Yo. Let’s wish a very happy Monday to Blake Oliver whose phone has been going nuts since he posted this on Saturday.
JPMorgan just told all 300,000 employees they must return to office full-time in March.
— Blake Oliver (@BlakeTOliver) January 11, 2025
Their response to employees raising concerns about childcare and commuting costs? They shut down comments.
A reply:
I want to know why an employer is responsible for an employees family or where they live? At some point some of this talk is a bit ridiculous.
— Eric Pierre, CPA (@yourfavecpa) January 12, 2025
There is enough data to show most WFH people are not as productive unless they have ownership in the business because quite frankly… https://t.co/IIOX9RLYyg
Venture capitalists are excited about accounting firms according to WSJ:
Venture capitalists are known for betting on risky, moonshot technology. But recently, some of them are heading to a quiet hamlet of the business world: accounting firms.
Bessemer Venture Partners, General Catalyst, Thrive Capital are among the venture outfits taking stakes in accounting firms on the heels of a series of deals led by private equity.
These venture investors believe generative AI technology can make traditional services businesses—especially those heavy on knowledge work, like accounting—more profitable and scalable, so much so, that they become desirable targets for the sky-streaking growth ambitions of venture capitalists.
“We do think there’s a huge opportunity to roll up accounting firms and automate a lot of the workflow and let the same accounting firms take twice as many clients,” said Marc Bhargava, a managing director at General Catalyst.
Great, just what the profession needs. Inflate that bubble, people!
EY took longer than originally planned to clear debts it racked up on the failed spin-off of its consulting arm, according to annual accounts filed by the Big Four firm.
A $700mn credit facility opened to cover the cost of Project Everest — which would have split the firm in two and radically redrawn the global professional services industry — still had $270mn outstanding at the end of EY’s financial year in June.
Including other borrowing, interest paid by EY’s global operating business over the year totalled $74mn, more than twice the amount in the previous 12 months.
Big 4 firms in India have reportedly asked staff to decrease T&E under the guise of caring about the climate.
Deloitte, PWC, EY and KPMG – the Big Four in the world of consultancy – have asked their employees to go slow on work-related travels as the firms look to cut costs and reduce their carbon footprints, said people with direct knowledge of the matter.
These firms are increasingly nudging their employees to minimise work trips, including client visits, and asking them to conduct such meetings virtually to the extent possible.
In cases where travel is mandatory, the consultancy firms are encouraging their employees to use public transport systems like trains wherever possible, people cited above added. Most of these directives have been issued in the last two-three months.
We imagine the real reason is that they need to decrease expenses but can’t offshore a bunch of work to India.
Related to cost cutting, CFOs in the UK aren’t feeling so hot about the way things are going:
Deloitte’s latest survey of UK Chief Financial Officers (CFOs) shows that business optimism fell to a two-year low in the fourth quarter. A net 26% of CFOs reported feeling more pessimistic about the prospects of their business than three months ago, marking the first time sentiment has tipped into negative territory since the second quarter of 2023. Nonetheless, confidence is well above the lows seen in 2020 and 2022.
CFOs are entering 2025 with a sharp focus on cutting costs. When asked how they plan to respond to the forthcoming rise in National Insurance Contributions (NICs), CFOs chose cutting costs as their top strategy. Raising productivity and prices for customers were rated as lesser, but important, strategies for dealing with the increase.
Since our audience is primarily American I’ll mention here that the NIC goes toward things like state pensions and maternity leave. Effective April 2025:
- the employers’ National Insurance rate is going up from 13.8% to 15%
- employers will start paying National Insurance on more of an employee’s earnings, with the threshold reducing from £9,100 to £5,000
- the employment allowance will go up from £5,000 to £10,500 – this allows smaller organisations to claim back National Insurance up to the allowance limit
Some have suggested that this increase, while paid for by employers, will ultimately result in lower wages and/or decreased hiring. More here if you care to read up: UK Chancellor Rachel Reeves raises employers’ National Insurance Contributions
Down Under BDO is doing great and poaching from Big 4 firms:
BDO Australia, the fifth-largest accounting firm in the country by revenue, is in talks with dozens of big four staff about joining it after having boosted its partnership to its largest on record.
The firm, which posted a 14 per cent rise in revenue to $540 million in 2023-24, added 13 partners through internal promotions in January, bringing the total to a record 304.
“We’re making significant investments in the BDO partnership. Our efforts continue to attract attention and top talent wishing to join the firm in 2025,” said chief executive partner Tony Schiffmann.
KPMG on the job market in the US:
Payroll employment rose by 256,00 in December, after a downwardly revised 212,000 in November. We generated 2.2 million jobs in 2024, the slowest pace since 2020, but still above 1.99 million in 2019. Brace yourself for significant downward revisions to payrolls in 2023 and early 2024 when benchmark revisions are released with the January employment report in early February.
The public sector added 33,000 new jobs, dominated by increases at the state and local levels. Non-education employment picked up, due to infrastructure projects and clean-up following massive hurricanes. Federal employment accounted for 6,000 of those jobs; losses in postal workers were offset by gains elsewhere.
Private sector job gains were concentrated in the service sector but broader based than much of the year. The Big 3 – state and local, healthcare and social assistance and leisure and hospitality – accounted for only 54.5% of total gains, the lowest share since May. That is welcome news as it could signal that job gains are becoming more dispersed.
Grant Thornton’s office in Milwaukee is being turned into apartments so they’re heading off elsewhere:
Chicago-based professional services firm Grant Thornton Advisors is moving its local office to the Associated Bank River Center as its current office tower readies for a conversion to apartments.
Grant Thornton, which provides tax and business consulting services, will occupy about 5,100 square feet on the 8th floor of the River Center, at 111 E. Kilbourn Ave., according to a permit filed with the City of Milwaukee. The company’s buildout could cost about $200,000, the permit shows
The company currently has an office at 100 East, at 100 E. Wisconsin Ave. also in downtown Milwaukee, and is among the last remaining office tenants in that building to sign a new lease elsewhere.
University of Missouri–St. Louis grad and RubinBrown tax intern Thomas Fabry gets a nice little article written about him:
During his senior year at Fox High School in Arnold, Fabry took an accounting class taught by Corey Krutzsch. At the time, he wasn’t thinking about accounting as a potential career path, but the accounting basics and principles Krutzsch presented made sense to him. One of the highlights of Krutzsch’s class was the Accounting Survivor game, a semester-long activity.
“Every week we had a test that was, essentially, like the trial mini games they have on the show Survivor,” Fabry said. “If you got anything wrong, you were eliminated. I lasted through the whole semester, and then there was a vote at the end, and people ended up voting for me.”
In addition to the prestige of winning the event, Fabry won a free T-Shirt that read “I survived Krutzsch’s Accounting Survivor!” with the show’s Outwit, Outlast, Outplay logo in the middle. For years, the shirt was just a fun reminder of an enjoyable high school class. Fabry took one semester of community college after graduating from Fox in 2014 but, unsure what career path he wanted to take, he started grinding in the real world. He took a job at Fazoli’s and worked his way up to manager, then did the same progression at a movie theatre.
But then…
Wanting to focus his career efforts, he started taking classes at STLCC–Meramec in the fall of 2017. It didn’t take long for him to figure out that his initial choice of computer science was not for him, though, and he spent the rest of the semester trying to figure out his next step.
Enter the T-shirt, with its muted yellow hue that stood out in a closet without similar colors.
“I was thinking back to what I excelled at in high school, and whenever I would just be getting ready, I would see that shirt,” Fabry said. “And one day it kind of hit me: ‘Maybe accounting is something that I’m interested in. Let me try this instead.’ So the semester after I tried coding and didn’t like it, I went into accounting, and it just clicked. It was something that I could intuitively think my way through.”
A CPA’s office building caught fire in Kentucky:
An office building caught fire Friday morning in downtown Hazard.
A portion of Main Street was shut down for approximately two hours as crews worked to put out the flames at Chris Gooch CPA’s office building.
No injuries were reported.
The building is technically still standing but considered a total loss.
The IRS is sending out money. Most of the time these kinds of articles about the IRS randomly sending out money are spam but Dallas Morning News covered it:
About 1 million taxpayers will automatically receive special payments of up to $1,400 from the IRS in the coming weeks. The money will be directly deposited into eligible bank accounts or sent in the mail by a paper check.
The IRS said it’s distributing about $2.4 billion to taxpayers who failed to claim a Recovery Rebate Credit on their 2021 tax returns.
People who missed one of the COVID stimulus payments or had received less than the full amount were able to claim the credit, but the IRS said it discovered many eligible taxpayers hadn’t done so.
“Looking at our internal data, we realized that one million taxpayers overlooked claiming this complex credit when they were actually eligible,” IRS Commissioner Danny Werfel said in a statement.
More from the IRS.
Aaaaand that’s it for this news brief. Do me a favor and email or text any interesting articles you see, that would just make my whole week. Be good. I don’t mean “well,” I mean the opposite of “bad.” I know how y’all are. Bye.
American Apparel names new CFO [