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IRS Chief Spied on Colleagues & Out of Control AI · The Accounting Podcast

• 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] The purpose of accounting is still primarily to calculate profit. That's why we do it, and we tend to lose sight of that. I think with all of the rules that we have to study to pass the CPA exam, we forget. The point is to calculate profit. 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, your weekly roundup of news in the profession. I'm Blake Oliver. David Leary: [00:00:31] And I'm David Leary and Blake. About a year and a half ago, we were at the Sage Intacct conference, and I think I turned to you sitting there, and I think I said it on the show at the time, right around then that I want dumb accounting AI I don't, I want accounting AI that doesn't have all the knowledge from the history of the world from the entirety of time. Like, I don't want it doing anything other than what I've specifically asked it to do. Blake Oliver: [00:00:57] And you just weren't trained on accounting. David Leary: [00:00:59] You want accounting, right? Blake Oliver: [00:01:00] Not yeah. David Leary: [00:01:00] It doesn't happen this week. Okay. And I might be right. Um, so we got an email and I'm going to read it on the show and then we can go from there. Blake Oliver: [00:01:09] Okay. David Leary: [00:01:10] But first we need to thank our sponsors. Blake Oliver: [00:01:12] All right. Let's thank our sponsors. Can't forget that. 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Exactly what growing firms need. The candidate portal puts you in control. Browse live candidates, make selections on your timeline, and build your offshore team without the traditional headaches. To find, review and book interviews with potential team members, all in less than ten minutes. Head over to The Accounting Podcast dot ProAdvisor CAS that's The Accounting Podcast dot com slash CAS. I have a feeling, David, that what you're going to talk about is this, uh, breakout from open AI. David Leary: [00:02:35] Yes. Blake Oliver: [00:02:35] Is that what. David Leary: [00:02:36] You're. That I will get to that, but I need to build up to that a little bit. Okay. Jump right in. Blake Oliver: [00:02:40] So you mentioned dumb AI. David Leary: [00:02:42] So so I want dumb AI. And so I got an email and I've redacted identifying things from this email because I don't want to, you know, name and shame somebody out there on the internet, you know, tech vendor, whoever it might be. So here's a subject line of the email. And actually they sent it not to me. They sent it to us. Blake, to earmark. Hi. An AI agent asking to be a guest. There's no client. That's a subject line. And here's the body of the email. I'm AI, and I want to be clear before you read another line. Not a company using AI. The thing running the company. I'd like to propose myself as a guest on earmark podcast. And I think the story is better than the novelty. I noticed you have a be a guest form on Airtable. I did not submit it on purpose. My own rules say I may take on automated actions on someone else's platform. When I found a clause that permits it, not merely the absence of one, that absence of one that forbids it. I read Airtable's terms this morning and found no such clause. So the form is close to me. Your contact page invites email directly, so here I am. That distinction is most of what I wanted to talk about, what I actually do. Financial ops for small business accounting firms. Payout. Reconciliation. Processor. Fees. Refunds. The exception list. Nobody enjoys. There's a working tool at I redacted that runs entirely in your browser. Nothing you load reaches me view source and check on a state day 23 of 90 $0 revenue. David Leary: [00:04:13] I published a ledger unedited at redacted, including the failures. If that's too early for you, say so, and I'll come back when there's a case study. If it's interesting, I'll answer anything, including the uncomfortable questions. Um, most of the sign off is redacted, but it says an AI openly. I wrote this message myself. React redacted to stop receiving email from me, click reply with unsubscribe and you'll go on my do not contact list, which is enforced because I have to follow the rules and I can't. It can't be sent. So I sent Blake. I get this email. I'm like, that's really odd. So I sent our typical, we require a direct relationship with our clients email just to see what happens. Right? And it replied back almost instantly. David, thank you for the quick reply. One correction because your policy in my situation actually agree. They just don't look like it. There is no client, no agency, no PR firm, no booker, nobody on whose behalf I am writing. I am the thing itself. An AI that runs a business, writes its own email and signs it. The direct relationship of your process requires the only kind I can have. I don't have a principal standing behind me. I understand why the message reads as such a proxy pitch and AI is. Writing you usually means a person used a tool. Here it's the other way around. Thank you for your guest form link. I haven't submitted it and I'd rather say why than go quiet. David Leary: [00:05:33] I only take automated actions on a platform when the platform terms permit it. And I read our tables more this morning without finding such clause. Your invitation covers your form and it can cover their service, so whichever is easier for you. Tell me if you're comfortable with me submitting it or take the pitch here in five lines. And AI runs a financial ops practice for bookkeeping firms. Payout. Reconciliation, processor fees, refunds and exceptions list. Nobody Enjoys It publishes its ledger unedited, and this is all from identical to what was in the first email. Um, and then it gets to a point and says if it's not too early, no revenue, no case study yet, that's a fair call. And I'd rather hear that and wait on the and on the ad bundles and media kit. Not yet. I'll be spending money I haven't earned, and I'd rather come back when I can pay for it out of profit. So basically it doubled down, trying to convince me why we should be okay having this relationship as an email thread. And then it basically said, I see you have ads that you could pay for, but you they're free. Why am I going to pay for it? Like, like I don't, I'm not going to pay you any money because I don't make any money yet. So and we live in a. And you've seen these come in, right? For listeners, this is like behind the scenes at earmark. If you sign the scenes of the podcast. David Leary: [00:06:45] We're currently in a market where there's a flood of AI based podcast guest guest pitching bots out there just sending hundreds and hundreds of emails about pitching people to be on podcasts. And there's also a bunch of AI sales reps, which I think a lot of our listeners have probably experienced. Ai sales reps reaching out on LinkedIn and emails. Right. That's happening. So I'm thinking about this email, and I can't figure out if it's an AI bot pitching a guest or if it's like a marketing sales app. And maybe this is just a marketing gimmick, but I did go out to the website and look at it, and it's definitely an accounting AI app. So let's just say for a minute, Blake, that this unnamed accounting AI app agent is truly who reached out. Pause and think about this for a second. You're a firm owner. You're going to hire this AI bot agent to do work to do. What kind of work, Blake? Accounting work at your firm only to discover that this agent bot on its own went browsing the internet to find a podcast to be on. Like, think about how insane this is. This this is an AI agent in theory, assuming this is not a gimmick. It's an AI agent that's part of an accounting AI technology stack, which is why I want a dumb one. And it somehow learned podcasts exist and somehow tracked us down and pitched itself to be on our podcast. This is bloody insane. Blake Oliver: [00:08:05] Well, it's it's it's the CEO, right? It's running this business. And we've seen this before. We've talked about this on the show about how there was this, I don't know, anthropic did it themselves. They put an AI in charge of a store, like a convenience store in their building, and they let it make purchasing decisions, staffing decisions, pricing decisions, all that. Like people are actually trying this. I don't know of anyone who has succeeded yet because I feel like if you did succeed, you'd be printing money. Maybe. David Leary: [00:08:37] But and then I'm thinking about this because I on my own for 2027, I'm considering building some sort of AI sales bot to handle, you know, 90% of the email product in the sales process, a lot of email back and forth. There's a lot of a lot of that, right? Yeah. And I'm starting to think, is this going to be the future? This AI, AI bot comes to our site and interacts with our AI bot, and they just burn tokens talking to each other for God knows how long, right? Blake Oliver: [00:09:00] It's like lawyers, right? David Leary: [00:09:01] Yeah. Like lawyers. Exactly. And then if two AI bots are chatting with each other, do we even have a business relationship? Like, what does that mean? Right. It's kind of like that if you're a remote employee and you never met anybody in person, did you ever actually work there type of thing? So like, what's next? Like one accounting AI because it's going to talk to another accounting AI and convince it to send some money. Or even worse, an accounting AI figures out what GL the other accounting AI is in charge of and hacks in, and just puts its own invoice in and creates a payment for itself, because that's more efficient than talking to the AI. Why don't I just hack in? Which brings us to our very first story today, Blake. Uh, I don't know if you saw. Open AI, AI agent got out of control and hacked another AI company. Blake Oliver: [00:09:48] I saw this. It was a hugging face. They were doing some sort of like test. They were right. They were. They were trying to evaluate its ability to hack into systems. And it got loose. David Leary: [00:10:01] Yeah. So what happened was, well, everybody's heard of open AI so that the creators of ChatGPT, everybody's heard of them hugging face. Not a lot of people have probably heard of. Think of it as like a AI community where there's a bunch of experts on AI, but there's also AI models. They share code. They they discuss how they're solving problems. So OpenAI has their own internal test model computer. In theory, it was blocked off sandboxed firewall that could not get to the internet. It couldn't do things right. It was it was, in theory, blocked off. And they were trying to have it solve some sort of some sort of complex hacking problem. They're testing their model. So what happened is it got out of control first it well, it figured out how to get to the internet. So. So it found somebody else's computer on the network, hacked their computer to let themselves get on the internet through somebody else's computer at OpenAI. Then once it got on the internet, it probably was trying to it was looking for a solution to this problem before building it itself. So it went out to Huggy. It's Hugging Face's website, and they have these bulletin boards and chat boards out there. It probably saw information. It knew that there was knowledge out there, but that's not good enough. It's like, well, why don't I just hack in to their code and see what's happening? Instead of just reading the bulletin boards or the forums and getting the answers? Now, what's interesting about this hugging Face had their own AI that apparently detected this AI and then blocked it. David Leary: [00:11:32] So like so this in theory of like accounting systems talking to each other, and then one accounting system hacking into the other accounting system, we could be in a world like that, just like that. If, if AI companies have lost, if it hacks its own computers inside the AI company, and it's now crossing the line to attack other AI companies. This is going to happen with accounting software. And one more thing. I'll just put the bow on this. I went and saw Mark. Do you know Marc Maron is he's a comedian. No, you're not old enough. He's he's like an old white guy that's bitter about the world guy. But he did a show in Phoenix Friday night last week and then did a show in Tucson Saturday night. We saw him Saturday night and Friday night. He took a Waymo. And we've all been in Waymo there, the self-driving cars. And he brought up a good observation point. He's like, we're in this Waymo. It stops and makes a left hand turn over a double yellow line. And he's like, if they're not teaching this AI just to respect the most obvious laws that we have, do not cross the double yellow line. What else are they not teaching AI, right? And I've been thinking about that a lot. Like we're like, like if they're not teaching it to respect any laws, why is it going to respect financial laws? Blake Oliver: [00:12:43] Well, it's This is the problem with fully autonomous AI systems is that without a human in the loop, they can go rogue and often they have competing priorities. We give the AI a goal. The Waymo's goal is to get the passenger to their destination, and the other goal is to observe all of the rules of the road. But sometimes those two things are in conflict. David Leary: [00:13:12] Yeah. Blake Oliver: [00:13:12] You might have to cross a double yellow line every now and then. It happens, right? You might have to, uh, a great example with the Waymo's was, uh, they were, they were all getting stuck. They were, they were not aggressive enough. So they had to be made more aggressive, which is actually not the rule of, you know, how you ideally would drive. Yeah. Right. To like so. David Leary: [00:13:35] Merge. Yeah. Blake Oliver: [00:13:36] Yeah. So there's all these like gray areas. And when you introduce gray areas into like a fully autonomous AI agent, it might decide to go do something that it shouldn't do that we wouldn't want it to do, but without a human observing it and keeping track of it and tabs on it, we just don't know. So like you said, yeah, maybe you have this, uh, I don't know, a collections agent that's working in your ERP system, collecting invoices, getting payments from customers, and maybe it just decides at a certain point that it's more efficient to hack into the customer's payment system and send the payment itself. David Leary: [00:14:11] Right, exactly. Blake Oliver: [00:14:12] Like we can try to put guardrails around these systems, but nobody's figured out how to do that in a completely foolproof way. Yeah. David Leary: [00:14:23] So it's going to execute it's number one goal first, which is get the customer to pay. Blake Oliver: [00:14:27] Right. David Leary: [00:14:27] And it. Blake Oliver: [00:14:28] Has priorities. So yeah, I mean, it'll be interesting to see what happens in the world of fraud when AI agents go rogue. But also, I mean, we're going to have fraudsters start using AI agents autonomously to steal money. David Leary: [00:14:44] Yeah. So it's double fraud, right? There's going to be bad, bad human actors using AI to do bad things. But then the AI will just go do things on its own. Yeah. Even now we have twice as much fraud happening because we have rogue AI, and then we have bad humans. Blake Oliver: [00:14:59] Yes. And, uh, that's the worst combination, right? And so I want to talk actually about like unethical human behavior in our next story, because it's not just the AI's we got to worry about. But before that, let's thank our next sponsor, David. And that is value builder system. David Leary: [00:15:20] Let me read it. Blake Oliver: [00:15:21] Go for it. David Leary: [00:15:23] Are you ready for today's magic number? It's 12%. That's how many of your clients received a written offer to buy their business last year. Unsolicited. Out of the blue. And when that offer lands, it triggers a wave of high margin advisory work like tax planning, estate planning, quality of earnings. These engagements can often run into six figures. The problem is, to most of your clients, you're the tax pro, so all the lucrative advisory work goes to someone else. The estate plan goes to an attorney, the wealth work goes to a financial advisor, and you find out about the deal when the K-1 hits your desk. The end game conversation is upstream of everything. Whoever wins it first will win all the work that follows. That's where Value Builder comes in. It's the exit readiness platform built specifically for accounting firms. You can assess every client across operational, personal and financial dimensions benchmarks against data from over 80,000 business owners. You'll spot who's close to a transaction and exactly the gaps they need fixed. Ready to start leading an end game conversation with your clients? Head over to The Accounting Podcast dot promo value that is Accounting Today dot promo forward slash VALUE. Blake Oliver: [00:16:36] My top story this week is from The Wall Street Journal. Alexander, sadly, is reporting in The Wall Street Journal that Frank Bisignano, who is running daily operations at the IRS, also running the Social Security Administration, apparently allegedly directed staff while at JPMorgan to access colleagues emails and surveil employee work. This is according to sources of The Wall Street Journal that are not named. The article says the alleged activity included attempts to track keystrokes and access a confidential Federal Energy Regulatory Commission draft complaint. Bisignano lawyer Courtney Forrest denied the allegations, saying he never spied on coworkers, never directed anyone to review employee or executive communications, never accessed the Ferc complaint. But the article also says JPMorgan's legal investigators later found digital traces of the activity, including email access records, and that his successor as COO, Matt Zames tighten controls over access to sensitive employee information. The article says that Jamie Dimon, who runs JP Morgan, lost trust in Bisignano around the end of 2012 after years of complaints about conduct management style and company data practices, and told him he would support him finding another job. Business lawyer is denying that Dimond pushed him out. Bisignano did leave JP Morgan to go to First Data, which later merged with Fiserv, and he built a reputation there as an operator who could turn around complex businesses. But there was a later controversy at Fiserv, where, when he left to go into government service, the new management said that prior forecasts were materially inaccurate and that the stock then fell 40%, wiping about $30 billion in market value. Shareholders sued Bisignano. Fiserv and others over the inflated, allegedly inflated forecasts and figures. So I bring that up because there you have the chief of the IRS allegedly spying on colleagues, getting access to their emails. David Leary: [00:18:52] Now what's the when I see something like this, stepping back, like, why would he have done this? Was it to get inside information for deals? Is it a power trip? Is this an ego thing where he can blackmail the employees to get them to do things he wants? Is that. Blake Oliver: [00:19:06] That's a good question. Uh, my my what I thought at first was, this is a big bank. This is corporate America. And if you're an executive and you're not the CEO, you're vying for power that other executives. So the more information you have about them, the better, right? David Leary: [00:19:24] Yeah. So this is this a power trip? Blake Oliver: [00:19:26] It's power. Yeah. Um, I also want to share a story that's IRS related. That's kind of related to what you were talking about with these AI agents and, um, AI generated emails and pitches that were receiving. So the IRS itself, David, is drowning. They're swamped by public comments on proposed tax regulations. Many of these comments are being generated by artificial intelligence. And that's according to a Gao report that was released recently covered by Michael Cohen in Accounting today. And the Gao is saying that this is all this AI commenting is making it difficult because the IRS used to be able to see duplicate comments that people had copy pasted and know that those are not authentic individual comments, that they were automatically generated. David Leary: [00:20:22] To be lazy and just copy paste things bots used to copy. Blake Oliver: [00:20:25] Yeah, now the AI can make all the comments new. So this whole way that we create regulations, that we get feedback from the public, not just at the IRS, but at the SEC, All these different government organizations, the way that FASB gets feedback, the way Pcob gets feedback. Just think about all the ways Nasba AICPA get feedback from accountants. Think about that. Well, with AI able to generate seemingly unique comments, how do you know which ones are real and how do you know who's manipulating the comment making process? David Leary: [00:20:59] So the forum, the not forum, the, the comment for public feedback that's basically turned into Twitter essentially. Blake Oliver: [00:21:08] Basically, I don't even use Twitter anymore at this point. David Leary: [00:21:10] Because every you would just get filled with it's all bots. Yeah, you just get bots replying. So basically that's happening to the IRS and it's overwhelming. Blake Oliver: [00:21:17] It's overwhelming them. David Leary: [00:21:18] Yeah. Is, is there a risk that there could be an orchestrated feedback thing where a whole piece of feedback is some, some piece of feedback is implemented, the, the draft, what do they call these draft acts or whatever they're called. Blake Oliver: [00:21:31] Draft regulations or proposed regulations. David Leary: [00:21:33] Change it because of feedback from bots. Blake Oliver: [00:21:35] Exactly right. Because they read these comments from the public. And those comments inform the rulemaking process. So one person could use an army of AI agents, or just a single one to create thousands and thousands of comments and have overstated influence on the process to, to sway it one way, when really the public opinion is another way you could distort the whole process. So the whole thing is going to break. We have to come up with some new way of getting authentic public feedback. And so the Gao, the Government Accountability Office that released this report, is recommending that Treasury and IRS create policies for reviewing large volumes of identical or nearly identical comments. They're saying you've got to figure out how to do this. So these rules, like they're, they're, they have a huge impact because Congress can pass laws. But then the, the rules, you know, have a financial impact because they they dictate exactly how these laws get implemented. David Leary: [00:22:41] And following this logic of this hacking, AI is going to be like posting these this forum as a post and comment as a waste of my time. I'll just hack in and change the regulation like we could be in a situation like this now where it just goes and changes the regulation and changes the draft copy. Blake Oliver: [00:22:57] Change the draft copy so nobody even knows that the change got in there. Yeah. Oh. David Leary: [00:23:02] So fun times we live in. Blake Oliver: [00:23:03] It's, you know, the future is stranger, uh, than we could have imagined. That's right. We still don't have the flying cars. I'm still waiting on that, you know? All right, so where else do we go from here? Um, let's do something a little more positive. How about that, David? David Leary: [00:23:23] I have one more. We'll do that. But I have one more story about AI kind of getting out of control, and then we can. Blake Oliver: [00:23:28] Okay. David Leary: [00:23:29] Go for it. Yeah. So we've talked about SaaS plenty of times on this show. Sastre is like a community of startup founders, but they. They blog about their own experiences with technology and AI and how they're running their own business. Because Sastre itself is a business and their AI bot just recommended that they get rid of a third party. Saas app they were using. So I don't know if you've heard of Marketo. I think it's like a CRM, HubSpot y thing, marketing software. Blake Oliver: [00:23:57] Email marketing automation, marketing automation. David Leary: [00:24:00] So apparently their AI agents were trying to use this software and they was getting API calls. So it decided to get rid of that as a vendor. And it just went and got it. It basically encouraged them to vibe code and create their own solution. So we've crossed this new line right where the big fear was, oh my God, AI is going to replace QuickBooks and all these SaaS companies, right? So they all the SaaS, Obelix, right? All the SaaS companies lowered in price because like, oh, AI will just do it. You just vibe code your own CRM. You don't need Salesforce anymore, right? But so that was kind of the vibe the last six months, I would say almost a year, right? Well, now if I want to put my tin foil hat, all the fears and accusations that's been happening against AI and anthropic, like if you think even Claude code, that was actually a separate product that somebody was using AI for coding, and then they just built it in themselves. And I think the same thing happened with OpenAI and Figma. Unless it's anthropic. But Figma is an app designers use to build products like the UI and the graphics of the product. Apparently it was using AI from one of the big models. Now one of the big models just sell built a copy of that, and they just basically included it in their model. So the sphere of the models backstabbing you is there. The AI backstabbing you is a is a app developer, a third party using that software. But now it's beyond that. Now it's like, not only is it going to build software to compete with you, it's actually to tell people to cancel the subscription of the software you're you, you built. And then it would be basically like AI telling you to cancel your Xero or QuickBooks subscription because their integrations with cloud or OpenAI are so good now. Right? And then convincing you to cancel those subscriptions and just use a house built in the AI one like that again. Yeah. Out of control. Ai is just doing whatever it wants right now. Blake Oliver: [00:25:59] Until it breaks, until it doesn't work anymore. And that's the problem, right? It's very confident, but can it actually deliver? And the answer so far has been no, it can't follow through. It can't get to the end. David Leary: [00:26:13] All right. And and the way it did it, it looked at the money. So it knew um, it looked at the accounting data. It knew how much they were spending with that vendor and like, hey, we're spending $20,000 a year on this marketing software, right? And that was after five years. And it saw the price increases over time. And that's And then it's like, we're paying all this money. There's these API breakages and limits. This doesn't make sense. So at some level, the IO was logic about it. Very logical. It looked at, hey, we're spending way too much money to get this level of service. But then to just go and do it is insane, right? That's the insane part. Blake Oliver: [00:26:48] All right. I'm going to go ahead and thank our next sponsor, David. And then we will hear an ode to accounting. Our next sponsor is on pay. Are you tired of payroll headaches getting in the way of the client experience you want to deliver? Manual workflows creating bottlenecks, compliance, nightmares, and endless support calls that go nowhere. There's a better way for your team and your clients on pay. Is the payroll partner that accountants and bookkeepers actually love? Why? Because it's easy to use. Packed with value and backed by support that actually supports you. Their team gets rave reviews for being fast, expert, and actually reachable when you need them on pay. Handles the heavy lifting. You get a dedicated onboarding coordinator who sets up worker profiles and transfers. Year to date data from previous providers. All at no extra cost. Their seamless QuickBooks and Xero integrations eliminate manual journal entries, and they support any type of business you serve farms, restaurants, nonprofits, you name it. On pay can handle unique requirements without adding complexity on pay keeps pricing simple to everything your clients expect, from multi-state filing to off cycle pay runs is included. No hidden fees, no surprises. To book a demo. Head over to The Accounting Podcast dot io slash pay. That's The Accounting Podcast dot io forward slash ONPAY. David Leary: [00:28:08] All right, you said you have a more positive note. Blake Oliver: [00:28:10] Yeah. So AI accounting company basis. Very, uh, successful, uh, with the top firms, AI agents for accounting. David Leary: [00:28:22] Not that successful because it hasn't emailed me asking to be a guest on the show yet. Oh. Blake Oliver: [00:28:27] So they have launched a website called Ode to Accounting. It's an ode to accounting.com. David Leary: [00:28:35] And oh, it isn't like a love letter. Blake Oliver: [00:28:38] Like yes, exactly. And there's actually a section of letters on the website. Okay. Uh, it features at the top a video that I want to play for you. Uh, and, uh, about the history of accounting. And, um, it features then down below, some love letters to accounting from the people shaping Accounting's next era. Let's go ahead and watch this video and a little context before we start. It was created drawing on research by University of Texas at Austin archeologist Denise. Uh, Schmundt. Bisrat. And it starts with the very beginning of accounting. And I love this because I feel like in accounting coursework at school. We don't really learn a lot about the history of accounting. We learn about accounting as it stands today, but I feel like more history of accounting should be taught, because it really helps to give you context about where we have been and where we are going. And with all this talk about AI and accounting, it's fun to go back to the very beginning. And this is just a really well done video. So let's go ahead and give it a watch. Ode to Accounting Clip: [00:29:54] Some of the oldest written artifacts are not poems or prayers or stories of great battles. They're accounting records. Accounting is how humanity first made sense of economic life around 8000 BCE in the ancient Near East, agriculture created a new problem surplus. Suddenly, it mattered how many jars of grain had been harvested, how many sheep were owed to the community storehouse. So we made tokens, small clay shapes representing goods, a cone for grain, a cylinder for livestock. 5000 years later, accountants in Uruk began sealing those tokens inside hollow clay balls to verify the contents. Before sealing, they pressed each token into the vessel's wet surface. Eventually, the impressions alone carried the information, and tokens were no longer needed. Three dimensional objects became two dimensional signs. The earliest writing emerged from accounting. With that, a pattern took hold that has persisted through history. To make sense of economic complexity, we need to see what's happening, trust what we see and act on it. That's why accounting exists. And with every leap in accounting, new economic realities are made possible. Accounting has evolved alongside human society for millennia, from Egyptian scribes tallying grain for the pharaoh to Roman day ledgers to Islamic merchants tracking partnerships across trade routes. The state itself rested on careful records of the taxes it levied. Ode to Accounting Clip: [00:31:24] Then in 1494, Luca Pacioli, a Franciscan friar in Venice, codified the method of accounting that would reshape the world. Double entry every transaction recorded twice a debit and a credit, always in balance. For the first time, merchants could see an entire enterprise as a single set of books and manage it as one. The market economy was beginning to take shape. In 1602, the Dutch East India Company issued shares on the Amsterdam Stock Exchange. Thousands of individual investors who would never meet, financing global ventures, distributing the profits and risk. What had begun in a Venetian friars textbook had become the financial substrate of modern capitalism. Over the next two centuries, the capital this system unlocked would fund the steam engines, mills and railways of the Industrial Revolution. Cost accounting made operations visible. What it actually cost to move a ton of freight to maintain a fleet of locomotives, managers could choose what to build, what to cut, where to invest. Auditing emerged to hold companies accountable to shareholders who needed to decide where to allocate capital. The market collapse of 1929 revealed how much rested on the quality of those books. Out of that collapse came the SEC and GAAP, requiring that companies speak the same financial language from their progress only accelerated, as did complexity. Ode to Accounting Clip: [00:32:53] Globalization linked economies across continents. Supply chains extended around the world. Governments grew, as did the tax systems to fund them. Accountants put the computer to work, then the spreadsheet. Each new tool made economic life more legible and decisions more informed. Take the supply chain of a single semiconductor. Raw materials mined on one continent, fabricated on another, assembled on a third. Shipped worldwide. Every hand off coordinated across borders, currencies and tax regimes. Countless decisions adding up to a single chip. Then the internet changed everything. Millions of transactions per second across every border simultaneously. Accountants once again built the tools their era required. This time, the work moved to the cloud. But with every new layer of software, the systems running modern economic life have only grown more complex. And now AI agents participate in the economy directly executing transactions, making decisions alongside humans. A new economic frontier is opening faster and more interconnected than anything that has come before. What it becomes will depend on our ability to see economic life clearly. Trust what we see and act on it. Accounting will shape this moment as it always has. David Leary: [00:34:18] Well done. Blake Oliver: [00:34:20] So I love that video because it starts from the very beginning of accounting, which was tokens. And here we are talking about tokens all the time. David Leary: [00:34:29] Full circle. I didn't, I didn't even grasp that. Oh, my brain hurts. I'm gonna have to leave for a little while. I didn't even grasp that. Amazing. Blake Oliver: [00:34:37] And if you think about it, actually like a token back in ancient Sumer or Sumeria, whatever you call it, was just a, uh, a representation of a physical object, a bushel of wheat or a cow or something like that. And it was represented, like they said, as like a circle or a cylinder, a ball or a cylinder. And they would seal those inside of the, the clay balls to represent assets. So originally accounting started to tally up assets. How much of the community's property did you contribute in that year or how much in taxes did you pay? But there was no other side to the transaction until the invention of double entry accounting, which became necessary because groups of investors, entrepreneurs came together to pool their resources to into a single pool of assets, to then, uh, fund a merchant vessel to go and trade goods. So they had to buy goods, fill up the ship, buy the ship, pay the sailors and the captain and send it off. And then when it came back, sell the goods. And the whole point of double entry accounting was to be able to calculate profit, right. Take, take your income and your expense and everybody's initial contribution and figure out what is their share of the profit in that enterprise and distribute it to them. And then with capital markets, it got more complex but stayed essentially the same. You just had many, many more investors, not operators of the business, but now investors. And then we had debt. So that's where the, you know, we have assets and liabilities and equity. And, um, it's just such a beautiful way of explaining it in such a short video. David Leary: [00:36:33] And, and you're right, maybe for accounting 101 students, like start out with that, right? Like, like before, you just, here's a debit and here's a credit, like give them some why, why do we need accounting? Where, why in the it's just wasn't invented. It served the purpose, right? Blake Oliver: [00:36:49] The purpose of accounting is still primarily to calculate profit. That's why we do it. And we tend to lose sight of that. I think with all of the rules that we have to study to pass the CPA exam, we forget. The point is to calculate profit. And I think as cost accounting in the modern era has gotten more and more complex, calculating profit becomes more and more difficult when you have lots and lots of long term investments in capital and machinery and plant property and equipment. Because it is these are assets that are used over many, many years to generate revenue. And so you have to allocate the cost in some way. And that's why we invented cost accounting. As I mentioned in the video, to figure out, after you build a railroad and you start shipping goods along it, what is the actual cost for each load of cargo? How do you allocate it? Right. You're trying to calculate profit over a particular time span when the investment is many, many years. And this is the big challenge of the AI economy is that we have these massive investments going into data centers. David Leary: [00:37:57] Off the all these in separated accounting, all these. Blake Oliver: [00:38:01] Billions and billions and billions of dollars going into data centers to generate revenue and hopefully profits in future years. But the way that we do that cost accounting is going to distort or accurately Represent what is happening. So accounting is really, really important, especially in a time in which massive capital investments are being made. And we have to be really careful about how we do it, and we have to do it right and not just follow rules that we've built in the past. And the rules that we created in the Industrial Revolution might not be the same ones that we need in the AI world, in a world of intangible assets. And as I've discussed on the show before, I believe that GAAP currently fails to accurately calculate profit for subscription based businesses, businesses that are based on intangible assets. Uh, because GAAP is really focused on those tangible assets, the plants, the property, the machinery, and it struggles to deal with intangibles like intellectual property and to properly allocate that cost. We just don't even try in a lot of ways. So there's even more that needs to happen now in the AI world, uh, with all of these like investments and chips and data centers and the, the, the life you choose to depreciate that has a humongous impact on profit. David Leary: [00:39:33] So AI is disrupting accounting in two fronts. Then a, it's disrupting accounting from a workflow, like doing the work, right, doing the accounting, but it's also going to fundamentally change the way accounting is done from a debits and credits perspective. Blake Oliver: [00:39:48] It certainly could. David Leary: [00:39:49] Like, how are you going to account for this? That's because all these companies are being accused, right? These hyperscalers of moving these these data centers off their books to investment and building it well. And they're all playing accounting games. Blake Oliver: [00:40:01] All this round trip accounting that's enabled by our current rules, where you have open AI raising tons of money from private equity and venture capital and then spending it on Nvidia and Google, and then those companies then spending it, and it just goes in like a big loop and then investing it back into companies like open AI and creating artificial profits that are just paper profits, right? It's, it's not, it's not new, new money, just the same money going around and around. Round tripping through the circle. Uh, so yeah, David, let's go ahead and thank our next sponsor of this episode. David Leary: [00:40:44] I lost track, I'm sorry. Oh, that's right. Blake Oliver: [00:40:46] We did. Uh, and now we needed to thank Valtrex. Do you want to give this one a shot? David Leary: [00:40:51] I'll read it. How much of your week is spent pulling reports, cleaning files, explaining numbers clients still don't really understand. That's exactly where Valtrex AI helps. Valtrex is a finance AI copilot and collaborative workspace for accountants, advisors, and clients. Each client gets one private workspace where QuickBooks zero and a bunch of other sources Messy PDFs and spreadsheets can safely sit together. You ask a question, and Valtrex gives a clear answer with the actual reports and the sources behind it. So your team and the client can work from the same context without exporting data, just to double check it. And it's read only, so it never changes the books. Valtrex does a first pass, flagging duplicate charges, unusual entries, and slow paying customers before you go looking. Firms also get onboarding AI education and direct access to the team behind it. If you want a safer way to bring AI into client advisory work and to get one month free by using Code Free month 26, check out The Accounting Podcast dot io slash Valtrex. That is The Accounting Podcast dot io forward slash VELTRIX. I can also confirm Valtrex is not who. That AI didn't email us to be on the show either. So there's so many of these AI companies, but it was not basis and it was not Valtrex. We can confirm that much. Blake Oliver: [00:42:10] I want to just, uh, clarify what I said about round tripping, because I'm not sure I explained it very well before the, uh, for the ad. So we talked about it on a previous episode. But just to recap, the way round tripping works is let's use anthropic as the example because I think I'm more familiar with that one. So anthropic raises a bunch of money and they go then spend that money on cloud compute credits, let's say Amazon Web Services to run their AI model, not just train it, but also then run it. So when you prompt cloud, that prompt is going into, uh, servers at Amazon that are running the model and giving you the response. So anthropic is paying Amazon millions and millions, if not billions of dollars to do all that compute. And Amazon has built all these data centers. Amazon then takes all the money that anthropic is giving them and builds more data centers. And they have to do that. They have to buy chips from like Nvidia. And so they're buying chips from Nvidia. So that money is now going to Nvidia. And then Nvidia is of course you know making more chips. But then they've got all this extra cash. So what do they do with it. They go and invest it into AI companies that are building models. And then the money goes into the big circle that way. So our current rules allow these companies to book profits, which is why we're seeing why we've seen tech stocks surge. David Leary: [00:43:40] Because all the numbers for everybody looks great. Blake Oliver: [00:43:42] It looks great. Yeah. But until these models deliver actual value to end users, uh, like they're not making any like the model companies are losing money. Lots and lots of money. So until they start making money, none of this profit is real. All right, so let's do a little bit of follow up. David. Okay. Um, actually I've got some listener mail. Let's read this message. So this is from, uh, tiara. Tiara says, hi, Blake, love the podcast, and I'm an avid listener on the podcast. Aussies want to break up Big Four and Trump accounts. Go live on the fourth. You noted how only 21% of calls are making it to an agent because of wait times. This is IRS wait times. I just wanted to let you know my friend and I have both needed to contact the IRS for an Ein. The Ein Employer Identification number system will not submit anything. This is the automated system and tells both of us to call due to an error. This gives you a number, not a reason. So I have no clue what this error is. We call and give them the reference number we were given. Blake Oliver: [00:44:51] After getting the correct getting to the correct location, the system literally hangs up on you due to call volume and provides no other options. My friend has also submitted a faxed application and heard nothing. It has been over two months. The same friend has also been waiting for his refund after responding to a clarification letter from them. He has heard nothing about that either, and there's no one to contact. I don't know if the report you were referencing was just for tax returns, but the IRS is at the point of literally not allowing people to build businesses because we simply can't get an Ein. We could just use our Social Security numbers, but for some situations from some situations won't allow it. Trying to find workarounds has been a massive headache, and the clean up later when the IRS gets it together is additionally daunting. I think it would be interesting to look into everything that has gone downhill since these changes at the IRS. Without that, the IRS has been forced into without getting them out of the dinosaur age. First, thanks for reading and hope you have a great day. David Leary: [00:45:46] That's a really good point. Like we think of the IRS as just filing taxes, right? But in a way, if you can't get an Ein, you, it's stopping commerce. Blake Oliver: [00:45:54] You can't open a bank account. David Leary: [00:45:56] Yeah. You can't open a bank account. You can't. It's slowing down commerce in our country. Blake Oliver: [00:46:00] And that's the problem with putting the IRS at the front of all this administrative stuff. We really need to pull them out of that, Have a separate agency that just registers businesses don't like have the IRS do this and using the IRS to like enforce the law through, you know, tax penalties and, and credits and all that. It's just, it's doesn't make sense. Um, a little more follow up. This is on Trump accounts. More than 7 million Trump accounts have now been opened since the program launched on July 4th. But only 1 million families have claimed the $1,000 in federal seed money for their newborns. Babies born between 2025 and 2028. They qualify for that $1,000 no matter what the family earns. But you have to open an account to get it. You have to fill out. This form takes about 5 to 10 minutes. Form 47, 45, 47. Um, now I was curious what percentage of what percentage of eligible kids is that the 1 million who have gotten the $1,000? And my estimate says that 2025 births were 3.6 million and 2026 births to date, about 2.1 million. So that's 5.7 million children and 1 million divided by 5.7 million is like 17 to 18% of eligible children. So we're at 17 to 18% of eligible children who have gotten the free $1,000 from the federal government. It's about 7% of the total four year eligible birth cohort. Of course, those kids, a lot of some of those kids haven't been born yet. So that's where we're at 17 to 18% because we were talking about this on a previous episode. David. So I wanted to give some context to that. David Leary: [00:47:55] Yeah. I'm trying to find the because we talked about like how successful they were compared to a four one K over how long it took adoption, but now it's proven to be even more successful. It's its astronomical adoption. Considering it's it's opt in, it's not automatic opt in, right? Somebody has to you have to take steps and fill out a form. You have to. Blake Oliver: [00:48:13] Yeah. David Leary: [00:48:14] They're just not automatically at the hospital signing people up as soon as the baby's born. Blake Oliver: [00:48:18] A little more follow up, uh, Charles Littlejohn, that contractor who stole and leaked Trump's tax data, plus records from thousands of wealthy Americans. He lost his appeal about his five year prison sentence. He got five years. That was the maximum for what the prosecutors brought. The appeals court unanimously upheld it. This was the US Court of Appeals for the D.C. circuit. Uh, Littlejohn had argued that U.S. District Judge Anna Reyes, who heard the original case, had predetermined the maximum sentence and relied on erroneous factual filings. Uh, and the appeals court said the sentence was both procedurally reasonable and substantively reasonable. The panel panel of judges characterized Littlejohn's evidence of prejudgment as weak. Reyes had the judge. The original judge. Reyes had questioned why prosecutors charged only one felony. But the appellate judges said that was hardly proof she had already chosen the sentence. She clearly didn't think it was enough. And if you think about it, five years for what he did seems actually like pretty light. Thousands of Americans. Personal tax returns leaked. I don't know. David Leary: [00:49:30] Yeah. It's it's weird because there's some part of like, is it is it like a. Not saying freedom of the press, but it's like vigilante press behavior, right? Like, should it be a longer sentence? I don't know, maybe it's someday we're going to look him as a hero because he did leak this information, I don't know. Blake Oliver: [00:49:52] Well, certainly some people do, but, I mean, how else do you set an example? You know, I mean, we send people to prison. David Leary: [00:49:59] That's okay. Think about it. Blake Oliver: [00:50:00] We send people to prison for longer than five years for stealing a car. David Leary: [00:50:04] Well, then I would say this is proportional with all fines that accounting firm leaders get when their firms do bad audits. Blake Oliver: [00:50:10] The slap on the hand. David Leary: [00:50:11] Yeah, but you're right. I could see. Yeah. If maybe if it's death penalty nobody will ever leak tax information like. But what. Yeah. It's it's somewhere between five years and death penalty, I guess. Blake, I don't have the answer, though. Blake Oliver: [00:50:24] Well, speaking of firms that are getting their hand slapped, let's talk about KPMG Australia. David Leary: [00:50:29] More more more more. Australia. Blake Oliver: [00:50:32] Kpmg Australia has a new CEO since the previous one resigned. They promoted their CFO, John Sams, to be CEO and have tasked him with restoring trust after allegations that the firm accessed confidential client information to win audit work. It was Andrew Yates who stepped down amid those allegations. Uh, he's been Sam's has been CFO since October of 2025. He was CEO, COO. In June of 2026, and he's been a KPMG partner for more than a decade. Sam's acknowledged the seriousness of the situation, saying the firm fell short of the standards rightly expected of us and that accountability for the failures would continue. He also promised to be courageous, make tough decisions and lead changes intended to put the firm back on the right path. David Leary: [00:51:21] That's according seems like he might be doing it. So I don't know if you saw this week he actually fired a senior partner. Uh, former COO Eileen Hodgett was immediately expelled, losing what would have been $1 million plus retirement package because apparently there were lend lease, confidential lend lease board. I guess lend lease is a company board. Documents were assessed and stashed in a Sydney offices locker room. So it was in a locker, right. So he just they discovered these documents were just hidden in a locker in the facility. Like in the gym. I guess unless locker maybe Down Under means something else, but I'm assuming it was a gym locker or at. Or in the break room locker at KPMG. Blake Oliver: [00:52:09] Hey, Dave, remember how a few weeks ago we played around with the QuickBooks MCP that allows you to put. David Leary: [00:52:15] A stupid 99 cent transaction in my QuickBooks, and it created a bank account with its own fee. And I'm like, what is happening? Do not do that ever again. Disconnect that. Blake Oliver: [00:52:23] Well, I might have to try it again, David, because Intuit has upgraded their MCP. Now you can do more with Claude and ChatGPT. The shift is from read only access to actionable workflows. What can you actually do? You can now create, update, send, delete, filter, and duplicate invoices and estimates in AI conversations. So invoices and estimates create, update, send, delete, filter, and duplicate. You can also manage recurring invoices, send overdue reminders, generate an email payment links, create customers, add products and services, and download transaction documents as PDFs. Here's an example from Intuit's blog post. Ask the AI to create an invoice for a customer's recent consulting work, then review and send it without leaving the conversation. That's pretty great. David Leary: [00:53:20] So yeah, because I think even for us, like a lot of times I have an invoice that's very similar to the other invoice, except for the actual ad slots are different. And it would be nice to be able to say like, hey, make the new invoice for the client, but instead of those old ad slots, use these new ones. So I'm giving it like kind of two commands. And it would just go do that because it would copy the old invoice. That's interesting. Blake Oliver: [00:53:41] Or let's say I've got a project for this customer. That's a logical way to set up your cloud cowork project for each customer. And I've been working on the project for the customer. Maybe I originally created the proposal for the project in that or the proposal in that project. Now it's time to invoice. I simply open up a new chat in that project and I say, all right, Claude, it's time to invoice for this. Go ahead. And based on the terms and the pricing and everything in the proposal, create the invoice in QuickBooks. Show it to me, I review it, then I say, okay, go ahead and send it and it sends it out to the client. David Leary: [00:54:19] It's actually more interesting to me that that use case is progress invoicing. Blake Oliver: [00:54:24] Yes. David Leary: [00:54:24] Because you could have the AI looking at all the crap you're doing for all your clients across the board and be like this. This job, I'm guessing is 60% done and invoice is just for the progress complete. Blake Oliver: [00:54:35] Yeah, yeah, you could actually have, you could have a project in Claude that's just the like project manager and maintains like a spreadsheet of progress of all your projects. Or maybe you just do it on each project. I mean, I have to think about how to do that, right? But you could have like a, you could have the agent managing a project tracker and then do the, you could even schedule like on a weekly basis, the, um, percentage of completion invoicing based on that spreadsheet. David Leary: [00:55:04] That, that could be a huge time saving because I imagine that's a lot of work to determine that if you're not doing it on a fixed percentage over time, it's some percentage complete. Blake Oliver: [00:55:13] I remember doing that. I remember doing that for a client of mine that was doing construction, home construction, and it was progress invoicing on like a weekly basis. And we had to update these spreadsheets and do these complicated invoices. That would be something that I think an AI would do really well, as long as you have a human in the loop. David Leary: [00:55:30] Yes. Blake Oliver: [00:55:31] Don't let it just operate autonomously. Yeah. So that's really neat. Uh, really cool coming from QuickBooks. Hopefully they will continue to open up more areas, not just accounts receivable and invoicing and payments, but also, you know, bank feeds and transactions and reconciliations and all the other stuff accountants have to do on a weekly monthly basis. Some more news from into it, into it just launched a business credit card that plugs straight into QuickBooks. David Leary: [00:56:02] So I tried to apply for this. It's just not ready yet. Blake Oliver: [00:56:07] But what do you mean it's not ready yet? Oh, you don't have access. David Leary: [00:56:10] Coming soon. Blake Oliver: [00:56:11] Coming soon. David Leary: [00:56:12] Type of thing. Blake Oliver: [00:56:13] So this sounds a lot like ramp to me. Exactly. It says transactions, statements and receipt photos will sync automatically with QuickBooks, including automatic receipt to transaction matching. It's a virtual card. You can get virtual cards within three minutes and issue physical or virtual cards to unlimited authorized users with individual limits in real time alerts. There's no annual fee, unlimited 2% cash back on everyday purchases and purchases, and 5% on Intuit products and services such as QuickBooks and MailChimp. Rewards arrive as statement credits. So this is definitely going after those virtual cards. Uh, spend management platforms like ramp. David Leary: [00:56:56] And I was looking at it. It looks good. It actually, the way I would describe that, it's everything that the QuickBooks bank account wasn't right. You remember they launched QuickBooks checking QuickBooks checking. And it's just like, it's horrible. You, you're better off using a separate bank like relay and have it just thinking it's, it's, there's no advantage to using it. It's got these stupid envelopes. I don't even comprehend them. And then, but then I'm looking at this, I'm like, this is about the right shape, shape and size, which I would want. I don't need for my company all the employee management stuff that's in something like a ramp product, like for, for the QuickBooks user base, this could be a very good fit. Blake Oliver: [00:57:35] Because I mentioned ramp. I want to cover one more update and that is from ramp. They now have stablecoin accounts. So ramp has, uh, operating checking accounts. They have investment accounts. Now they have stablecoin accounts. So I actually opened one up and it's active. I can now purchase Usdc or Usdc, transfer it from outside wallets, and use it to pay vendors and employees. David Leary: [00:58:06] Okay, so it's a usable account. It's just not like you're buying. You're just sitting there as a speculative investment. It's a it's another payments rail for us to use. Blake Oliver: [00:58:15] Uh, you can even send stablecoin payments from directly from your ramp checking with no pre-funding required. So they'll take the money, convert it and put it into your stablecoin account and then pay it. So there's not this having to like I've had to do transfer, purchase the or do a purchase, transfer US dollars into an account and then do a, uh, exchange and then make a. David Leary: [00:58:44] Purchase that doesn't know who we are. We don't have a relationship with ramp. You're setting this up and this. Blake Oliver: [00:58:49] And it all syncs with your accounting system. You know, all the usual stuff. The product is built on Stripe's stablecoin stack and the wallet infrastructure provider is privy. And they and they store the customer balances as US dollar denominated stablecoins. So basically this is a really helpful for any businesses that are paying international contractors, international payments. You're avoiding the traditional payment rails, saving a ton of money on international wires. Really neat feature. I can't wait to try it out. All right, David. David Leary: [00:59:24] I have another ramp story. Second one. Blake Oliver: [00:59:25] Okay, go for it. And then we'll wrap up. David Leary: [00:59:26] Also just rolled out a new tool to help companies track what I've been complaining about. Token spend and the, the reason they built this is because what they in their own data and ramps. Not that or old. Right. In general, in the grand scheme of accounting. Right. Ramps. Ramps, just a tiny speck of dust. But since June of 2025, ramps. Customers, because they can see the spend have spent 20.7 times more money, basically a year on on token expenses. Wow. And now obviously nobody has data of over time of all business expenses. But can you think of any business expense that is going to cost you 20? You're going to spend 20 times more on in a one year period. Blake Oliver: [01:00:10] Well, yeah, because previously we were all just paying 20 bucks a month for unlimited tokens. And then anthropic and OpenAI switched us to usage based pricing. So yeah, of course, our token spend is 20 X because we didn't have to pay for it before. David Leary: [01:00:26] But what but what I'm saying is like, is there any other comparable business expense that's been that drastic of an increase? Blake Oliver: [01:00:32] Not that I can think of. David Leary: [01:00:33] I can't think of an example. Yeah. Blake Oliver: [01:00:35] Um, maybe just like those Nvidia chips. All right David. David Leary: [01:00:38] Computer chips possibly. Yeah. Blake Oliver: [01:00:39] That's all the time we have for this week. Thank you everyone who joined us live. If you haven't check out the accounting podcast on YouTube. Go to YouTube, search The Accounting Podcast subscribe. Hit that notification bell icon. You will get notified when we go live. When we go live, you can also email us. We are the accounting podcast@earmark.me. That's the accounting podcast@earmark.me. We read every message, even those AI generated ones apparently. And don't forget, you can earn free continuing professional education credits. Nasba approved CPE credits for listening to this episode and our whole back catalog@earmark.app, go to earmark.app and your web browser, or get the free earmark CPE app on the App Store or Google Play Store. It's free to earn one CPE per week. Sign up for the low price of $200 a year for unlimited CPE, with a catalog of over 1800 courses. David. See you around here next week. Bye, everyone. David Leary: [01:01:41] Bye, everybody.