannot ensure the security of their data. But
Not what I expected from that headline (Score:2)
That said, accounting will come back into vogue soon enough. Many people are recognizing that jobs in finance are the ones with the best chances of retirement going forward. I have a PhD that is heavily into a STEM discipline and I'm currently on track to retire at approximately the youthful age of 137 - and I got all that way with zero student loans. I fear for what will happen to other STEM hopefuls when they realize they are signing away their
So... (Score:2)
Capitalism at work (Score:2)
Big 4 Underpay (Score:2)
The biggest problem with the accounting profession in terms of attracting bright young graduates is that the profession pays poorly compared to other fields of study that require similar levels of intelligence and effort. The Big 4 often pay less than 1/2 of what an investment bank, major consulting firm, or big tech might pay. But they require the same demanding hours. So if you are a promising young student who can do any of those, what is the argument for choosing accounting?
Dumbing down standards may ge
Revenue for colleges (Score:2)
Don't pay more. Lower the bar for entry. (Score:2)
Seems the solution we have to everything now. Don't raise entry-level pay for a job. Lower the bar to entry so you get worse candidates in the door, then you can continue to lower the pay level because, "These people are terrible at their job." God damn, I love the smell of capitalism burning in its own rot. Especially funny when it comes to the accounting crowd.
Remove the gatekeepers? (Score:2)
People keep complaining that the trades are neglected, and now apparently accounting, because young people choose not to enter them. There's a reason. For many professions the only way "in" is through apprenticeships, where you are essentially abused by a senior person while you learn the business and earn your credentials, whatever they happen to be. The only way in is via people who are capable of acting as gate-keepers, preventing you from entering the field if you don't dance to their tune. Accounting (
DK (Score:3, Informative)
Dunning-Kruger in full effect right here.
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It is very satisfying to see all the items on a balance sheet click into place. And frustrating as hell before it happens. Much like mechanical or electrical engineering.
Double-entry accounting a major step (Score:3, Informative)
It is very satisfying to see all the items on a balance sheet click into place. And frustrating as hell before it happens. Much like mechanical or electrical engineering.
More generally, Double-entry accounting was one of civilizations major achievements. At its heart its just a method of data acquisition and organization that conveniently describes reality.
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Double-entry accounting was one of civilizations major achievements.
Double-entry accounting was invented in 1494 and is one of the milestones of the Renaissance.
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A book on Double Entry Accounting was published in Europe in the late 1400's.
DE has been around far longer than that.
Re:and nothing of value was lost (Score:5, Interesting)
If done properly, accounting is a form of control and organization - just of finances, instead of tangible parts and such. In fact, there's a bit of beauty and calmness about it, if you're O/C about these things.
I had to take a year of accounting in college and I loved it! If I didn't want to be a programmer, I would have switched majors. It had some of the same appeal to me as coding - organization, makings things fit together, solving problems. When my kids are old enough, I'm going to encourage them to look into accounting. Or plumbing. But not programming.
Plumbing major with account and programming minors (Score:3)
When my kids are old enough, I'm going to encourage them to look into accounting. Or plumbing. But not programming.
Personally I'd recommend a plumbing major and accounting and programming minors. I once helped a plumbing company organize, computerize, their inventory. Borrowed heavily from double-entry accounting. A ball valve is purchased from this supplier; goes to this warehouse, service truck, or plumber; is sold to this client.
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You don't major in plumbing.
Plumbing is learned in vo-tech schools or apprenticeships, not colleges.
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You don't major in plumbing. Plumbing is learned in vo-tech schools or apprenticeships, not colleges.
I'm referring to the post AI era.
For now, vocational programs are often a big part of community colleges. In my state, community colleges are mandated to focus on vocational certifications, vocational degrees, and undergrad classes transferable to all 4-year public schools within a certain distance. So I can in fact go to my community college and take plumbing, accounting and computer science classes.
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You don't major in plumbing.
I agree, a PhD is preferred.
Re:Plumbing major with account and programming min (Score:5, Interesting)
That was my first hard lesson that IT is in some ways a Humanities study.
Re:Plumbing major with account and programming min (Score:5, Insightful)
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I am O/C about these things and I loved accounting. A place for everything and everything in its place. I very nearly switched majors from CIS to accounting for that reason. I stayed with CIS for lots of reasons, but programming had its own beauty and organization in my eyes. I eventually became a B2B interface engineer which really tapped into that part of me. It's also why I love games like Satisfactory.
If you want to get more people into accounting, use marketing that plays into the desire that some of u
Came from here, sent there, currently in account (Score:2)
Now, can people fk it up for their personal benefit?
But that's not the accountants, that's the politicians and their lawyers who wrote accounting related legislation, like tax codes. The accounts have to abide by the nonsense the politicians come up with. Left to themselves, most accounts are probably like scientists, they just want to describe reality. Some money came from here, some money went there, and some money is currently located in account (repeat as necessary).
Came from here, sent there, currently in account -- sounds an awful lot like a blockch
Yeah, who needs to know where money went (Score:3, Insightful)
and nothing of value was lost/
Yeah, who needs to know where the money went, or where it came from, or how much is still around.
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Yeah, who needs to know where the money went, or where it came from, or how much is still around.
My experience with accountants is that they believe they are the core, the center, the heart, the brain of an organization, and that their budgets are Holy Writ, rather than wild-ass-guesses and poorly justified projections.
Budgets are the work product of executives, management, not accountants. Budgets are in part a way to define priorities and to limit actions to only its necessary scope. They are a means of exercising control, to keep subordinates on track with a plan.
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Indeed, my dad was a comptroller - a management accountant. He did budgeting work, but he presented plans, he didn't approve them.
They might tell somebody that something "isn't in the budget", but that's because keeping within the budget is their job. They generally didn't get to set said budget.
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You do know that the Accountants don't make those budgets - they are there to keep them.
So all your rant about Accountants should be on the managers that make those budgets.
Are you sure you're dealing with accountants?
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Frank Reynolds is busy cooking Frank's Fluids books
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Sorry, but accounting ISN'T simple. You could as well say "Only programmers could take simple true/false decisions and make them incomprehensible.".
OTOH, wasn't KMPG one of the companies involved in scandles about fraudulent bookkeeping? I'm not sure I'd want to accept their advice.
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wasn't KMPG one of the companies involved in scandles
I don't think KPMG has been involved with scandles https://scandleshop.com/ [scandleshop.com] but who knows
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"Only accountants can take what should be simple adding and subtracting"
Uh, no, it's not. I've only taken a few introductory courses on accounting, and I won't deny that the CPA requirements have more than a whiff of a trade guild about them, but accounting requires you to figure out exactly *what* needs to added and subtracted. Let's say you spend a million dollars on a piece of manufacturing equipment that's going to last for decades. How do your accounts reflect that expense? Welcome to the wonderful
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Welcome to the wonderful world of depreciation and the many, many ways it can be expensed.
And, indeed, the different regulatory ways it must be expensed, based on the industry, the size of the company etc.
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Again, just because you are too stupid to understand the rules does not mean that the rules are stupid.
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Right.
So simply re-do all the tax and accounting laws. Got it.
Anything else you want for x-mas? Lol.
Re:World's smallest violin (Score:5, Insightful)
This is pure Dunning-Kruger. You can just say, "I don't like accountants because they make me pay money when I don't want to," instead of lying.
Only accountants can take what should be simple adding and subtracting, then somehow make it incomprehensible to people without years of arcane study.
Only computer programmers can take what should be simple sentence writing, then somehow make it incomprehensible to people without years of study.
See how dumb that looks? Anyone who would say that could safely be assumed to understand absolutely nothing about coding language or who actually establishes coding languages to what end.
Government accountants and industry accountants work together to make tax rules that defy common sense, like having companies scrap perfectly good and useful equipment because it might be a tax liability.
That's legislation, not accountancy. The CPAs don't have a say in that. Legislation and business rules creates the world in which they work and they have to translate financial transactions to meet the requirements of that world.
What they need to do is add some common sense to their profession. Then maybe more people would be willing to practice it.
You might have an easier time working with accountants if you took the time to understand WHY they ask for what they ask for.
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That's legislation, not accountancy. The CPAs don't have a say in that.
Are you trying to tell me with a straight face that accountants have no say in writing tax policy?
Give me a break.
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There are over 670,000 actively licensed CPAs in the US. (https://nasba.org/licensure/howmanycpas/)
There are over 762,000 licensed electricians in the US. (https://www.cnbc.com/2024/07/27/americas-demand-skilled-electricians-boom.html)
Your average CPA has as much of an influence on tax code as an electrician has on building code. That is to say, they have as much influence as any expert has on legislation within their field. The engaged ones will have some amount of influence, but there is no centralized co
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The engaged ones will have some amount of influence, but there is no centralized coven of tradespeople secretly steering federal policy.
Special interest and industry-backed think tanks write much or most of our legislation, then hand them over to politicians.
Now, what professionals would a think tank hire to write tax code? Dentists?
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If I were to guess, I'd say the people responsible would be:
* Legislators who propose bills
* Legislators who vote for bills
* Special Interest groups that include business strategists, political scientists, accountants, etc.
But the 1-3 accountants who may have a hand in writing legislation are ABSOLUTELY going to be outnumbered by all the other expertises and don't constitute a significant percentage of CPAs as a whole.
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It doesn't matter how few accountants write the laws.
It only matters that accountants write the laws. No other professionals would know the arcane terminology required by all the other accountants who get to comply with the laws.
Even when the laws are vague and left for IRS to fill in the details, they're going to have tax accountants do it. In this case as well, it's still totally irrelevant how few accountants they use.
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what professionals would a think tank hire to write tax code?
Tax Lawyers and Lobbyists. There are plenty of people who understand and study tax code more than CPA's.
The accounting department in large corporations is a cost center and has little, if any, influence over anything. There job is to provide clear information to management about income and expenses. That means accurately tracking those things and providing reports in standardized form so that managers can understand and compare them. Likewise in public companies they provide public reports in standardized
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Are you trying to tell me with a straight face that accountants have no say in writing tax policy?
Give me a break.
You are conflating what is done overwhelmingly by politicians and lawyers with what is done by accounts. Conflating those who write the laws with those who implement the rules, Accountants are overwhelmingly in the latter category.
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Only accountants can take what should be simple adding and subtracting, then somehow make it incomprehensible to people without years of arcane study.
You literally have no idea what you are talking about.
Accounting is far from simple adding and subtracting. It takes those simple additions and subtractions and justifies their existence to everyone. The key is in the name: accounting is both taking into accountaccountable for the numbers produced.
Take the accounting equation: Equity = Assets - Liabilities. Accountants create detailed (and very standardized) sheets to justify each of those three variables. If the equation is out of balance, there is a mista
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I don't blame the accountants for the tax code being so convoluted, that's on the politicians. Unfortunately, it's working as it was designed to work. If things were made straight forward and simple, the elite could hide all their theft in the numbers like they do.
If things seemed fucked up, that's because it is. All by design.
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Both assets and liabilities are usually nothing more than wild-assed guesses.
Are you trying for the most incompetent and uninformed post ever made? Keep going the way you are and you're sure to make the top-ten worthless posters on Slashdot.
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Are you seriously wondering what came first, the accountant or the fucking IRS who helped create that necessary evil?
Root cause analysis. If the IRS didn’t make the job of business accounting insanely complex, capitalism wouldn’t need more than a $5 calculator to do the job of accounting.
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It would be helpful to understand just a little bit about the accounting profession before commenting. Believe it or not, the work of many accountants has nothing at all to do with taxation.
Financial accounting rules such as GAAP or IFRS are not at all tied with tax. These are the rules that allow you to read financial statements from companies and understand them on a consistent basis. Without these rules, investors can easily be defrauded or confused by inconsistent booking of assets and liabilities. Thes
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What moron modded this insightful?
All that post does is highlight the authors pride in the own deep ignorance of both floating-point numbers and accounting.
What they need to do is add some common sense to their profession.
You've clearly demonstrated that you don't know enough about the subject to offer meaningful criticism.
Why is it that every right-wing moron thinks that their ignorance makes them more qualified than an educated professional?
Government accountants and industry accountants work together to make tax rules that defy common sense, like having companies scrap perfectly good and useful equipment because it might be a tax liability.
Show us this rule. Put up or shut up.
Oh, no such rule exists? It's just something you heard from one of your equally ignorant fri
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You're barking up the wrong tree.
Tax law is set by Congress, who has every incentive to keep it as complex as possible (to provide as many loopholes for their cronies as possible). Congress also has this weird fetish for implementing any and every abstruse policy via the tax code. The folks at the IRS are tasked with writing and implementing rules to interpret that tangle Congress has enacted. Most
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No... the barrier gets raised every time some jackass skirts the letter of the law to misrepresent their position. Basically, every time somebody "cheats" you have to patch the hole... and the complexity grows.
You could reduce the whole mess to a law that says, "Reasonably describe the health of your organization"... but exactly how long do you think that would stand?
There are laws against having sex with animals. Those laws didn't spring out of nowhere. Sometimes you have to write specific shit down - even
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If your accountant is handing stuff off to a cleric it's probably time to skip town. Or consult your own cleric at least.
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You must be new here.
Slashdot has pretty much always been a centre of performative Dunning-Kruger. In the very old days there were some actual experts around who would chime in, but they've mostly died, grown out of arguing with idiots on the Internet, or gone elsewhere.