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The HIRE Act Would Tax Firms 25% for Offshore Labor · 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: [00:00:05] The country of Albania has introduced the world's first AI cabinet minister. I think eventually a country will elect an AI to run their country. David Leary: [00:00:17] 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 accounting profession. I'm Blake Oliver. David Leary: [00:00:32] I'm David Leary and Blake. We start a little late and I'm going to miss the beginning of the bills game. But I'm suited up and ready to go. Blake Oliver: [00:00:38] I am, uh, I mean, I know that means a lot to me, David, because I know you're such a huge fan. So thanks for accommodating me on this Sunday because of my travel schedule. I was in Toronto last week for camp ATX doing a presentation on AI. Ai agents. What where we're at as a profession, and how we can move along the AI maturity framework to get more out of it. David Leary: [00:01:06] And you're showing you're doing practical talks on this because I know this because you kicked off a bunch of workflows in R, and I figured out, oh, he was just demoing this for others. It's not theoretical AI. You're showing real AI usage. Blake Oliver: [00:01:19] Well, I'm trying to show what you could actually do with it. Like examples of it, not just in theory. And one thing I learned while I was there, like a realization I had talking to all of these e-commerce accountants, it's a conference or a retreat for e-commerce accountants who use a tool from around the country, around the world. And so these are very tech savvy accountants. You have to be to do e-commerce. You're dealing with all these different payment systems and reconciling all these different reports. And they use a lot of automation. But even in that community they are struggling to move into an AI workflow type of environment. They've given chatbots to their team, maybe like set up a ChatGPT team account. But beyond that, as with most firms, they have not integrated AI into their workflows yet. And so that's what I was presenting on, was how do you get from just using these chatbots to actually having it do work in your firm, where it's not people copying and pasting? David Leary: [00:02:24] Yeah, and that's hard. And I could see for this world, you have to train a chatbot specifically on e-commerce stuff, because the way Amazon, when it makes a deposit to the bank account, which essentially that's what ATO x is a2 X is for Amazon to zero. Originally that was the original thought of it. But there's that deposit isn't just your sales. That deposit is made up of a roll up of things, including refunds and shipping and sales tax, and they make that deposit in there. But then Shopify does it completely different. Then the next shopping cart does it completely different. So you the you'd really have to train AI custom for each one of those stores to break out that deposit, and then make the journal entry correctly. Now, there are some apps that do that really well, but you're right. Like it's not just here's AI start using it. You're going to have to really train it to these specific use cases, which constantly change because these platforms change. Blake Oliver: [00:03:15] So if we have more time toward the end of the show, I want to share some of my presentation. But we've got so much news to get to. Let's just get started. First, let's thank our sponsors. David Leary: [00:03:26] So sponsors this week we have onpay relay and team up. Blake Oliver: [00:03:31] Thank you to our sponsors. Listen to those messages and visit those links at the end of the message. It helps them know that you heard about them on the show. Help support our work. So David, let's go ahead and thank. David Leary: [00:03:44] Onpay Forbes and CNBC rank on pay number one for small business payroll. Onpay really knows how to get payroll done right for every client you serve, no matter how complex their software is easy to use and backed by outstanding service levels. They handle new client onboarding for free, and have experts on call to keep you and your clients on track. The system includes multi-state payroll, local tax filings, integrated HR tools, and more with no hidden fees. When you join on Pace Partner program, you get a custom dashboard to easily manage all clients in one place. Plus, you gain exclusive perks like revenue sharing or discounts, free payroll for your firm, co-branding opportunities, premium swag, and more. Onpay helps you run your practice efficiently while providing exceptional payroll that your clients can count on. To learn more about using Onpay for your firm and clients, that may be farms, start ups, restaurants, bars, doctors, nonprofits, gyms, franchisees, or dentists. Head over to The Accounting Podcast that is The Accounting Podcast. Blake Oliver: [00:04:46] Thank you. And and thank you to our livestream viewers joining us on this Sunday morning. Amato's says. Are you talking about the Hire Act tax? Yes. That's one of my top stories this week, and that's why the headline of this episode is The Hire Act would tax firms 25% for offshore labor. This is a Senate bill that would basically be a tariff on hiring offshore teams, payments to contractors outside the US, which would apply to accounting firms. So that's a that's a big deal for us. We'll talk about that. We're also going to talk about like a feel good story to start things off, the LSO marching band accountant LSU. I mean marching band accountant. This is such a great story. Uh, it was all over the news. Here's the AP photo. Kent Broussard is 66 years old and just became the oldest member ever of LSU's prestigious marching band. He spent months training with a weighted vest and carrying a 30 pound sousaphone through his neighborhood to prepare. He even had to enroll as a student at LSU and now attends classes, does homework and studies for tests just to be eligible for the band. So they only have 325 spots in the Golden Band from Tigerland. Grammy nominated, by the way. And he took, you know, 50 years or 40 years away from music to do it. He's the oldest member ever in the Golden Band. David Leary: [00:06:20] Did it say anything? On why he never joined band before was because the workload of his accounting classes was too much when he was in college before. Like like, why did he wait 60 years to chase this dream? It's my question. Or I guess 40 years, I guess. Blake Oliver: [00:06:33] Yeah, I don't know. He played sousaphone in high school and at Southeastern Louisiana University. So I guess he'd always wanted to to play for LSU. Right. That's like, what a great what a great marching band. So he graduated in 1980, hadn't played sousaphone since then and then picked it back up as retirement approached and decided to pursue his dream. So it's a reminder that you can achieve your dreams at nearly any point in life. His message is people retire, dreams don't. All right. Let's talk about this tax on offshore labor. The higher act, which was introduced in the Senate. David Leary: [00:07:18] Which is interesting because when we were talking about all the tariffs. Ppp months ago, I was like, how is it that you can only do products you think you would have to do labor to? It's kind of the same argument. You want to have jobs be in the United States. Like why are they not tariffing labor? Well, they must have listen to the show and now they're going to try to do it. Blake Oliver: [00:07:35] And I think it came up because JD Vance was at some sort of event and criticized firms for like tech firms for offshoring US jobs. And so that was the hint that maybe something would come of this. So this bill has been introduced in the Senate by Bernie Moreno. He's a Republican from Ohio. And it's called the Halting International Relocation of Employment Act or Hire Act. And it was introduced on September 5th, 2025. The proposed effective date, if it passed, would be January 1st, 2026. It would impose a 25% excise tax on all payments to foreign service providers. And it would also eliminate the taxable tax deductibility for outsourcing expenses. So that's a double hit, a 25% excise tax and then no deduction for those payments. The combined impact would create an 85% cost increase for typical outsourcing arrangements. So My thought on this is does offshoring lose its economic appeal? That would be the point of this bill. If your goal is to get firms to hire American workers and to not offshore the labor, then increasing the cost, 85% might do it roughly if you offshore to the to India. The rule of thumb that I've heard is roughly you can do it for about the third the cost as to do it here in the US. And it could be less, could be. David Leary: [00:09:23] More. For the accounting industry, that's kind of the the number that's tossed around. Blake Oliver: [00:09:27] And the Philippines kind of like similar. But maybe it's like a third maybe the Philippines is. Wait, was it Philippines is a third. India could be as low as 25% and then Argentina is closer to 50%. So there's different trade offs in terms of cost but then also time zone and and the culture. So let's say you're offshoring to Argentina and your cost goes up 85%. You know, I'd have to do the math on the show, but it's like, okay, we have a, you know, $100 becomes, let's say $50 if we offshore it to Argentina and then we increase that by 85%. I mean, we're losing a lot of the benefit. It doesn't all go away, but it becomes a lot less appealing. David Leary: [00:10:13] But is this much to do now? Is this just a marketing gimmick by. Was this a senator or representative that introduced this? Blake Oliver: [00:10:21] Um, this is a senator. David Leary: [00:10:23] I guess in a world without. Let's pretend AI didn't exist. I could see where, like, okay, this might possibly bring some jobs back to the US. I could see that. But what this is going to do is, is people are just going to work harder to figure out how to just give more work to AI and then not send that money overseas. So then is there going to be an act that's going to oh, you have to If we're going to tax you more, if you're using AI employees instead of hiring people in the US, it's the same logic. Where does this end? Right. I feel like this is too little, too late. It's. The ship has sailed on this. You can't put this cap back in the bag. Blake Oliver: [00:10:59] Well, and are there even enough US workers to do this kind of work? That's the same problem with the whole tariff argument, is that we've got a lot of demand for manufacturing jobs here in the US. You increase tariffs. So then you're trying to stimulate economic activity to come back here for people to hire here. But we don't have the workers. We don't have millions and millions and millions of workers who could go work in factories to replace the people doing it in China to build our products. And it's the same thing. We don't have millions of of accountants sitting around ready to do the work that's been outsourced to India and the Philippines. So unless you're going to bring those people here to do the work, we've got a problem. There's a there's a mismatch with the labor pool and it would just create massive inflation. It would definitely create inflation because what would firms have to do if they repatriate the jobs? They're going to have to pay a lot more here. 85% more potentially, according to this article. So that's going to increase the cost of accounting services and tax services. And that's going to you know, and this is not just for accounting and tax. This is for all professional services. So consulting and anything that's being offshored right now, um, it would have a massive inflationary effect. So I don't think the I don't know, you can't turn the clock back on globalization. That's what you're trying to say David. It's too late. Yeah. So, um, it would actually also give a huge advantage to large firms because large firms could create these like domestic sort of like onshore offshore places like Intuit did this Us with the offices in West Virginia. You create you create a service center in a very low cost area, a very poor part of the United States. And then you can see the benefit of the lower wages, lower cost. Um, and I guess that would be kind of the objective of this, but small companies aren't going to be able to do that the same way. David Leary: [00:13:04] So and now has the has the AICPA came out with any statement on this yet? Blake Oliver: [00:13:10] Oh, I can. David Leary: [00:13:11] Position. Blake Oliver: [00:13:12] I feel like they're going to have to. But you know, this is tricky for them because it is super political and the AICPA does not like to get into this discussion on tariffs or anything that touches like me or Trump and. David Leary: [00:13:27] A whole program to issue US CPA licenses in India. Right. In the Philippines. Yeah. To encourage this. And this is like how are they not going to have they're going to have to have a statement on this because it's going to affect these their firms, their member firms. Blake Oliver: [00:13:43] It's going to be huge. The profit margin of these firms like depends on like especially the big firms depends on being able to leverage this, you know, cheap cheaper offshore labor. So there's definitely going to be that economic need that that like business need. But then do they want to like if they come down on this are they going to be targeted. You know, is Deloitte going to be targeted as like being anti American like that? This is a tough situation. I cannot imagine being like the PR and communications person at this, these big firms, but I bet you they're going to fight it behind the scenes for sure. So the bill hasn't gone anywhere yet. It's in committee. I have lots of questions as to how you would actually enforce this. How would you how would you know what payments being offshore are to contractors versus for other things like you'd have to create some sort of regulatory regime just like tariffs for all these payments going out. And now with crypto theory right. David Leary: [00:14:43] You're 1099 are being issued maybe I don't know in theory. Blake Oliver: [00:14:48] Right. Um, so. I think we're going to see a lot of lobbying opposition. I would be really surprised if this makes it out of committee, but it just shows you like that the this this idea that you can create this protectionist regime in America and like, that's the way to create jobs. Um, that is really core to the Republican Party right now. And the cost is just so high. The disruption is just so high. We're seeing that with the tariffs right now. Would can you imagine everything that's going on with tariffs right now, all the chaos that's happening with these companies that are subject to these tariffs. Can you imagine that happening in the whole professional services segment. And then what might happen to the economy with these slowing jobs reports. I mean, this this is the sort of bill that could just push us right into a recession. David Leary: [00:15:44] If we're teetering right now. Yes. Blake Oliver: [00:15:46] Yeah. Okay. So we will keep you posted on that. Of course. Um, but why don't we talk a bit about. I think you were going to say something. David Leary: [00:15:59] About story a little bit. I have a tie on. So, um, I don't know if you saw this. We talked about this two weeks ago, maybe two episodes ago, that there was a slide deck and I forgot which big four firm it was, but they said they're going to hire 30% less people. Right. College graduates. Well, now there's a story. The UK's chief of PwC in the UK has admitted that graduate hiring is under pressure due to advancing technology and global economic headwinds. So they're confirming that they're cutting back because of artificial intelligence. And PwC is going to hire 200 fewer entry level recruits this year compared to last year. So that's that's significant. Instead of 1500 you're going to hire 1300. That's 200 odd jobs. And that's tied to this, right. Like if people are just going to use AI instead, the hiring the hiring is not going to come back. Maybe it's the way I think about this. Blake Oliver: [00:16:51] Like that's how I feel about the manufacturing is yes, some manufacturing is coming back to the United States, but it is highly automated manufacturing. So the number of jobs is not going to be super dramatic. And all these companies are working to build robots that can work like humans. These humanoid robots that you see on Instagram and on TikTok that are dancing around, it's only a matter of time until they can work an assembly line, just like people. And then so you've brought back manufacturing, but you haven't created a lot of jobs. David Leary: [00:17:24] That that's they're going to bring back the work. Like instead of having 20,000 people in India doing this accounting work, you're going to bring all that work back, but you're going to have AI do the work instead, which it didn't actually bring back 20,000 jobs. Blake Oliver: [00:17:39] Right? And the other issue is that you're saying to us companies, bring back the work and hire American workers, but the workers aren't trained because we don't have an education system that's designed to train them to do high tech manufacturing or to maintain these robots. So it's not like there's going to be jobs where people are just working on assembly lines, building stuff. You know, that that MAGA 1950s dream doesn't exist. So what we should be doing is investing in upskilling our workforce, because we want them to have the jobs that don't make sense to offshore and in accounting. Those are the client facing jobs. So that's what we want to train accountants to be able to do is to work with clients in person, on zoom, on calls and not like doing the work behind the scenes. The work behind the scenes is going to be done by offshore labor and by AI. So it's about investment, right? Not putting up these barriers. That's just that's just my opinion. And I would love to hear what our listeners think. I'm going to check out the livestream here. Change is coming says wow, Eileen left. But I gotta say I think this is a debut for American labor overall. We need jobs in this economy. Well, you look at the unemployment rate, though, and it's pretty darn low. And inflation has been hurting US workers more than anything at the moment. Do you want to trade much higher inflation? For what. How much of an improvement in the in the unemployment rate. That's the trade off right. That you can't get something for nothing. All right. So let's talk about the IRS and bad tax advice. We were talking a lot earlier this year about TikTok tax advice, and you know how much it was going to hurt Americans. And now we actually have a number, right, David? David Leary: [00:19:40] Yeah. So the IRS, they've now leveled, uh, leveled the right word, maybe levied, uh, levied $162 million in penalties, um, because thousands and thousands of people are attempting to use tax credit schemes that they learned about on social media. And these things are from fake eligibility claims, promises of faster refunds, ways to, quote unquote, amend returns. And then there's even instructions on ignoring the IRS. And then that just builds up more fines and penalties, etc.. So the IRS obviously is you're trying to encourage taxpayers to, you know, get their returns fixed, don't deal with your notices, etc.. But so it's just it's really come around full, full circle, right? It went from bad TikTok advice to where now there's true consequences for following that bad TikTok advice on social media. Blake Oliver: [00:20:33] And so far it's 162 million in penalties. I imagine that there's a lot more potential penalties out there, because the IRS has just started getting to all this stuff they've done. David Leary: [00:20:45] Going on for years. My daughter's 18. I remember when she was getting her driver's license, I was it was two years ago at 16. And I remember sitting there at the DMV and some guy comes in with pink slips for like six cars, and he wants to roll them all into his LLC or some crazy thing. And I was like, literally, what? You see those videos on TikTok trying to do all the time? Yeah. Because then that way he wouldn't have to pay registration fees. I don't know, some some crazy scam. Right. Blake Oliver: [00:21:13] It might be related to the fuel tax credit, which is one of those credits that's being claimed fraudulently thanks to bad tax advice, but it's reserved for specific business uses. So if you're obviously an individual who's just taking those credits, like that's something that's pretty easy for the IRS to to figure out the the another one is the Sick and Family Leave credit, which is designed for self-employed individuals and businesses with specific qualifying circumstances. You see a bunch of individuals starting to take that who are obviously not self-employed or not businesses. That's going to be an issue. David Leary: [00:21:49] It's not in the article, but imagine the Augusta rules kind of one of these famous ones that's always used a lot, but they've issued over 32,000 penalties since 2022 because of these scams. Blake Oliver: [00:22:00] And the penalties are severe. There's a $5,000 civil penalty for filing a frivolous return. So if you claim a tax credit that's clearly frivolous, it could be bam $5,000. And that could then there's additional penalties on top of that. And then, of course, the nightmare of dealing with the IRS for years trying to sort it out. Yeah. David Leary: [00:22:24] So I have another article that's slightly related. And I think these are important for accounting firms. I also have an article. This is a survey from Perl.com, which is basically like a ChatGPT cloud type product that's out there. This their survey was about using AI for personal, financial and tax advice. And the results of this survey basically almost 20%. So 1 in 5 have lost $100 or more due to AI giving poor financial and tax advice. Blake Oliver: [00:22:54] 1 in 5. That's a lot. David Leary: [00:22:56] Yeah. So 22% of people, Gen Zers are using it for stock advice, 20% are using for crypto advice, 10% are using it for tax advice, and 31% said they would let AI defend them in court if it was free. Um, and 28% would sign AI drafted legal documents. But I think you can as an accounting firm, here's two articles. You could send your clients this week in email and justify your cost and your human involvement in their financial life, their tax life and their financial life. And you could just point like, hey, if you're paying attention to social media, you're screwed. If you're trying to use AI for your finances, you're screwed. Like, you as a firm could use these two articles in the show notes and, you know, justify a price increase. Maybe, I don't know or at least communicate to your clients your value. Blake Oliver: [00:23:45] I think what's fascinating about that story, most to me, is how much people are willing to trust AI to make decisions for them. I use it, I use it, and I think of it as like an advisor or a resource. But ultimately I'm not going to let it make the decision for me. I still have to go through that decision making process and use the information it gives me. Take its opinion. It's like a like a friend, a sounding board. David Leary: [00:24:14] A sounding board is the way to treat it. Blake Oliver: [00:24:16] Yes. But people are just accepting it as like the truth and just delegating their decision making to it. At least you know a good chunk. And I mean, that's so risky. David Leary: [00:24:28] And I think a lot of it is probably social media, right? Somebody's like, oh, I let, um, ChatGPT tell me what stock to buy. And then one person doesn't get success and that video goes viral. Then everybody uses it and then nobody's making the videos of I lost, I lost, I lost. You're not seeing all those videos. It's that it's that same world we live in. Blake Oliver: [00:24:47] You nailed it. And I see this all the time with AI demos. I'll watch a YouTube video about how to build an AI agent. Or the big one right now is how to build your own personal agentic AI company. Remember, it's sort of like how at the beginning of ChatGPT, there were all these video series of people who, like, created a GPT. I think this was even before custom GPT. They were just starting a thread where they said, I want you to run this business, like you're going to come up with a business and you're going to make passive money for me and research it and like, tell me everything to do and. David Leary: [00:25:24] Create fake items and everything. Blake Oliver: [00:25:26] Yeah yeah yeah. And and so they would create these videos and it would look so good. Like the business is going is starting to make money. But none of them they all dropped off eventually the chat like didn't work like the the nobody ever created a successful business that was run by an AI and they still haven't. And the latest thing now is these AI systems where people will build these AI agents all working together in N810, which is one of those hot apps where you can do that and they make it look so great, they'll show you like one output that worked. But I guarantee you that, like a lot of the time it completely fails. And so you can't just give it a task and you can't you can't just give this thing full autonomy and have it expect it to work like the actual success is way lower than what you see on social media, which is kind of true with everything. Right. Social media is is everybody showing their highlight clips? Yes. Not their failures. David Leary: [00:26:27] And that's true with gamblers. Gamblers always tell you about their wins, but they never tell you about their losses. So I have a follow up story. Speaking of gambling, you covered it almost a year ago. Probably, uh, late 2023. You probably covered this story, but the Jacksonville Jaguars had an employee, uh, former team employee, uh, omit Patel. He was a financial manager with the Jaguars, and he stole approximately $22 million through fraudulent virtual credit card transactions. I remember this money to deposit it into his FanDuel account to bet on sports. So he's he's pled guilty to that. He's currently serving six and a half year federal prison sentence. But he filed a lawsuit. He's suing FanDuel for $250 million, alleging the company enabled his gambling addiction. But what made this story bubble up? This week, FanDuel has agreed to pay the Jacksonville Jaguars the Jaguars themselves sued FanDuel because of their employees fraudulent behavior, and FanDuel settled this week for $5 million. But it's really not. It's a settlement that probably for FanDuel, is nothing. And the reason why FanDuel is one of the NFL's official sports betting partners. And this gives FanDuel the ability for national advertising rights with the league use of NFL trademarks, access to official league media and marketing channels. And in 2018, there's so much money in sports gambling that approximately $2.3 billion a year in revenue comes into the NFL. So that's just the NFL's piece of the sports gambling revenue. Never mind what FanDuel is making in all these gambling companies are making. So $5 million to just have good terms still with an NFL team is nothing. Blake Oliver: [00:28:15] Well, and the guy stole 22 million. David Leary: [00:28:17] Stole 22 million. Blake Oliver: [00:28:18] So they got 5 million back. David Leary: [00:28:21] Yeah. Blake Oliver: [00:28:21] Yeah. David Leary: [00:28:22] They were seeking 66 million in damages, but they got 5 million back. Blake Oliver: [00:28:26] I just I have to say, David, this is like off topic. I know, but I'm not a sports guy. Really? The whole change that has happened, though, from like, 20 years ago to now where like, I remember, like, who was the baseball player that got banned for life. David Leary: [00:28:43] Pete rose. Pete Rose for life. Yeah. Blake Oliver: [00:28:45] That was such a big deal when I was a kid. And now it's embedded into the sports. It's like, to me, this is like if, like, NFL was, like, sponsored by, like, all the vape companies or something. It's like this vice that, like, yes, it should be legal. People should be able to do it. I don't believe in banning people from like, gambling, but to promote it on a national scale like this, it's just insane to me. David Leary: [00:29:14] And I mean, if the money's going to the players too, it increased the player's pool of salaries by $1 billion. So that money trickles down to players. So the money the money's getting to the players in the NFL. But ultimately, you're right, it's. Blake Oliver: [00:29:26] Coming from the gambling addicts who cannot escape. David Leary: [00:29:30] It. Blake Oliver: [00:29:30] Because it is now embedded into sport. Yeah. David Leary: [00:29:33] And it's two things, right? The gambling addicts like going back to the previous stories. They're going to brag when they win. They're not talking about their losses ever. Nobody talks about how much money they're losing. And the other thing that's happening is people are there's AI now. People are using AI to tell them what to bet on, which is causing more losses. I've seen some articles like that as well. Blake Oliver: [00:29:51] Right. Because the AI is just trained on all the success stories and not exactly losses because that's what people share. Yeah. David, let's talk about another crazy AI story. And this one I think I don't know if I said it on the show, but I predicted this. I called this, I called this, the country of Albania has introduced the world's first AI cabinet minister. So when AI agents and ChatGPT came out, I thought, someday people are going to start delegating everything to these things. And in that story you talked about like that's what people are doing. They're delegating their decision making to AI. David Leary: [00:30:35] Yes. Blake Oliver: [00:30:35] It's just so easy. Right. And I thought, well, someday somebody is going to put an AI in charge of their company, like a big company. Like a public company. The board of directors will just elect to nominate an AI CEO. It will happen. Same thing in politics. I think eventually a country will elect an AI to run their country. David Leary: [00:30:59] It could happen. Blake Oliver: [00:31:02] It'll. It's somewhere. Someday. I think it will happen. Albania just took the first step. They have appointed an AI called Dila de la Villa is an AI, and it is now the world's first virtual government minister in the Cabinet of Albania. And Delia's job is to oversee public procurement processes for the Albanian government procurement, meaning purchasing. And the idea is that there's a lot of fraud in procurement, in government and especially in Albania. And by giving this responsibility to an AI, they can avoid the, uh, you know, the human conflict. What do you think? David Leary: [00:31:53] This makes sense? Because there's probably a lot of, you know, greasing of palms that occurs. Right. And maybe that will occur less if who you're going to grease, if it's just an AI making the decision about your purchase order. But you can't. Blake Oliver: [00:32:05] Bribe an AI, right? Or can you? I know we'll find out, but. David Leary: [00:32:08] But what's more interesting about this is this concept of a cabinet or a city council or a or government legislature, and some of the members are AI. You wouldn't have the only leader be only AI. But you could have. Blake Oliver: [00:32:21] Could you elect could a country opt to elect AIS? Could you have an AI. David Leary: [00:32:25] As a representative? Right. It can't be any worse than we have. Blake Oliver: [00:32:30] So I think like the the this terrifies me, this idea of like putting AIS in government positions, making decisions for the people. But the actual use case is really good because procurement is rife with fraud and abuse, because it's very easy for humans to go around the proper procurement process. And it's not their money, right? It's other people's money. And these procurement people have friends and they go back and forth from industry into government. And they they help each other out. Right. Like, you know, give me that contract, you know, uh, you know. Yeah, we're we're 20% more expensive than, you know, the lower bidder. But we're going to kick you know they kick back some to you under the table right. Like super common. Ai theoretically doesn't have any of that conflict of interest. So you'll have two A's are built on human like intelligence in a way. So, like, maybe they could be bribed. David Leary: [00:33:29] Yeah. You'll have. Blake Oliver: [00:33:29] To keep. David Leary: [00:33:30] An eye on this story and see if it. Because it's really an experiment. Arguably. Right. Yeah, we've implemented this. Blake Oliver: [00:33:35] But like in companies like I think AI could really help with procurement in spotting that kind of stuff. Right. Spot all the hidden relationships in the data to see if there are contracts that don't really make sense according to the policy. Um, the dialect here in the live stream says Imagine Gemini for president, where it outputs cat reaction images to show approval or disapproval. I mean, we kind of already have that with our politics at this point, right, with social media. It's it's it's governing by meme is the new meme. Yeah. And now the Democrats are starting to embrace it, so I beam. David Leary: [00:34:14] Yes. Blake Oliver: [00:34:15] It's amazing how far we've come. You know, since Kennedy stood up there at the Berlin Wall and made his speech, you know. Now, that would just be a meme now. So that's what I have about AI. Let's thank our next sponsor, David. Its relay, and I'll be happy to read this one. Between David and myself, we now have three, four or maybe even five business entities, 20 or so checking accounts, dozens and dozens of virtual cards. It would be impossible to manage all of this if we weren't using relay as our small business bank. Relay is truly a part of the tech stack we use to run our businesses. Relay allows David and me to each have our own logins. We can grant access to our team and even our accountant without sharing passwords or two factor authentication codes. Relay allows us to grow and scale our banking needs without ever going into a physical branch. I recently added an account to receive inbound merchant services and with a few clicks I had it just a few clicks to get a payroll checking. I had it and I had access to my ACH info and I could give that to my payroll provider. You can set up an account in minutes with relays, virtual cards. We can issue debit cards to our team around the world for needed business expenses. I can instantly spin up a new visa card and set both daily and monthly spending limits. Blake Oliver: [00:35:34] And when a team member doesn't need their card, I can freeze it until they need to use it again. Relay also has automation features that sweep money automatically from one account to another based on dates, amount or target balances, or percentages. For example, inbound payments could be split daily to your payroll sales, tax payable, operating and savings accounts based on predefined rules. And I should mention some more features. There's now built in bill pay. You can forward bills to an email address, process them for approval and relay and then pay those bills via ACH and check and wire. Um, there's an expensive feature now where your team can upload receipts to document their expenses, and and they can code the expenses using the chart of accounts that syncs from QuickBooks and and Xero. And then you can sync those into the accounting system. So it's like doing that pre accounting work. And then you just match and reconcile and zero or QBO. I love that feature so much because I don't have to have a separate expense management system to collect all those receipts. It's like bill pay expense management in my bank. And I'm not saying you don't need those apps, but I think for a lot of small businesses like ours is right now, that is enough to start. David Leary: [00:36:51] I think for a lot of clients, they they travel twice a year. They don't need special cards and virtual cards and spend policies. They just need to track those receipts from that one time they traveled that that. Yes. Blake Oliver: [00:37:04] So my recommendation is like for all your new clients. Get them on relay when they sign up for you. Even if they have another bank, just make sure they set that up as their business bank account and use it as their operating account for that business. And what's great is that then when it's time to actually get the accounting going, because that usually lags behind when they start the business, then you have everything you need. You can just import it all. You don't have to worry about, like not being able to get the transactions from like 3 to 6 months ago because the bank doesn't give you that. You've got it all. David Leary: [00:37:35] And it really does. Like I'll let you finish that. Sorry. Yeah. Blake Oliver: [00:37:41] So yeah. So if you want to learn more about relay, sign up as an accountant. Get your free accountant portal where you can manage all your clients. Go to accounting podcast. That's The Accounting Podcast. David Leary: [00:37:57] But it's going to say is the reason people co-mingle funds. It's very hard to open a business bank account. You got to go to a branch. It's all physical with relay. There's no reason any small business owner should not have a separate business account anymore. It used to be a hassle and I understand it. You'd co-mingle your funds, your personal finances, your business finances. But there's zero reason for any client of yours to do that anymore. With solutions like relay. Blake Oliver: [00:38:22] Stop the co-mingling. Okay, next Supreme Court and tariffs. My favorite topic. Well, I guess we already talked about tariffs a little bit in the form of this excise tax, which would kind of be like a tariff on offshore services. Um, I wanted to do a little update on where we are with the tariffs, because we haven't talked about it in a while. Current situation. For those who have been stepping away from this, the, uh, a court of appeals, federal court of appeals has ruled that the Trump tariffs are unconstitutional, but they have stayed the order to suspend them until the Supreme Court can hear this case. So this case is going to the Supreme Court. The appeals court found that the president improperly used the International Emergency Economic Powers Act to implement many of these tariffs. They said it doesn't give the president authority to impose broad sweeping tariffs like those enacted this year. And that's because the court determined that the Ieepa lets the president regulate imports during declared, declared emergencies. But the statute's text and its legislative and its legislative history never mention tariffs, duties or taxes or other trade laws do contain explicit tariff powers and detailed limits. But this law does not. So the lack of the specific language means Congress did not intend to delegate broad tariff setting power through this bill, and for our constitutional history buffs, a reminder that setting tariffs or taxes is a power reserved to Congress, not the president. That's under article one of the Constitution. And in order for the president to be given such authority, Congress has to do it clearly and explicitly, which the court is saying that the Iipa fails to do. My hope and my feeling is that like this should stand. The Supreme Court should uphold this because, I mean, you know, I'm no constitutional lawyer, but imagine if the president could just take broad authority with everything like this. David Leary: [00:40:42] You mean like when Biden did the student loan stuff? Blake Oliver: [00:40:45] Yeah, that was crap. David Leary: [00:40:47] Like, the argument was Congress controls the purse. So, yes. Do you have to say the same thing for tariffs? Congress controls the purse. Blake Oliver: [00:40:55] Yeah, I, I, I'm not a fan of the, you know, super powerful executive. There's a reason that we have separation of powers in this country. And I just feel like I know more Americans need to take US history class or a class on the Constitution or something like that, because that's what has preserved our democracy for so long. And we cannot allow the executive of any party to continue to expand the power of the presidency. I mean, we saw this with Obama, too, 30 years. David Leary: [00:41:28] It's been slowly happening more and more. And Trump's really pushing for it harder. Blake Oliver: [00:41:32] Even Trump's pushing for it. And you know, Trump's attitude like people really don't like that the way he presents it, you know. And but like what I'm trying to say is like Obama, the nice guy did the same kind of stuff, especially with like, all the drone strikes and the war powers. I mean, he he basically took away a lot of war powers from Congress. David Leary: [00:41:55] Well, the executive order is it's like it went from three to 7 to 20. And then every president just keeps undoing the previous executive orders and then creates their own 10 or 15. And yeah, it just it has to stop. We're on a slippery slope of the executive branch trying to have too much control or it's temporary control. Right. They they implement these things. But there's a reason we have a legislative branch to actually make things become laws. Blake Oliver: [00:42:19] Yes. So anyway, that's my political rant for the episode. Thank you. Nice to get it out there. Feel better now? David, do you want to talk about one of your stories? I've also got the Epic Times CFO story that, uh. David Leary: [00:42:37] I want to hear that, but I'm going to just mention a story that I don't think we have to talk about it as much on the show, but it's in the show notes and everybody should go read it. It is a a food, a restaurant owner's industry magazine website called The Takeout Comm. And it is essentially the they call it I'll read the headline, head, what they call it. The only recap of Red lobster's downfall you need. And it really, um, goes through everything about Red lobster, their experience with private equity, because they've been they've gone through 2 or 3 rounds of private equity with different companies. It talks about the endless shrimp shrimp deal that really only helped the private equity company. It did not help Red lobster. It talks about the real estate deal where it burdened Red lobster with these ridiculous leases. But the company was making all the money. And so as you know, our industry is getting in bed with PE more start. Go and see what's happening in other industries. Make sure you're understanding it because you're going to probably see parallels. It takes place it's a half hour long article to read, so it'll be in the show notes. Blake Oliver: [00:43:38] Where do we found it? David Leary: [00:43:39] It's called the takeout.com. I'll just put it in the comments now. But it'll also be in the show notes. I'll put it in the chat. Blake Oliver: [00:43:45] But for our listeners who are not in the show notes, what is this article? How is the. David Leary: [00:43:49] Takeout, takeout, comm and then its website and then Red lobster? Blake Oliver: [00:43:55] What's the name of the story? David Leary: [00:43:57] Oh, it's. Oh, the name of the story was the only recap of Red lobster's downfall you'll need. Blake Oliver: [00:44:02] All right, search for that. Listeners, give it a listen. My hot take on P these days is it's all about the timeline. If the private equity firm is one of those firms that is trying to flip you in 3 to 5 years, it's going to be a bad time. And the reason is that 3 to 5 years is not enough time to change the business model of the firm, which is what really needs to change long term for these firms to survive. They need to get out of the pyramid shaped hourly based billing model, timesheets model, and move to something else. That's the only way you're going to be able to attract new partners in the future. But the PE firms aren't going to be able to do that in 3 to 5 years. So what are they going to do? Well, they're going to increase EBITDA. They're going to they're going to they're going to squeeze expenses and they're going to make people work harder in order to make the firm look better and then sell it. So it's like that's that's the problem with those firms. And then but the PE that has like a longer time horizon, like let's say ten, 20 years, that could be really great. Bring in the right people to modernize the tech. So I think it's going to be sort of a tale of two cities in that regard. David Leary: [00:45:15] That's a good point because that's what happened with lobsters, right? The in the short term it helps some liquidity problems they were having, but it basically set them up with unsustainable costs in the future and the inability to actually compete long term. And that's where the state they're in today is poor decisions by short term decisions by P in the beginning. Blake Oliver: [00:45:36] All right. So Eric in the live stream is asking for me to talk about this AI stuff that I mentioned that I talked about at A2 x. So Eric I'm going to talk about that. But first we're going to thank our final sponsor and that is team Up. You know that feeling when you're turning away clients because you just can't find the right people? You're not alone. Most accounting firms are stuck in the same boat, either at capacity or desperately trying to scale, but can't find reliable talent. Maybe you've tried outsourcing before and it didn't work out. 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David Leary: [00:47:03] So you have a you want to talk about what you presented? Blake Oliver: [00:47:06] Yeah. Just I mean briefly I want to talk about like the where accounting firms are right now and where we are going to go. So if you want to build a firm that is rooted in AI, this is sort of the way to get there. And there's sort of four stages, in my view, four stages of of AI in accounting firms in stage one. Right now that's just chatbots. And that's where actually most firms, surprisingly, scarily, are not even there. I tried to figure out, you know, what percentage of accounting firms have provided their teams with access to gen AI chatbots like a team plan, and the numbers vary. But according to Thomson Reuters. It's about 21 to 27% of accounting firms that have provided their teams with access to gen AI chatbots. So like a quarter this transformative technology. David Leary: [00:48:14] I think I saw a Microsoft survey where 78% of employees are bringing AI on their own to work. Blake Oliver: [00:48:20] So and that's true, about half of accounting firm staff are using open source gen AI tools like ChatGPT for personal work use cases, even without formal firm authorization. And that is bad because if you're concerned about security, uh, your people are using the free version of ChatGPT. Those prompts, that data they're uploading that could be used to train the model. So that's why I say, like, first thing is recognize your employees want this and, like, pay for it and get the team subscriptions so that you are not leaking data through your employees and trying to like, stop them is just like it's impossible because the productivity gain is so high that your employees are going to be tempted to use it no matter what, and you should want them to be more productive, right? So a quarter of these firms, you know, are not giving access to their teams, and that's where you need to start, obviously. And so there are the firms that have they've given access to their teams to like say a ChatGPT or copilot, but they're not really seeing the gains. We had that MIT survey that showed that 95% of companies that have implemented gen AI, which is mostly in the form of chatbots, they're not able to tie that to any return on investment. And why is that? I struggled to understand that because it's such a big productivity boost for me. Blake Oliver: [00:49:46] I feel like if all of my people have ChatGPT and become two, three, 4 or 5 times more productive like I am, sometimes ten times more productive. We should see a huge change in our company, but that's not what's happening. And why is that? Why are some people seeing a huge productivity increase and others are not? And a lot of it is a education problem because GPT, in order to use them right. In order to use ChatGPT correctly, you need to write a good prompt. And that's where this whole industry, educational industry around prompt creation comes from is people actually don't know how to ask for what they want. And so there are all these frameworks that have popped up that people can use. There's different ways of expressing them, but they're all kind of fundamentally the same. Here's one that I really like the craft framework. You have to give the AI context. So define its role. You are a tax reviewer. You're an expert tax reviewer. I am the owner of an accounting firm. That's a little bit of context. You could give it more context about what the project is that we're going to work on. What kind of tax returns are we going to review? What kind of things do you need to look for. Blake Oliver: [00:51:18] So that's context in the craft framework. Then there's the request. You have to actually clearly state what it is you want the agent to do. I want you to review returns according to a detailed checklist, and look for mistakes and point out things that we might have missed. Then there's actions. How should the AI do it? That's the process you should follow. And what should it definitely not do? And you need to define that process in detail the way a human would do it. So what is the process a human tax return reviewer would follow? Do you have that process written down in your firm? The last two are a little easier. That's format, which is how do you want the AI to return whatever it gives you? Do you want it in bullet points? Do you want it in a word, doc? Do you want it in a narrative? And the last one is template. If you give it examples a template, it's going to be much more successful. This is really hard to do. You can listen to me say this, but the only way to learn how to write good prompts is to do it over and over again, and to see the results. David Leary: [00:52:23] And that's. Blake Oliver: [00:52:24] Why you. David Leary: [00:52:25] Look at your slide here in the pilots, because a lot of these companies, a lot of firms are doing pilots and the pilots are successful because I think they only do the first three. They do the context, request and actions. But the real work for all of this is how do you have consistent formatting and consistent output. And that's where the formats and templates come in. Because without that it doesn't scale. Blake Oliver: [00:52:45] And I'm not even sure, though, that these firms that are deploying the chatbots are giving this framework to their employees. Most employees are not getting training in how to engineer a prompt, and they struggle to do it themselves. What's interesting is that executives are really much better at this. They use AI four times more than front line workers. Why do executives get a lot out of AI and workers? Individual contributors don't. It's because the individual contributors don't know how to write a good prompt. And what a good prompt is, in essence, is just proper delegation. You could use this framework, the Craft framework, context, request actions, format and template to delegate work to a person. And there's many delegation frameworks that you learn as a manager. So that's why chatbots aren't delivering huge productivity gains when you give them to individual contributors, because it's like asking one of those workers who has never managed a person in their life to manage somebody, to manage an employee, and you don't give them any training on how to do it. So chatbots are great for future managers or current managers or executives because they know how to frame a prompt. They know how to delegate. That was a big realization for me. Delegating to a human and delegating to an AI is essentially the same. You need to give it the context. You need to clearly define your request. You need to say what actions do you take? What outcome do I want? You have to clearly define all these things to successfully delegate. And why is this? It's because artificial intelligence is modeled after human intelligence. These llms are mimicking the neural pathways in our brains. So they're not they're not intelligent. They're not aware. But when you use them to like, process an input into an output, they're doing something very similar to what our brains do. And that's why you have to include all this information. And where they really struggle is that they're missing a lot of context because they don't live in the real world. They don't have an experience of like being in your business, and they don't understand your business. They don't, you know. David Leary: [00:55:16] They've never worked in any business. They've never worked in any role. Blake Oliver: [00:55:19] Yeah. Or imagine it's like a human being who grew up in a library that has read every book in the library, but has never left the library or talked to another person. That's that would be an interesting employee. David Leary: [00:55:33] To work with is a great way to describe AI. Blake Oliver: [00:55:36] Yeah. And that's why these firms struggle. So like what's the unlock for this? How do we get our people to be more productive? Well, one is you. You train them to use the frameworks to do effective prompting. But I also think that that's not possible because not every individual contributor is going to be a manager. So how do you get them to benefit from AI? And that is where you go from stage one into AI workflows. And the bridge to that is custom gpts. So don't make your individual users come up with the prompts. That's a lot like they're not. David Leary: [00:56:20] Going to learn the raw resources. And here you go. Yeah, here's sand. Go make glass. Blake Oliver: [00:56:26] Like yeah. Or it's like, I don't know what's like some construction tool that like you need a lot of like experience to use. David would be like you taking me to a job site and giving me some, like, Tool and telling me to, like. David Leary: [00:56:39] Use it. Build the wall. Frame a wall. Blake Oliver: [00:56:41] Yeah, yeah. Frame a wall. Oh my God. Here's the disaster. David Leary: [00:56:43] Here's the wood. Blake Oliver: [00:56:44] Without any training. Yeah. So the way you unlock this is you have to use custom gpts, which are basically just predefined sets of instructions. So you can predefine the prompt, you can engineer the prompt. And everyone at your company can just use the same prompt. So then all you have to teach them is when to use what custom GPT for what. So that's the bridge. And then the next step is to actually embed AI in your workflows. So like we have done at earmark we have workflow software. We use Process Street. But you can use whatever workflow software you want. And you have to very clearly create a checklist. That's every step along the way and has instructions for every step. So you've got the task, you've got who it's assigned to and you've got the documentation. And what you do is you define that with your team, and you make sure that when somebody does the task, they can go through it and they're just following that process. It's like an preflight checklist that a pilot uses. It maybe has like 100 things on it, super detailed to make sure you don't miss anything. Because if you do, you're going to crash the plane. So you build that and then you look for the tasks that AI can do. And the tasks that AI can do are the ones where the the inputs are available. The context is clear from the inputs. You can write a prompt that allows the AI to accomplish the task, and generally you start with the small tasks first, the ones that might take a few minutes. Those are the best tasks to automate and you'll find as you define your workflow. There are lots of tasks that just take a few minutes that make up a much bigger task. Blake Oliver: [00:58:38] So if we're talking about like reviewing a tax return, there's probably lots of little parts of that return that you review. Maybe you do, um, you know, one form and you could, you could say, I think we could have AI review this form and look for like the most common mistake, and you just build a task that sends the prompt with that particular form to the AI, which then reviews it and sends back a report. And then you integrate that into your process. And I think you could build like a great tax return quality assurance workflow with this. I mean, you could also do it for generating financial statement narratives to accompany the financials that go out to clients. You could do it for, uh, sales process, like creating pricing. You could do it for an intake of documents. You know, there's lots of companies that are building this where you just, like, dump in the documents and it like Pre-populates the return. You could actually do that yourself if you wanted to, although it's probably better just to like, use the off the shelf stuff if it exists. But, you know, there's all sorts of stuff like this in an accounting firm. And the problem is that firms haven't documented their processes. So, Eric, I hope you're still around, because the answer to your question is, if you want to learn how to build an AI first tax and compilation firm, know with no audits, then the first thing you need to do is to build a documented process for all the deliverables so that you start at the beginning, and at the end you've got the deliverable that goes to the client and somebody other than you. David Leary: [01:00:13] Yeah. Assign it to your team. Blake Oliver: [01:00:14] Could follow that process. It needs to be that good. And it's going to take you a long time. It took me a long time to do this for earmark, but the benefit is that it can be delegated. Now all the work is delegated to a mix of humans leveraging AI. Um, now with a tool like Process Street. What's neat is that we can actually turn some of the tasks into AI tasks by connecting it to Zapier, and you just press a button, and now the AI does the task. That's super cool. You don't necessarily have to have that, because you could just in the instructions for the task link to a custom GPT you've built and shared with your team, and just have them do the copy paste there. That's the the hack I would do to start. And then once you've got that figured out, you get rid of the copy paste by doing the AI prompt with like Zapier or a make or something like that. So anyway, that was kind of the essence. Um, there are other stages that I identified, like AI agents and workflows, um, you know, that can act autonomously and make decisions. I think that the profession is still so far behind. It's not even worth exploring that. I mean, I'm doing it, but like, we we haven't integrated any actual AI agents in our workflows yet. It's all deterministic. Ai. So there's still so much benefit. And then the other one, this is the one where you're hearing a lot of the hype. It's the stage for agentic systems. So I'm going to set up this whole system of AI agents with an orchestrator agent and a chatbot. And then it delegates the work to different other agents. And it works like a team. Like, that's super cool. And it looks super fun, but I don't think it's going to be there yet because it's really expensive, because you're doing like all these prompts are going happening and all the agents are sending prompts to each other. They're calling on each other like it might not be any cheaper than doing it with people. And this is where it also fails. David Leary: [01:02:09] The executives at these companies. So then when they find out what AI has been rolled out and like what, it doesn't do this yet. And then they consider the project a failure. Blake Oliver: [01:02:18] Yeah. So there's a lot of low hanging fruit. And I mean, you know, we're not even talking about the firms that haven't embraced cloud yet. They're hopeless. They're never going to catch up at this point. Um, yeah. There's so much potential. Like if I was building a firm right now, I would from scratch. I would be focused on what are the services that I can provide to a customer where I can just gradually maximize how much of that grunt work is being done by AI with people reviewing it and like a quality assurance process, like, what could I deliver to them? And maybe start with a deliverable, start with whatever it is you give them and work back from there. David, anything else before we go? I guess there was a story I wanted to talk about, uh, the Epic Times CFO. David Leary: [01:03:08] Yeah, you covered that one. And then we'll call it a day because the bills game is on. Now, I need to get off the. Blake Oliver: [01:03:13] You got to get there before you get some spoilers on Twitter, right? David Leary: [01:03:16] Yeah. You're gonna people start putting it in the communication for thread here. The comments thread with the score is no spoilers people. Blake Oliver: [01:03:26] I have. Uh, I have I used to get the epic times, like, delivered to my house in LA. I never subscribed to it, but it would just end up on the doorstep. And I always wondered, what the heck is this thing? And then I learned that it's, like, linked to, uh, this, like, Chinese group here in America, like Falun Gong. Is it? It's like they're like a political religious group. Am I am I right, David? David Leary: [01:03:53] I just know there's a billboard between Tucson and Phoenix that has been there forever. And it's always like seeking the truth. Epoch times. Like, it's very vague. It looks very, uh, tinfoil hat style, billboard like, conspiracy driven news. It's hard to say, but. But it's it's it exists. Right? And obviously it's pumping out content to a certain individual. I just don't know who it's. Blake Oliver: [01:04:19] I never read it, but I always saw it. And then I saw this headline. The Epoch Times CFO charged with 67 million money laundering scheme. Bill Guan, he's 61 and he's the CFO of the Epoch Times. He was arrested on federal money laundering and bank fraud charges, and was accused of laundering at least 67 million in illegal proceeds to benefit himself and the newspaper. If convicted, he faces 30 years in prison. What was the scheme? Guan led the Outlets Make Money Online team starting around 2020. The team would purchase crime proceeds via cryptocurrency at discounted rates. Money was then moved through tens of thousands of layered transactions using prepaid cards, financial accounts open with stolen identification, and multiple bank accounts affiliated with the newspaper. Thanks to this money laundering operation, the Epoch Times revenue explored. It exploded 410% during the time the scheme was happening. Revenue jumped from 15,000,000 in 20 19 to 60 2,000,000 in 2020. And when banks question the money surge, Guan allegedly lied and claimed the funds came from donations. So there you go. I guess the lesson here is if you're going to do money laundering, don't make it so obvious. Like it was so much money that the banks are questioning where it all came from. But this is a big thing is like laundering criminal proceeds through crypto. David Leary: [01:05:50] For a paper that is somewhat free. Right? I guess. Blake Oliver: [01:05:53] Right. David Leary: [01:05:54] It's available for free. Blake Oliver: [01:05:55] Anyway, I just thought that was, uh. That was interesting. David Leary: [01:05:59] I'm always shocked at how complicated frauds are sometimes where it's like, what if you just took that energy and just made your business better? Like, this is tens of thousands of layers of transactions. That's so much work. How do you keep track of all that? You're building all these systems to keep track of that? Just build real business systems and don't do this. Blake Oliver: [01:06:18] If you're that clever, if you're that clever, you shouldn't have to do fraud. You could figure out how to make money legitimately. Yes. You know, that's why. Yeah. That's why I've never, like, I've never been tempted in my life to do fraud. You know, to like, like. And I've had plenty of opportunities as an accountant with clients who just are, like, so trusting, like, here, here's my bank account with all this money in it, you know, like, yeah, I'm like, no, you can't do that. I have to explain to them, you have to give me a read only login, but some of them would do it anyway. So I've had the opportunity, but I've never had the desire because I can make money legitimately. I don't need I don't need to do it illegally. And you know what actually really convinces me? And I think we should do more to educate people about this is like the people who do the frauds. They talk a lot about this, how stressful it is and how they are just miserable the whole time because they're constantly afraid of being caught. Like it's not worth it for that. It's not worth it to feel that stress all the time. You know, I think that's the that's the worst part of it. And you ask, like, if you listen to oh My Fraud and you listen to interviews with the interviews that Caleb does with these fraudsters. David Leary: [01:07:34] He brings on the criminals. Blake Oliver: [01:07:35] Yeah. So they have all this money and they're just even if they're spending it and they're living the life, they're like secretly just miserable. We should, like, educate people more about that. Well, the crime. David Leary: [01:07:49] Like, get educated by that. You can listen to Oh My Fraud podcast and get CPE credits, right? Blake Oliver: [01:07:55] Yeah, but I mean, it's like, I feel like a lot of the fraud education is all about how, like, you're going to get caught in, like, all the penalties you're going to face, right? David Leary: [01:08:03] But it's not the the emotional impact. Blake Oliver: [01:08:05] Yeah. The emotional impact is. David Leary: [01:08:06] Like just. Blake Oliver: [01:08:07] Impact how it will destroy your emotional well-being and your relationships with everybody. And you'll be miserable because you're afraid, you know, like that to me, is like, because the actual financial penalties of, like, white collar crime. Ah, you know, you see these people that, like, steal millions and millions of dollars and go to prison for a few years. And I think there's a lot of people who would say, hey, that's a fair trade. That's more money than I make in a year, right? And so like that, I think the approach needs to change. Anyway, I think that's enough for this week. Thank you to everyone who joined us live. If you want to earn free CPE for listening to this podcast and many other fine podcasts, go to Earmark app, create a free account and earn one CPE for free every week. You got time until the end of the year to get your CPE in and not rush, and prices are going up October 1st. The earmark annual subscription will be going from $150 to what is it. David Leary: [01:09:11] 179.991 76. Blake Oliver: [01:09:14] $170 a year. Well, one penny short of that. And if you buy it now, you can lock in that price for next year. And we'd love to take care of our subscribers. So we we are going to honor these, uh, prices. Uh, we're going to grandfather in our customers as long as we can. And so far it's working great. So if you keep subscribing to earmark, you know, we're going to do our best to keep that price the same as what you started paying for it. So lock that in. Now, get your unlimited CPE, get access to premium content such as tax Inaction and many other fun shows. David, go enjoy the bills game. Thank you so much. Uh, I know this this means a lot to me because I know what a huge fan you are. So go bills. David Leary: [01:10:01] No, I sacrifice for all our listeners. It's important. It's important we have to get the show out. Blake Oliver: [01:10:05] And thank you to our livestream viewers for no spoilers. David Leary: [01:10:09] Thank you. All right. Bye, everybody. Blake Oliver: [01:10:11] Bye, everyone.