What’s up, newshounds? Everyone good? I hope so. Don’t want to hold you up so let’s get right to it.
Computerworld interviewed Ken Englund, Technology Sector Growth Leader at EY Americas.
Headline: EY exec: In three or four years, ‘we won’t even talk about AI’
Why do you think this has been one of the most unique hiring periods over the past decade or so, and how has AI affected that lately? “I do fundamentally think we’ve had a platform shift. We had this around mobile. We had this around e-commerce. Or, if you go back far enough, we had this shift from mainframes to client-servers. So, I do believe this [AI] is a fundamentally a platform shift.
“From that perspective, the most critical thing when I sit down with clients, I always ask them, ‘How’s your data doing?’ We all know nobody has perfect data. In the AI world, data is going to become even more important. If it was difficult to manage your data before — think about graph databases and vector databases — really we see a lot of investment by enterprises into getting their data right for AI; that translates into ensuring you have the right resources: data architects, analysts, AI engineers and all those sort of positions as driving it.”
Meet Ariela Ortiz, Binghamton University School of Management graduate (2007) and one of those weird people who really enjoys running.
Her alma mater wrote up a nice little thing about how she’s completed six major world marathons:
When she’s not completing company reports and releases, Ariela Ortiz ’07 prepares for some of the most famous races in the world.
It’s like a natural instinct for her to train for hours at a time — every morning, rain or shine. After those long runs, she gets ready for a daily commute to her conventional 9-to-5 at KKR, an asset management firm based in New York City.
If you expected from the above paragraph that this get-up-and-go-er did time at Big 4 you would be correct.
During her sophomore year, Ortiz co-founded the Alpha Chapter of the Association of Latino Professionals in Finance and Accounting (ALPFA).
Through ALPFA, Ortiz networked with professionals from the Big Four accounting firms — Deloitte, EY, KPMG and PwC — which gave her a crucial “kickstart.” By her junior year, Ortiz connected with a recruiter who secured her a two-year internship at Deloitte.
Ortiz spent years there auditing and studying for her CPA exam. After successfully passing and gaining licensure as an accountant, her schedule opened up.
That’s when a friend suggested they start running together — a sport Ortiz hadn’t participated in since joining her high school track team. Ortiz signed up for the New York City Marathon in 2014.
The rest is history.
We salute you, Ariela. Couldn’t be me, I’m about that bike life.
PwC is hooking up with a cockroach. Sorry, PwC is hooking up with Cockroach Labs. I’d prefer actual cockroaches to being forced to read this press release again.
With this partnership, PwC UK and Cockroach Labs will offer end-to-end comprehensive solutions to banks and financial service institutions grappling with evolving regulatory complexities and impending mandates around operational resiliency, business continuity, and data sovereignty. Additionally, they will address the growing need for financial firms to migrate from legacy mainframes in alignment with modern customer expectations and industry-wide cost optimization initiatives.
Marcum Asia was apparently orphaned in the Marcum/CBIZ deal announced two weeks ago.
Marcum Asia, the US audit firm focused on Chinese small-caps, has been excluded from the $2.3bn acquisition of its parent company, leaving it searching for a new name and potentially new investors.
“We understand that the Asia focus of Marcum Asia’s practice was not part of CBiz’s strategy,” said Drew Bernstein, co-chair of Marcum Asia.
The firm, which has annual revenues of about $50mn, would keep the right to use the Marcum brand for an unspecified transition period after the CBiz deal closes, Bernstein said, and it would not need to untangle its staffing and quality assurance processes from Marcum’s until after that period.
It’s all very complicated, go check out FT for the full story.
Some gambling drama down under involving Deloitte:
Deloitte allegedly signed off on “materially understated” gambling fees owed by William Hill Australia and failed to disclose three years of underpayments at the bookmaker when it was engaged to help BetEasy acquire the company, according to new claims.
BetEasy, now part of London-listed Flutter Entertainment’s Sportsbet business, acquired William Hill for $313.7 million in 2018. As part of the deal, it appointed Deloitte to run the rule over the business.
Sportsbet and its insurer, Allied World, have accused Deloitte of negligence during that process, and its audit work for William Hill before that. It has alleged, in documents filed with the Supreme Court in NSW, that the firm signed off on “materially understated” fees that William Hill was required to pay to Racing Victoria between 2015 and 2018.
390 current and former partners are also named in the claim.
The Institute of Public Accountants of Australia is annoyed that all tax practitioners are getting lumped in with naughty PwC. Here comes the strongly worded letter!
The Institute of Public Accountants has criticised the government’s reference to the PwC incident in the various sets of reform measures it has released in a recent submission.
The professional body noted that the government’s recent consultation on the eligibility requirements for tax practitioners again refers to regulatory gaps “exposed as a result of the PwC scandal”.
“The direct linkage of these measures to the progress of ‘Government’s comprehensive response to the PwC tax leaks scandal’ is inappropriate as there have not been any systemic failures of standards in the broader tax practitioner community,” said IPA general manager, technical policy, Tony Greco.
“We should not be bundled with revelations of professional misconduct by a small number of large firms which is tainting perceptions that these issues are widespread.”
And on that topic, PwC is annoyed PwC is lumped in with PwC, too. Australian Financial Review continues a deep dive into the scandal and its aftermath:
The PwC players, the blowback and why it could all happen again
Almost 18 months after the tax leaks matter first broke, PwC Australia is still unable to break free of the scandal. The reason is cultural. Despite the apologies, the promises of change, and the introduction of onerous new processes, rules and oversight, the firm’s operatives will, by its very nature as a sales-driven partnership, continue to struggle to balance purpose and profit.
There are multiple signs of this struggle. Many current and former PwC partners challenge the idea that the tax leaks matter involved any serious wrongdoing. They still argue – despite multiple reports saying the opposite – the scandal was nothing more than the sharing of almost trivial information about impending tax laws that were widely flagged by the government. A “victimless crime” hyped up by “the enemy”, in the words of one former leader.
The IRS is giving a little tax relief to taxpayers in South Carolina, North Carolina, Florida and Georgia who got rocked by Hurricane Debby, KPMG has details.
And here’s something else tax-y from KPMG, a complicated Tax Court situation:
The U.S. Tax Court yesterday held that if a participation interest gives the holder a contractual right to a share of proceeds from the sale of specified securities owned by a partnership, that interest is a capital interest in the partnership, regardless of the holder’s subjective intent to participate in the partnership’s business.
The Tax Court also held that the taxpayer did not meet its burden of proof that there was no reasonable expectation that it would ultimately receive interest on an outstanding loan that it later deducted as uncollectible, and thus that it could stop accruing such interest.
The case is: YA Global Investments, LP v. Commissioner, T.C. Memo 2024-78 (August 8, 2024). Read the Tax Court’s opinion [PDF]
And that’s all she wrote (literally). Please do reach out if you see an interesting story you think we should cover, have a tip, or want to share your views on a current hot topic. You can reach me via email or text anytime and on X/Twitter most of the time. Less of the time you can find me on PSN or Switch but let’s keep work segregated from play OK?
Have a great week! Love ya bye.
