Latest / The Accounting Podcast / Deloitte Caught Making AI Workslop, IRS Shutdown Continues

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Deloitte Caught Making AI Workslop, IRS Shutdown Continues · 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! David Leary: [00:00:04] A startup founder, used cloud AI to detect a $2.1 million embezzlement by his co-founder. Blake Oliver: [00:00:11] $2.1 million? David Leary: [00:00:13] Yes. By his co-founder. And? And it took about 18 minutes to do this. Essentially what he did is he exported all the QuickBooks data, put it into cloud, and asked one question, what's wrong with this picture? Coming to you weekly from the OnPay Recording Studio. Blake Oliver: [00:00:34] Hello and welcome back to The Accounting Podcast, your weekly roundup of news in the accounting profession. I'm Blake Oliver. David Leary: [00:00:41] I'm David Leary. Another week. But you were traveling I was traveling. We had a lot of a lot of email on phone, bad internet connections. It's lots of fun, but but all my flights were good, though. Everything on time. Blake Oliver: [00:00:53] You didn't get delayed due to the government shutdown, which has led to all these air traffic controllers calling in sick. I was in Atlanta and Boston, and my flight to Boston got delayed by a couple hours, and there was no official cause for the delay. But the flight attendants said it was due to the air traffic control in Boston. And I've been reading about this like this is the, I think, biggest impact of the government shutdown on the general public, at least maybe the business community in general, is the fact that, like, these flights are getting delayed because there's not enough air traffic controllers in these towers. And, you know, the impact is huge. We'll talk about that. I also want to talk about this top story here. Deloitte and their AI work slop. Well that's what I'm calling it. We talked about AI work slop in the last episode. Or maybe it was the one before that. And that is work that is generated by AI. That looks like real work, but turns out to be poorly done. Inaccurate. It looks like work, but it isn't work. And and Deloitte actually did like a government report for the Australian government using AI and got caught. And they had to refund hundreds of thousands of dollars. And, uh, what else? The IRS is shut down. That's a huge impact on accountants ahead of the tax deadline. Only two days to go. As we record this, you've got a story about crypto going after CPA firm clients. I want to talk about audit improvements. Um, lots of news to cover. So I really want to jump in and get to it. But first let's thank our sponsors. David Leary: [00:02:35] Our sponsors this week is Cloud Accountant Staffing Rippling and Assembly. Blake Oliver: [00:02:40] Thank you to our sponsors. And let's go ahead and thank Cloud Accountant Staffing here. David Leary: [00:02:47] So did you hear the news Blake Cloud accountant staffing has now expanded beyond the Philippines recruiting top talent from Latin America and South Africa. This means more options for your firm, including team members and time zones to better align with US business hours, something that's crucial for many firms looking for real time collaboration. Cloud staffing was founded by a firm owner who grew his firm using offshore talent, and now he's applying everything he learned to help you grow your firm by helping you hire a full time team members for your firm from their global talent pool. How much should your firm change? Or for that matter, your life? If you could add 40, 80, 120 hours of capacity to your firm in 2026? If your firm is in need of expert bookkeepers, accountants, CPAs or virtual assistants now with even more geographic options to choose from, head over to The Accounting Podcast ProAdvisor. That is The Accounting Podcast. Blake Oliver: [00:03:40] Thank you, David, and welcome to our livestream viewers. If you have never commented before comment today, let us know what you think about these stories. Let us know what is top of mind for you. Uh, give us your opinion. Give us your hot take. Welcome, Anthony. Welcome. Adley. All right. Deloitte is going to partially refund Australia for a report with apparent AI generated errors. David Leary: [00:04:06] And when you say refund, the refunding a portion of a $440,000 payment they received. So they they charge $400,000 for a report. Blake Oliver: [00:04:15] Well, this is this is. Blake Oliver: [00:04:17] Yes. And that's the equivalent of 290,000 USD. The Australian government paid for a report that was littered with apparent AI generated errors, including a fabricated quote from a federal court judgment and references to non-existent academic research papers. This was reported by ABC news. The report was for the Department of Employment and Workplace Relations, and was originally published on the department's website in July, and a revised version was published Friday after Chris Rudge, a Sydney University researcher of health and welfare law, said he alerted the media that the report was full of fabricated references. It's a 237 page report. Deloitte has confirmed that some of the footnotes and references were incorrect. David Leary: [00:05:08] But they said that their findings and recommendations are still the same. So even though they went back and disclosed it and amended the report, nothing changed in their findings, which is interesting. They're trying to justify, like even though we were wrong, it was still right. Blake Oliver: [00:05:25] So here's an example of the error though. And Rudge said he found 20 errors in the first version of the report. And the first error that jumped out at him wrongly stated that Lisa Burton Crawford, a Sydney University professor of public and constitutional law, had written a non-existent book with a title suggesting it was outside her field of expertise. And Rudge said, this is the quote I instantaneously knew it was either hallucinated by AI or the world's best kept secret because I'd never heard of the book, and it sounded preposterous. This is I mean, you know, I guess. David, how do you how do you prevent this? How do you stop this? If you're a consulting firm like Deloitte? How do you ensure that your employees aren't just making stuff up? David Leary: [00:06:14] I don't know how you can do that, but what went through my head is, is this the real risk of AI taking accounting jobs? It's not the AI is going to take the job away. What's going to do is clients are just going to say, if hiring a firm, I could just do that myself. And that's the real risk to accounting firms and accountants and jobs is clients are just going to be like, I could just do a half assed ChatGPT 4.0 thing myself and just pump out a a bad report. I don't need to pay somebody $400,000 to do it. Blake Oliver: [00:06:44] Well, I think it depends. Blake Oliver: [00:06:45] What you're using the report for. And if you're just using a report, like to get a particular tax deduction and you just need the report and the quality of the report doesn't matter that much, I think that sort of thing is going to be easily automated with AI. And if you think about it, this is the risk to audit, which is, you know, the core service of the accounting profession is if companies feel like they just need an audit to check a box, then they will have no problem using an AI auditor to do that job. So there's a big opportunity for technology companies to come in and use AI to automate, audit, and just hire CPAs to sign off on them at the end of the process and essentially take us away, take the ownership of that audit away from the CPA firms, and maybe it'll be a CPA firm that does it right. But it's either way, it's not good for individual CPAs necessarily. David Leary: [00:07:47] And this was an audit. This was a they were reviewing welfare compliance systems. So I imagine this was probably turned from a review to a consulting engagement on how to eventually implement a welfare compliance system. Blake Oliver: [00:08:01] They did say it. Blake Oliver: [00:08:02] Was like an assurance type engagement, some sort of like assurance. Blake Oliver: [00:08:06] Okay. Blake Oliver: [00:08:06] On this program, but I guess like the report that they generated, they did it with the AI and they didn't check all these references. And so it's like it's sort of like, you know, they they did their job and then they had to make the report. They used AI to make the report. And then there were additional inconsistencies, errors added into the report by using AI. So that's what you have to watch out for. David Leary: [00:08:30] Um, yeah. The liberty of this, the, the you could say it's hallucinations and it kind of is, but it's kind of it's kind of not, it's just, it's if you hired an employee that had 21 PhDs. Yeah, they would constantly be doing stuff you don't want them to do. You want you want dumber? Ai. I will still insist on this. Um. It's funny. Did you see the quote from the labor senator, Deborah O'Neill? She criticized Deloitte, saying the firm has a quote unquote human intelligence problem. Blake Oliver: [00:09:03] Which I like that. All right. Let's talk about this government shutdown, the impact on the IRS. But first, let's talk about air travel, because this as somebody who travels a lot and has been traveling to. It was six cities in three weeks for the advisory amplified tour. Uh, you know, this impacted me and it worried me. Like when I was getting on the plane, I was thinking, what if there's a problem due to air traffic control? Like, are we putting our travelers at risk because of this? And I think the answer is yes. The scariest thing for me was hearing about how at Burbank Airport in Los Angeles, there was a point in time during the shutdown when the air traffic control was completely off. There was nobody working in the tower. Now, when that happens, there is a backup procedure, which is that the pilots have to do their own air traffic control, so they get on a shared frequency. And it's like at an airport that doesn't have a tower, a rural airport. They have to like, communicate with each other. There's no intermediary. So that only that not only slows things down because you can't have the planes getting as close together as if you have air traffic control. It also creates risk, like there's a huge risk of these planes crashing into each other because they miscommunicate. And like, that's the problem I have with this shutdown, is that it feels like the Trump administration takes everything to the brink, and all it takes is one mistake or one unanticipated economic incident or an international incident to then take down the economy or crash a plane. Blake Oliver: [00:10:41] So the actual impact of this can be quantified. Controller related delays jump from a typical 5% to 53%, as workers called in sick because they are being asked to work, but without getting paid. Now, back in 2019, the air traffic controllers created chaos at LaGuardia, Philadelphia and Newark. And that actually was the thing that helped end the 35 day shutdown because Trump backed down. Um, and so, I mean, like, I feel like this will probably happen again, but if it goes on even longer, what are we going into? We're going into the holiday travel season. We're going into Thanksgiving. Like this could be truly chaotic, uh, and risky and scary. The US Travel Association is estimating a $1 billion weekly loss to the travel economy. 750,000 federal workers total have been furloughed. Reload. Over a million are working without pay. Tsa is another thing. Security lines are going to get long because TSA screeners, they earn on average only $51,000. So if they don't get paid, they are not paying their bills. It's going to create real problems for them. They're not going to come to work. They're going to go drive for Uber to pay the bills. David Leary: [00:12:05] This is not I did not observe anything when I traveled. I flew Monday and then flew home on Saturday or Sunday or Saturday, I guess. But I didn't see any. Uh, I was in JFK. I didn't see anything. I had no delays, I thank God, but I am flying again this week, so I'll report back in if I have a all. Blake Oliver: [00:12:24] Right, I hope. I hope it goes. I hope it goes okay for you David. All right. So let's now talk about the impact of the government shutdown on the IRS. For our friends who are in tax, this could create some problems as of October 8th. Nearly half of IRS staff have been furloughed, with only essential personnel retained to maintain limited core services. What is open and what is closed? Here's what's open. Electronic tax returns are still being processed. The October 15th deadline hasn't changed for extensions. Um, tax refunds are being issued on an automated basis, especially if you're using direct deposit. But IRS phone support and in-person assistance centers are closed or severely limited, so taxpayers are going to have long wait times or no response from live support. Paper returns, mailed payments, and IRS correspondence are not currently being processed. Processing is suspended until funding resumes. Audits, enforcement actions, IRS Legal counsel and the Taxpayer Advocate Service are mostly halted or delayed, and interest and penalties, however, continue to accrue on unpaid taxes, and the IRS expects all deadlines to be met, regardless of the shutdown. 39,870 employees are being retained. That's about 40. That's about 54% of the Pre-shutdown workforce. They are going to keep critical services running, but the other staff are furloughed. David Leary: [00:13:57] Now the staff that are still working, are they being treated like the air traffic controllers where we will pay you eventually, but you're working for free right now. Blake Oliver: [00:14:07] I think I think that's the situation. Yeah. So so you're, you know, this idea that like, like that we're forcing people or asking people to work and do their jobs without getting paid for the government. For the government? Yeah. It's just it's just like it's unconscionable. Like, we should not be putting human beings in the line of fire like this. This, like collateral damage is just awful. And it's bad for the economy, too, because what's going to happen is these folks are going to have to pull back on their spending. And so it's going to it's going to we're going to see the numbers get worse in the economy as a result of this most likely. Um, like like I said before, there's a $1 billion impact on travel just because of this. David Leary: [00:14:53] And if you're still going. Blake Oliver: [00:14:54] To avoid traveling. David Leary: [00:14:55] You're still going to put out all this money anyways and back pay the people. What is this actually accomplishing? I mean, it's a negotiation tactic in the end, but. Blake Oliver: [00:15:04] Well, so that's why Trump has done something that's unprecedented. He has started firing federal workers instead of furloughing them. Trump just fired over 4100 federal workers. It's the first time in modern history that mass firings have happened during a funding lapse, instead of just furloughs. And examples of the firings are across departments Treasury. Uh, 1446 employees were terminated. About 1300 IRS workers were in that group. Health and Human Services lost 1200 people. Housing and Urban Development cut 442 employees. And it's it's like, uh. Yeah. This has never happened before. David Leary: [00:15:48] Well, there's even more precedent being set by the IRS in the Trump administration. I don't know if you saw the IRS now has a CEO. Blake Oliver: [00:15:56] Irs has a CEO, CEO. David Leary: [00:15:59] So essentially what happened is they created a new role and appointed somebody to it, and they basically bypassed the confirmation process. So it's a new role called CEO of the IRS. And they filled it with the former CEO of Fiserv. Um, he currently was serving as the uh, commissioner or overseeing the Social Security Administration. So so they moved him over to IRS, and they've created a whole new role called CEO. No, no hearing anything. Just he's now kind of in a way, he he's not the commissioner, but. Blake Oliver: [00:16:36] He has the job of the commissioner. David Leary: [00:16:38] The job of the commissioner, essentially. Blake Oliver: [00:16:39] So that that way during the government shutdown, they don't have to get confirmation. David Leary: [00:16:45] And arguably this is a complete conflict of interest. So, um, I'm going to demolish his name. Beside Cigano. Besides. You're going to have to spell that out. I'll do Italian style by Cigano there. All right. Long time Republican donor. Yeah. And his wife, they donated about $900,000 to the Trump 47 committee last October. Um, he obviously got a point. Uh, he became the commissioner of Social Security Administration. But where the real conflict of interest happens here is he used to be the CEO of Fiserv and still owns I think. Blake Oliver: [00:17:27] About people just say Fiserv, I say Fiserv. David Leary: [00:17:29] Fiserv, Fiserv. And he still owns about $300 million worth of stock there. Now, there's two other stories I have about North Dakota. So North Dakota just launched their own stablecoin. They call it the Roughrider coin, based on Theodore Roosevelt. And they worked with Fiserv to launch this. So it's going to be fully backed by US dollars and used primarily right now for interbank transactions such as loan settlements and overnight lending. Um, but Fiserv is basically I'm sorry. Blake Oliver: [00:18:05] I didn't call it Fiserv. David Leary: [00:18:07] I don't know, because I want to I don't want to just say Fiserv. Blake Oliver: [00:18:10] Fiserv, I mean, I don't know, listeners tell us, how do you say it? Do you say Fiserv? It means financial services. David Leary: [00:18:17] Services. Exactly. Right. And they they what they've historically done is they've a lot of banks, smaller banks, community banks. They provide turnkey out of the box software to run your community bank or your bank. So what they're doing now is now they have their own digital asset platform and they're hosting not only their own stablecoin on it. Now they're hosting this new North Dakota stablecoin on it. But let's go back to let's say the US was going to create a stablecoin. What department would probably be in charge of that? Blake Oliver: [00:18:49] What department would be charged in that. In charge of that. Treasury. David Leary: [00:18:52] Treasury. Yeah. And he's one step below the Treasury. So he's the CEO of the IRS. He's right there. Like this is a complete conflict of interest. This is why you have to have hearings. You can't just appoint somebody to a position. Blake Oliver: [00:19:03] That's right. Well. David Leary: [00:19:05] He has a vested interest to get his hands and help launch a digital stablecoin for the US government and have his company serve it. Blake Oliver: [00:19:13] Well. If history is our guide, then this will all be eventually ruled unconstitutional by the courts. But we still haven't had a decision about tariffs yet. And it's coming. Uh, and it could totally blow up all of that. Let's talk about the budget. Let's talk about, um, let's talk about let's talk about Doge. David. Remember Doge. David Leary: [00:19:40] Oh, yeah. That's the other thing. The new CEO of the IRS. He's a pro doge guy. Blake Oliver: [00:19:45] He's pro Doge because. David Leary: [00:19:46] He's a pro doge. Blake Oliver: [00:19:47] I mean, I have some bad news. Um, Doge promised $2 trillion in savings. And I think last time we talked about this, it was going to end up being maybe a few hundred, you know, billion dollars. Well, government spending actually rose. Oh, this year, government spending rose $220 billion. This year, for the first time ever, US government debt, um, payments exceeded $1 trillion. That's more than we spend on Medicare or defense. That means that for every $5 collected in taxes, $1 goes straight to paying interest. So basically Doge accomplished nothing in the broader scheme of things. Now, the tariffs have brought in $195 billion this year, which is double the prior year, but they still only equal 3.7% of federal revenue. And 51% half of our federal revenue comes from individual income taxes. So there is zero chance that tariffs is going to make a dent in the debt or do anything to solve this fiscal crisis that we are headed for. So basically, Doge failed completely and we are rapidly heading toward yes, publicly held debt is already approaching 100% of GDP, and it's expected to surpass the World War two record of 106% in the coming years. So. It doesn't look like the Trump administration or the Republicans are going to do anything about it. So that's where we're headed. David Leary: [00:21:38] And this was the whole like this was ultimately why, you know, I must got so involved in government. He was so scared about the debt. He was wanting to solve the debt, solve the debt, solve the debt. Blake Oliver: [00:21:49] It is an existential crisis. It the debt could end America as we know it. This is how it's happened in the past. Nations look to history. Nations fall. Britain lost its dominance as a global power due to the debt that it incurred as a result of the war. Um, and Spain. Same thing with Spain when Spain ruled the world. Same thing with the Netherlands. And it just goes on and on. It happened to Rome. So. That's not a problem, though, that we have to worry about today. David, let's keep going. Um, and let's read actually, let's think let's think our next sponsor. How about. David Leary: [00:22:34] That? I'll let you read that. Blake Oliver: [00:22:35] Rippling. Thank you. Rippling, uh, rippling is the all in one platform that unifies your clients HR, finance, and it in a single system. Accountants. If your team is stuck juggling payroll, benefits, time tracking, and it margins slip away fast, what if all those systems actually work together? That's what rippling does. One platform we're adding a new hire automatically updates payroll, benefits, compliance, and laptop access. No more chasing tickets or wrestling with spreadsheets, just more time to focus on higher value work. With rippling, firms can turn workforce advisory into a recurring revenue stream. You'll give clients live visibility into labor costs, overtime trends, and compliance risks while offering insights that shape business decisions. It's how firms move from reactive admin work to trusted strategic advisors. You protect margins and build stickier client relationships along the way. And to sweeten the deal, when you book and complete a qualified demo, you will receive a $100 gift card. If you're ready to elevate your firm's advisory practice and get a $100 gift card, head over to The Accounting Podcast. That's The Accounting Podcast. Okay, David, where do we go next? Do you have a story? David Leary: [00:23:54] Because I talk AI. I have two AI stories. Should we give the warning? Warning? Blake Oliver: [00:23:59] You're going to get get your drinks out if you're playing the game. Yeah, let's talk about it. David Leary: [00:24:05] Alright. Blake Oliver: [00:24:05] What's your AI story? Because I've got one about search. David Leary: [00:24:08] I have two. One I feel like is just a better story. We'll talk about that first. Then we'll do the open AI story. Buying a personal finance app. So a startup founder used cloud AI to detect a $2.1 million embezzlement by his co-founder. Blake Oliver: [00:24:26] $2.1 million? David Leary: [00:24:28] Yes, by his co-founder. And? And it took about 18 minutes to do this. Essentially what he did is he exported all the QuickBooks data, put it into Claude, and asked one question, what's wrong with this picture? And then asked what pattern suggests problems and then said to investigate everything that happened. So in 18 minutes it missed things that internal audits in the external auditors and the CFO. Blake Oliver: [00:24:55] You said it. David Leary: [00:24:55] Missed. Blake Oliver: [00:24:56] Things. You mean it found things? David Leary: [00:24:57] It found things. It found things that CFO and internal audits missed. Like what? It found fake vendors that were paid on 28 day, 23 day cycles. Real vendors paid on 28 day cycles, random payment dates. A lot of like statistical things like patterns in the numbers. Blake Oliver: [00:25:15] Uh oh yeah. Yeah. When when people use fake numbers, they, they, they statistically have like a different, like signature than real numbers. I remember that from my, uh, my audit classes. David Leary: [00:25:27] Or people subconsciously create a Fibonacci Fibonacci sequences. So it's it's 8000, 13,000, 20, 1000. You keep adding the previous two. It's subconsciously you're doing these. Blake Oliver: [00:25:39] Yeah. David Leary: [00:25:39] Yeah, yeah. So it's all it really detected the patterns. Um, it determined that there were 17 fake companies all going to this. Other founders personal accounts via shell companies. Blake Oliver: [00:25:49] Wow. So he was creating fake vendors and paying these these shell companies? David Leary: [00:25:56] Exactly. What? Blake Oliver: [00:25:57] What was this? David Leary: [00:25:59] I couldn't get the startup name. I tried to find it. I don't know what the where, the where did. Blake Oliver: [00:26:02] Where did you get this story from? David Leary: [00:26:04] This was in tech boolean.com. Now here's the real story though. What this guy is doing now, this founder founder, he basically created a series of other AI prompts. He has an embezzlement detector, a fake invoice finder, the shell company revealer. So he created like little AI prompts. And now he's selling these for $10,000. He has 47 clients now, so he's probably making more money on his AI fraud finder stuff than he is on his actual startup, whatever that might be. Blake Oliver: [00:26:37] All right. So okay, so I get it. So this is this is the founder who discovered the betrayal and decided to create the solution to detect it in the future. Wow. And this is by, um, who is this? Uh, you said, uh, Uzair Hasan. David Leary: [00:26:56] So he so he's basically selling AI prompts now. So there's probably if he's doing these $10,000 per analysis prompts me for accounting firms to pump out something and be like, hey, for two grand, I'll scan your books and make sure your business partner is not screwing you. You. There's probably a business opportunity here for accountants that are actually. Blake Oliver: [00:27:13] Yeah, like a quick, like, AI fraud detection type of engagement. I like that that could be good. David Leary: [00:27:19] But then it makes me think like so. Intuit zero. They're all launching AI to write collection letters like this is what they should be doing. Like you like detect this, detect real things and surface real issues and data files. I'm like, I don't need to know that that Starbucks for $3. What the address of that Starbucks is. That's the kind of AI insights we get right now on a bank feed. Nobody cares. Yeah, what's real stuff? Blake Oliver: [00:27:47] Or a chatbot that tells me what my gross margin is? David Leary: [00:27:50] Yeah. Blake Oliver: [00:27:51] Yeah, here's my AI story. And this is from the profitable firm AI versus search. What accountants need to know now. So a lot of us have been wondering, in the world of accounting for marketing, what is going to happen to search engine optimization now that people are using AI and the profitable firm Karen Rayburn found, basically summarized the findings of a sparktoro study. A study on this that found that only 20% of Americans are heavy AI users, meaning that they use it more than ten times a month. So 20% are using AI frequently. 40% of Americans are using AI tools at least once a month. But what's interesting is that the people using AI the most, the heavy users are using search engines more. Now, as a result of using AI. So search engine use has increased. Googling has increased among that group. Why is that? I mean, I'm just guessing because the more research you do, the more googling you're going to do. Like. Right? Like the more AI prompting you do, the more you need to like confirm or look up or something like that. David Leary: [00:29:07] Well, that's interesting on the Google, right? It'll give you that AI summary, but it's kind of hard to like ask a follow up question. So in a way, you just do a second search or a third search. It doesn't. It's not like a chat. It's or maybe it is, but Google sucks at UI. So I don't even know how to get into it after I do my search. Blake Oliver: [00:29:25] So so 95% of Americans still use search engines monthly. 86% are classified as heavy search users, so 20% are heavy AI users, but 86% are heavy search users. So it has not inverted yet, right? We still have search engines are dominant. Ai has not taken over when it comes to how people find your firm or find a service provider. Um, now, will this someday change? I think so, but I think it's going to take a lot of time. Remember when Google first came out? It took a long time for people to stop using the Yellow Pages and to start using Google. It took 20 years, really, for the market to change in that regard when it comes to Habits. Human habits. Changing behavior is really hard and takes a long time, but I do think it will happen. So anyway, the point is that search engine optimization and having a website and doing all that stuff is still really important, and AI relies on that. Ai goes out and finds it and synthesizes it and brings it back to the user. So you still need to have all that. I agree with that. David Leary: [00:30:40] You need to have something that reads your website eventually. Yes. Which is basically SEO. It's just you have AI reading it now instead. Blake Oliver: [00:30:46] And instead of a human going out and reading it and yeah, it's it's actually going to be this is why I believe that video content and audio content is really important for firms, because it's getting easier and easier to create the text content with AI. And so if you've invested a lot in creating a blog, if you've invested a lot in creating a lot of web pages for your firm. That advantage is going to shrink as smaller firms and other firms are able to create that much content. Also, thanks to AI, like they're not going to have to go out and. David Leary: [00:31:24] Get a brand new firm in a week, could create as much content that your firm historically did in a decade. Blake Oliver: [00:31:29] Yeah, yeah, maybe not that extreme, but yeah, a lot, right? Like, I could be ten-x. I could do what your firm takes months to do in in weeks. So. Or years. Yeah. You're right. So I think the key is to continue with the SEO but also invest in like video content because you can create a lot of video and you can you can basically create a lot of text from video, turning those transcripts into articles, turning them into resources. But also AI is going to prefer video because AI will be able to detect AI video and will prefer human generated content because that's what people ultimately want. They don't want AI slop. David Leary: [00:32:15] Agree. But then what happens when the AI just suggests you don't really need to even hire that accountant or the accounting firm? I'll just do the work for you. So did you see OpenAI is buying a personal finance firm now or personal finance app? Uh. Blake Oliver: [00:32:32] I hadn't heard that. What is it, Roy? David Leary: [00:32:34] So in general, right now, OpenAI has been on this mission to, like, buy more customer facing things. So they bought Pulse Sora, and then now they bought an instant checkout shopping cart type tool. But now they purchased acquired Roy ROI. It's an AI personal finance app. And I looked at it a little bit. I was able to find it because they shut it down already, but I was able to find some screenshots of it. It's just like using mint for lock or Quicken back in the day. It's a personal finance app, and the real ramifications of this is what happens if OpenAI buys 0 or 1 of these new AI startups. And this because it's pretty clear based on that other article we just talked about with the founder using cloud to detect these anomalies, like could it just become the gel? Like you don't even need a separate gel. All these startups are building a gel. Can it just be your gel, be your accounting system? Openai has the opportunity to own that piece. Blake Oliver: [00:33:32] I mean, I'm sorry to disappoint you, David, but I don't think OpenAI has any interest in owning a gel because they've basically turned into a consumer app. Chatgpt consumer is used more like by consumers than by businesses at this point. And so it totally makes sense. They're buying a personal finance app because people are asking a lot of personal finance questions, and OpenAI needs the context to answer those questions. So if you have your personal finance data, all your transactions in their app, they can then use AI to get insights from that data. It's going to be incredibly powerful, and you might think, well, that's a huge risk for wealth managers. It's a huge risk for financial advisors. But think about who's going to use these tools. It's going to be people who don't have a financial advisor or don't have a wealth manager, which is the vast majority of Americans. So OpenAI is using their technology in a really smart way. They're using it to reach a market that is underserved. And that's what I've always said accounting firms should do with their services is use technology and use AI to roll out a service at a lower price point to a market that hasn't been able to afford it before, because then you're not competing with other firms for the same clients. You're competing with the status quo, which is they were doing it themselves or not at all. And that's how my firm worked. The reason that we were able to grow very quickly is because we provided outsourced accounting services at a price point that competed with freelance bookkeepers, not accounting firms. So our clients could get a level of service that they would normally receive from an accounting firm or a CPA firm, and they could get it at the price of a hiring a freelance bookkeeper. David Leary: [00:35:38] So how cheap do you have to make your plan? If if I can get AI Claude or whatever, even if I'm an expensive one, I'm spending $200 a month, you know, because that's that's the expensive plans, right? Approximately one $5,200 a month for some of those AI models, but many are just 20 bucks a month, so I'm spending $20 a month. Do you have to price some sort of bookkeeping services at 20 bucks a month? Because I'm going to reflect back on something I think I remember Hector Garcia said. And this is early days, maybe 24 months ago, Hector Garcia said something that stuck with me. Ai is never going to do perfect accounting, but it's going to do it good enough. And for most clients, are that profit and loss statements close enough? I can file taxes with it. It's good enough. So do you need to offer a good enough service at your firm where you cut? Not saying you cut corners, but you don't provide the perfect financials. It's good enough. Financials. Blake Oliver: [00:36:30] Yeah. Um, we need to when we design services that are standardized is you start from the price and then you figure out what services you can provide at that price. You don't start from the services and then add the price to it. So you figure out your target customer and you figure out what they are willing or able to pay for the services that they need, like they need an accountant. They need a tax return. Right? What can they afford to pay? Um, what will the market bear? And then design your services to be superior at that price point. And I think the problem is most firms go the other way, and they design the services around what they think that the client needs. And it's often way too much. And then they price it based on their own cost and not on based on what the client can pay. David Leary: [00:37:31] What the market will support. Blake Oliver: [00:37:32] What the market will support. And then they're like surprised why nobody wants it. Yeah. And often like you're right it's it's we're offering way too much. We're doing way too much right. Clients that just want a tax return done and want the books done to get the tax return done, do not need monthly financial statements. So why do we send them? Why do we prepare them? They just need very, very simple bookkeeping. And I mean, the firms that I see, the firms I see that are serving those clients well are are doing the minimum for them. David Leary: [00:37:59] Yeah, yeah, there's a session with the monthly close and I, I think I tweeted about this. I don't think I've ever met a small business owner that cares about having their book this monthly close concept. They care about having their books closed and they have to get a loan. They care about having their books closed when they have to, uh, they're going to get acquired or there's some big business deal or their books closed so they can run taxes. But this concept of like, gotta close the client's books every month. Nobody cares. Nobody. That's not what they're paying you for. Yeah. Blake Oliver: [00:38:26] David, let's go ahead and thank our next sponsor. And it's cloud accounting staffing. Again thank you to cloud accounting staffing. If you're still on the fence about whether offshore staffing is right for your firm, I get it. It's a big decision. Here's something that should give you complete peace of mind and remove all the risk. David, I don't know if I can say that I can't remove all the risk or give you complete peace of mind, but I think this might help. 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They're essentially giving you a risk free trial to add 40, 80, or even 120 hours of capacity to your firm in this labor market. That's an opportunity you can't afford to pass up to take advantage of cloud accountant staffing, 90 day money back guarantee, and finally solve your staffing challenges, head over to The Accounting Podcast. That's The Accounting Podcast promo forward slash CPE A. Remember when OpenAI did their big, uh, GPT five announcement and I noticed. David Leary: [00:40:09] You shared the video? The graphs were wrong or something, right? Blake Oliver: [00:40:11] Yeah. Yeah, yeah. They have this big announcement and they had like a hundreds of millions of people watching it, and they had charts on the screen that didn't make any sense. The y axis and the numbers and the bars were like completely off. And it turns out that is actually more common than you think. 86% of major companies are using broken charts in their financial reports. I spotted this in CPE AI. David Leary: [00:40:41] Broken charts or just we just make broken charts. Blake Oliver: [00:40:45] I I. Well, given given how new AI is, I'm assuming this is just like not due to AI. This is just due to like, human error. When you have people making charts that like are not like connected to the data. Maybe it's you have a designer making a chart and nobody checks to make sure that the chart actually makes sense. This is a study of 50 S&P 500 companies, and it found misleading. Bar charts, pie slices that don't match their percentages, and hidden axes designed to exaggerate performance. The hidden axes thing is where you like you start at a different number than zero, so it makes things look better than they are, or yeah, usually better than they are. This was in CPA Journal. Com that's the most common trick is starting a bar chart axis above zero to make small differences look dramatic. One company made their product look way more successful by starting their bar chart at 30 instead of zero of 1584 charts reviewed, 12% had fatal flaws that completely misrepresented the underlying data and some charts were distorted by over 100%. That's shocking to me and makes me wonder, is anyone actually reading these reports? We know that 10-K filings only get downloaded an average of like a few dozen times. Blake Oliver: [00:42:08] So I'm guessing that we're we're doing all this work as accountants to put together these ten K's with all these charts and the fact that, like so many of them have errors and nobody's pointing them out indicates to me that like, nobody's reading lists. Yeah. So. So who's reading the reports? And when I bring this up to, I don't know, um, like, uh, people who are really passionate about, like, financial reporting, I bring up these problems like, uh, like when I talk to Jerry McGinnis on the earmark podcast, they say, well, um, and, uh, no slight to Jerry. Love Jerry. But, like, I gotta argue with with you on this, Jerry. Jerry says that it doesn't matter. I believe this is what he says is it doesn't matter that the that the reports only downloaded a few dozen times because they're they're read by analysts and the analysts are very carefully looking through the reports. But if they were really carefully looking through these reports, would they would they not be pointing out these. David Leary: [00:43:08] If anybody the analysts should be the ones picking up on this, they should recognize these, this information. But it could be all for naught. Did you see, um, Cracker Barrel, are you familiar with Cracker Barrel? The restaurants? Blake Oliver: [00:43:20] Well, I saw they had this whole logo redesigned. That didn't go very well. Is that what you're talking about? David Leary: [00:43:24] And it tanked their stock price. But it turns out almost all the anti new logo stuff was all bots. So what? In theory, we have this perfect world where stock price is determined by the financial statements. But the reality is we have a world where bots are doing fake social media against a logo change, and it caused the stock to have a problem But nobody's looking at the. Blake Oliver: [00:43:50] Financial social media. Fake accounts on social media are criticizing the change. David Leary: [00:43:54] I yeah, most of the anti new logo stuff that happened for them was essentially bots. Blake Oliver: [00:44:03] Where did that come really I guess. I mean, I guess you could prove it somehow by looking at the accounts and figuring out which ones are bots. That's crazy. So why were they doing this? Were they trying to drive down the stock price to like, profit from it? Is there a conspiracy here? David Leary: [00:44:16] I had the story and I didn't bring the show because I didn't like you. Open the door. That's why I just brought it up. Blake Oliver: [00:44:21] Yeah. David Leary: [00:44:21] Give me a second to find it here. Blake Oliver: [00:44:22] No. Yeah. If you can find it, that'd be great. In the meantime, I'll thank our last sponsor of this episode. And that is Assembly. Are you still juggling five different software tools just to manage one client? You're sharing contracts through DocuSign, sending files on Sharefile, collecting payments in QuickBooks. And your clients are constantly asking, where do I find that document again? Sound familiar? That's exactly why assembly was built for accounting firms like yours. 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David Leary: [00:45:43] So this was data that the Wall Street Journal obtained from a company called Peak Metrics 44.5% of the post on Twitter about Cracker Barrel. On August 20th. That's when the new logo went viral. Were posted by bots or likely bots. Wow. And it peaked at about 49% when the controversy was in like full, you know, trending Twitter topic type thing. So it's just it's funny, right? Like this affected the stock price, not the financial statements. So maybe nobody cares about your charts because nobody even cares about the financial statements. Blake Oliver: [00:46:17] Right. And that's my argument is that because accounting has failed to adapt over the last 50 years to our changing economy, to this change from tangible to intangible assets to this change from a manufacturing economy to an intellectual property and services economy. That is why financial statements are not being used like they used to be. And that's why you have social media and non-financial metrics driving stock prices. And we have to modernize accounting standards. The language of accounting is outdated and it's not a matter of small tweaks. It's a matter of major changes that are necessary to make them useful again. Let's talk about E. S dramatic audit quality turnaround. Here's a feel good story. E expects to achieve its lowest. E expects to achieve its lowest US auditing shortfall rate in 16 years, dropping to 9% or below in 2025. That's what they are projecting anyway. This would represent a dramatic improvement from 46% in 2022. So they had a 46% audit efficiency rate from the PCAOB in 2022. And then it went down to 37%, and they got it down to 28% the following year. And now they're aiming to get it down to below 10%. It was the highest efficiency rate among the big four firms for three years. David Leary: [00:47:56] Now how did they make these improvements. Are they saying. Blake Oliver: [00:47:59] They fired clients so they they shed 132 public company audit clients, uh, between 2023 and 2025. David Leary: [00:48:09] So so it wasn't because of AI. They just got rid of the questionable clientele. Blake Oliver: [00:48:13] Well, they got rid of the difficult clients. And probably I'm going to guess that resulted in more capacity for their teams, which were not stretched to the limit and could then actually do proper audits. Go figure. So their competitors took on net clients. It looks like most of the clients went to Deloitte and KPMG, although we can't really tell. But like the the growth numbers like, um indicate that, uh, because E lost 101 clients and Deloitte and KPMG together gained 104, PwC got nine. So e used to be the market share leader and now it's Deloitte. So it seems to be that like in the past E was the market share leader. They had the most audits. They also had the worst audit efficiency rate as a result. Like it's there's this there's this perfect. There's well not perfect. But I mean seems like to be a very obvious correlation between how many audits you do, how much staffing you have and the quality of audits. David Leary: [00:49:21] Only capable of doing so much. It's that that do you want it fast? Do you want it quality or do you want it cheap? It's that same. Blake Oliver: [00:49:28] You can get two pick two right. Yeah. Um, so I guess that's good news. But then my, my question is, well, will this just cause Deloitte's audit quality to drop now as a result. Like, have we actually achieved anything here? Or have we just shifted the bad audits somewhere else. David Leary: [00:49:45] To somebody else? Blake Oliver: [00:49:46] Yeah, exactly. Um, David. Sounds like you have something to share. David Leary: [00:49:53] Yeah. Um, so I'm going to use this word crypto bros loosely. I would say anybody who pushes crypto or Bitcoin is a crypto bro. Let's just it's a huge umbrella. I don't know what else to call them. Right. Blake Oliver: [00:50:04] Label them. David Leary: [00:50:05] Label them crypto bros. So some crypto bros and I'll be very specific with transition advisors and true vestments have launched the True Vestment Bitcoin Legacy Fund, aimed at helping CPAs or CPA firms high net worth clients invest early in Bitcoin through a structured advisor led vehicle. So you see. Blake Oliver: [00:50:27] The early in Bitcoin. David Leary: [00:50:29] Early. Yes. Essentially they want you to they want CPAs to sell bitcoin this fund for Bitcoin to their clients. And they have three, three phases. And now follow me on these three phases and tell me what this sounds like to you. Phase one they're going to raise $150 million through a private investment targeting CPA's firm's clients. So hey CPA firm, you have clients that have money. Get them to invest in this private investment. Phase two, they found institutional investors that will match the first $150 million that came in from phase one. And then eventually they're going to merge this into a Nasdaq registered entity that, uh, it's an existing entity, right? So basically, what is that? That's a Spac, right? Blake Oliver: [00:51:16] Yeah. David Leary: [00:51:17] So this just does not taste right. Right. Like this is like total Ponzi scam. Like but they're going to get it. But again, we've seen this over and over again. The crypto people keep exploiting. Blake Oliver: [00:51:30] David don't say anything. Don't say anything on the show that's going to get us sued. Okay. David Leary: [00:51:34] Well It just looks like. Blake Oliver: [00:51:37] Looks like not is. David Leary: [00:51:38] Looks like okay is. But historically. Remember when the all the crypto companies would say they got an audit even though never had an audit? Blake Oliver: [00:51:46] Yeah. David Leary: [00:51:46] From the firms. The crypto keeps trying to utilize the CPA. This is a brand thing right? Yeah. This like protect the CPA brand. The AICPA should be like railing against this. Like, hey, don't don't push crypto on your clients. I mean, that's going to roll up into another institutional layer and then eventually go into a it looks like a Spac from what I can tell. Blake Oliver: [00:52:12] I mean, so to me, um, like maybe like everybody who knows me, I think knows how skeptical I am of crypto. And I think that, you know, personally like to me, it is inherently like Bitcoin is inherently worthless. Like I think it's worth $0. I would never buy it. David Leary: [00:52:30] And that's because you don't have a CPA partnering with them. Creating educational materials for your clients like your CPA, should partner here and provide you the education you need. Blake Oliver: [00:52:42] So to me, what this means is that the fact that you have an investment firm targeting CPAs to try to sell crypto investments means that we're nearing the end, okay, because there is an end game for crypto, and the end game is where there is no one left to buy it, right when there are no new buyers that want it, the price will begin to drop. And. When will that happen? We've already exhausted the individual market. There are really no net new individual buyers of crypto. Everyone who wants it has already gotten it. Um, so like the fact that firms are investment groups are going after CPA firm clients means they've exhausted all the easier ways to get those buyers. David Leary: [00:53:31] And they're trying to compare this to like you said early Bitcoin. They're trying to compare today's bitcoin prices to like buying the Dow at $900. Yeah right. But let's go take a time machine Blake. Let's go back. Do you know when the Dow was at $900. Blake Oliver: [00:53:46] I have well not $900 900 points, right? Yeah, I don't remember. David Leary: [00:53:51] And it was basically somewhere between mid mid, mid 60s to late 60s. Blake Oliver: [00:53:57] Okay. David Leary: [00:53:58] Right. Um, now at that time the Dow 30. Here's who was in the Dow 30, um, AT&T, Bethlehem Steel, Chrysler, DuPont, Eastman Kodak, General Electric Company, Goodyear tire and rubber companies that made things there was you if you invested in the Dow when it was at 900, you were investing in companies that actually created value. And like you. Blake Oliver: [00:54:21] Said, they made things. Yeah, they. David Leary: [00:54:23] Made. Blake Oliver: [00:54:23] Things. David Leary: [00:54:23] Yeah. And it's not speculation, right? They were all they all had real there was real businesses happening there. Yes. They were creating. Blake Oliver: [00:54:30] Value for customers. David Leary: [00:54:32] Yes, but that's deceiving. If if this is, the people running this fund are using words like buying the Dow at 900, I'm imagining that's in their training materials. They're trying to get CPAs to say to their clients. Blake Oliver: [00:54:45] This is what they are creating, the expectation of future returns. And that expectation only exists as long as there are future buyers of crypto that are willing to pay more than you did for it. And eventually that will end. And there are no cash flows associated with Bitcoin. Like you buy a share of General Motors back in the 60s and it made things and it made a profit. And it passed that profit back to you as a shareholder in the form of. David Leary: [00:55:11] A risk that they would make bad cars and maybe they went under. But yeah, the plan was they would make cars, sell them for a profit and you'd get money back. Blake Oliver: [00:55:20] Yeah. I mean, to me it's like I mean it's no different. Like the closest thing is gold, right. You could say like Bitcoin is digital gold. But even then, I just think that you're better off just buying gold. So, yeah. Um, CPA's be wary. Exercise your professional judgment and independence and protect your clients. Let's talk about, I don't know, some other miscellaneous news here. Bdo USA just announced its largest expansion ever, and they are merging with Hawthorn in a deal that combines firms that are enormous. 200 sorry, not 202.88 billion and 271 million respectively. Bdo says their employee stock option plan or stock ownership plan was key to making this massive deal happen. Mm. Wait, I just saw another story. David Leary: [00:56:17] I have a. Blake Oliver: [00:56:17] Story. Esop. David Leary: [00:56:19] Yeah. What is laying off employees because of the way they financed their ESOP. So they owe a company. They got a loan from Apollo Global Management, which I think is probably a P company or capital. Blake Oliver: [00:56:32] P. David Leary: [00:56:33] Firm. Yeah, that's P firm right. Blake Oliver: [00:56:35] That's how they financed this ESOP huh. David Leary: [00:56:37] So they took a $1.3 billion loan at approximately 9%. And they're getting it. They they got it reduced by 1%. But this loan is putting BDO to their knees. They basically have laid off employees. They've paused non-essential travel. Right. They are doing cost reviews across all their tax audit and advisory units. Like this is now the question. What's interesting thing is the there's a post from Junk Bond Investor. So apparently the company that um. Gave them loan. They were also shorting another company called First bands. First brands. Sorry. So first bands collapsed after BDO brands. I keep saying bands. First brands collapsed months after BDO gave them a clean audit. So like where's the independence here? So BDO has a client that the person they took a loan from is auditing their audit. They're auditing a client. Wait. Blake Oliver: [00:57:44] Wait. So how's it working? David Leary: [00:57:45] Okay. Shorting. Shorting. All right, so let's tie this together. Okay. So we have. Blake Oliver: [00:57:48] Bdo. Bdo is auditing who. David Leary: [00:57:50] First brands. Blake Oliver: [00:57:52] And first brands gets a clean audit. David Leary: [00:57:54] First brand gets a clean audit. But it collapses a few months later. And the lender. Blake Oliver: [00:58:02] Yeah. David Leary: [00:58:02] The private equity was shorting that company that they audited. So I'm BDO. I audited a company that that is being shorted by a company I took $1 billion loan from. Like where's the separation of. Blake Oliver: [00:58:18] Where's the independence. David Leary: [00:58:19] Independence? Blake Oliver: [00:58:20] Yeah. It's like there's so much focus on independence by the regulators on like the appearance of it. Like an auditor can't own one share of a company that they're auditing or they can't have any any business relationship. David Leary: [00:58:35] You can't put CPA in your LinkedIn signature. Right. These are all distractions here. Blake Oliver: [00:58:41] We have private equity buying in buying accounting firms or loaning them huge amounts of money. And we expect these firms to like be independent. And yeah, it's how did we end up in this situation. David Leary: [00:58:59] And what are actually here's here, here's here's let's tie this back. What is the fraud triangle. Blake Oliver: [00:59:04] Opportunity rationalization and. David Leary: [00:59:08] Financial pressure right. Isn't that. Blake Oliver: [00:59:10] Yes. David Leary: [00:59:11] Financial pressure. So this is being described as rising financial pressure, this high interest debt on video. Right. Right. Like all the parts of the fraud triangle are here. Like they have the opportunity to possibly scratch the back of Apollo here. They have this financial pressure. This is not this is not this does not look good and it does not pass the smell test. Blake Oliver: [00:59:36] In the live stream chat, Chris Khan says this has all the hallmarks of conflicts of interest and insider trading. Chris also pointed out earlier in the show that bots now make up the majority of all internet traffic. David Leary: [00:59:49] Including half the conversations on Tax Twitter. I would say now it feels like. Blake Oliver: [00:59:54] Yeah, so this is why, like I kind of gave up on Twitter recently or X, I gave up on X recently and Facebook too, because I felt like, how do you know you're talking to a real person anymore? I'd rather like message my friends who are real people than sit on the internet. And that's also what's going to destroy Reddit, is because there's all these bots now on Reddit that are contributing to these threads, and so it's not human generated. It's going to be you know, we don't know the motives. What are what are the motives of the people running these bots? All right David. That's all the time we have for this week. We didn't get to a few things. I've got some mailbag listener mail. Hopefully we'll get to that next week. The Tax foundation, they weighed in on the outsourcing tax proposal in the Senate. Who knows. That'll actually happen. But it's interesting. I want to get their take on it. Maybe next week. Um, there's a study from accounting today about how accountants are ready for AI to replace people. Not a study, a survey. India is, uh, wants to create their own Big Four. That's interesting. David Leary: [01:01:05] Wow. That's. Blake Oliver: [01:01:07] Yeah. So next time, don't let me forget about that one. And good luck to our Tax Pro listeners. Good luck as we approach that October 15th deadline. Line. Uh, if you're listening, it's already past. Hope it went well for you. And let's all hope that this government shutdown ends and that sanity prevails sometime soon. Because I don't really want to get on a plane anytime soon. Uh, but, David, best of luck to you. And, uh, come home safe next week. Thanks, everyone who joined us. Live. Great to see you all, Chris. Idiot. Carrot. Boring accountant. Stephen. Edgar. Emily. Mohammed. David Leary: [01:01:53] My secondary screen name. Blake Oliver: [01:01:55] Idiot carrot. David Leary: [01:01:56] Okay. Blake Oliver: [01:01:57] Anthony Adley, great to see you all. Thanks everyone who joined us live. Even if you didn't comment, um, we'll see you around here next week. And don't forget, you can earn free continuing professional education credit for listening to this episode and every episode of the Accounting podcast. Get the free earmark app, download it on the App Store or the Google Play Store, or just go to earmarked app and your web browser. Create a free account. Register for a free course and get a free CPE. Did I say free? Did I mention free free free free free. David Leary: [01:02:29] Free free. Blake Oliver: [01:02:29] Free. It's free free free. David Leary: [01:02:32] Just like TurboTax free free free. Blake Oliver: [01:02:33] And if you want to support our work here on the show and at earmark more broadly, subscribe for the low, low price of $169 and 69. Wait, no. $169.99. We should have made it 69 on both. That would. Why didn't we do that? No, you can't do it because it's the apple six seven. We should have made it. 676767. Um, if you don't know what six seven refers to, it's the new 69. David Leary: [01:03:00] You obviously don't have a teenager. Blake Oliver: [01:03:02] You don't have a teenager. All right. Um, that's all I got this week. David, great chatting with you. We'll see you all around here next week. Bye, everyone. David Leary: [01:03:11] All right. Bye bye.