Good morning, capital markets servants! I trust everyone had a good weekend and is all charged up for another exciting week of…whatever it is you do. Here’s some news.
PwC says clients want a break on prices since the firm is bragging about making big technological leaps in efficiency, according to Bloomberg:
PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP, one of the world’s largest professional advisory firms, has cut prices for some services as clients raised the fact that the consultancy is using artificial intelligence to complete its work quicker.
“Clients would hear us talking about using AI and and say, ‘We want our fair share of those efficiencies,’” PwC Chief AI Officer Dan Priest said in an interview with Bloomberg News. “We certainly, as appropriate, give our clients the pricing benefit of the efficiencies we’re achieving.”
Dan Priest was a bit evasive in the interview:
Priest declined to provide further details on PwC’s pricing, saying that the firm’s broad approach is to “align AI-driven gains with client benefit, whether that’s in efficiency, timeliness, quality or cost.” He estimated, however, that tech consulting firms have improved the efficiency of the systems integration business by roughly 30% with AI.
I think we can safely assume clients aren’t getting a 30% discount.
Meanwhile, at PwC UK:
PwC is planning to cut about 175 junior auditors in the UK and has told other staff that pay rises will be lower this year, as the Big Four firm grapples with tougher market conditions.
PwC told some 270 audit associates last week that they were part of a compulsory redundancy round, according to people familiar with the matter, with one saying headcount in the division was too high partly because of a lack of junior staff leaving voluntarily.
Is turnover really still that low? They’ve been saying that for at least two years now. We know people are sticking around due to a shortage of good opportunities to jump to but it’s not like post-Big 4 jobs are that hard to come by even in this market.
FT added that PwC staff, all 25,000 of them, were told they’re getting a 2.5% raise this year, down from 3% last year. The The Consumer Prices Index (CPI) in the UK rose by 3.4% in the 12 months to May 2025.
Two more states have embraced alternate pathways to the CPA, bringing the total to almost two dozen.
State lawmakers in Pennsylvania and Delaware each voted on Thursday to pass their respective CPA pathways legislation, joining a growing number of states enacting new laws to provide alternative routes to obtaining a certified public accounting license and ease the accounting shortage.
New York passed similar legislation two weeks ago while Florida’s bill has stalled, most likely because it’s attached to more controversial legislation.
Australian Financial Review says partner numbers are down at down under Big 4 firms. The numbers are kinda scary actually.
The big four consulting partnerships have shrunk for a second consecutive year, as leaders seek to offset lower demand for advisory services to maintain average partner profits.
Australian partner numbers across Deloitte, EY, KPMG and PwC are down 15 per cent, or 500, to almost 2900 partners in the two years since the 2023 peak.
In that time, almost 850 partners have departed the big four, with less than half being replaced. That is an extraordinary number, given the time and effort it takes to break into the lucrative partnership rank.
PwC lost the most at more than 300 followed by 200 from Deloitte, 170 from KPMG, and 100 from EY.
EY paid The Guardian to run this “article”: ‘We have lots of opportunities’: how women working in tech are empowered by role models at EY.
When Julie McGourty was speaking at a tech conference recently she noticed something different about the room. “It was very nice to look out at the audience and see that the vast majority of them were female,” says the EY director, cybersecurity. “That’s something I’ve never seen at any conference I’ve been to in the last 20 years – when the audiences were always mostly male – so it was really inspiring to see that shift.”
EY is leading that shift, thanks to its strategic focus on empowering women in their careers. McGourty’s been in cyber for 20 years and at previous companies she was often the only woman in a team, but this isn’t the case at EY, where women are “very much empowered”, as shown by the large number of female partners it holds.
This part is funny considering EY laid off a ton of IT people earlier this year:
McGourty says she relishes the “independence and autonomy” she’s given to manage her time and her working week. “I think this is why people here are so energised and why we enjoy the culture,” she adds. “EY wants to find good people and make sure they stay.”
EY wants to encourage that retention because “they realise that having that knowledge and expertise and being able to take that to the next client is good for the individual, but it’s also good for EY. It’s very much a place that likes to encourage people to stay by developing them and giving them an opportunity.”
At least it’s clearly labeled as a paid ad unlike certain other Big 4 fluff pieces we’ve seen floating around lately.
The above “article” is one of several EY paid Guardian to run, we’ll see if we can find them all.
Thomson Reuters has published a guide to the GENIUS Act for tax and accounting professionals that covers new regulatory requirements and tax considerations.
In case you missed it when Business Insider published an interview with Deloitte US head of talent David Rizzo in 2023, Forbes has followed up two years later with a rehash of how to get hired at Deloitte.
For the Business Insider interview, David Rizzo said that the top three (3) things he looks for in Deloitte job candidates are:
- The right kind of technical and behavioral skills. He wants to know what you do and how effectively you work to deliver organizational and team results.
- How you communicate your experiences and whether those experiences validate and demonstrate your ability to adapt to a changing environment, solve complex challenges and deliver results.
- A good fit between the job candidate and the company culture, team and values. Rizzo said that he specifically looks for curiosity in candidates and wants to bring on talent that is team-focused and purpose-driven.
Speaking of Deloitte, this snazzy Toyota GR Supra painted in Deloitte green won a race in Malaysia over the weekend:
I know absolutely nothing about racing so all you get is a picture.
Federal News Network spoke to GAO’s Jay McTigue about digital identity verification at the IRS. TLDR They’ve made some progress, there’s much more to be done.
He said:
Back in the 20-teens, the Treasury was losing money to identity thieves who would file fraudulent tax returns claiming to be someone they were not. And this was prevalent across government. OMB and the National Institute of Standards and Technology put forward various guidance and requirements for federal agencies to strengthen protections over private citizens’ information that they were collecting. And there were other initiatives to make government services more available online. What we found at IRS, dating back to about 10 years ago, they began looking for ways to accomplish those goals of allowing taxpayers to access services, but also not to make it too easy so that fraudsters and others with ill intent could take advantage of the easy access via digital portals. And so, IRS started a program called SADI, Secure Access Digital Interface, to build new protocols and technology to allow access but build in security from the start. And what we found is that IRS, as they were standing up this platform, procured services from a third-party credential service provider called ID.me. This was around 2020 and maybe a little bit before then, and as we’re all aware, that also coincided with the start of the pandemic and various relief measures that Congress and the administration were trying to get out to citizens and taxpayers to help them weather the pandemic. And one of those initiatives was advanced payment of the child tax credit so families could access the credit — which they would qualify for once they file their tax return, but the advanced payment would make it available much sooner and provide financial relief for families. In order to do this, IRS quickly stood up SADI with the help of ID.me and actually allowed the program to be launched as Congress specified in the summer of 2020, and they were able to leverage an existing contract that the Treasury Department had with ID.me to procure these services very quickly. At the start, IRS has seen tremendous improvements in terms of the performance of taxpayers and its processes allowing taxpayers to get through and access the service. Before they moved to this new platform and ID.me, the number of taxpayers or the percentage of taxpayers who were able to authenticate was in the range of 30% to 40%, and this was the old password-based and out-of-wallet questions that people would — you know, IRS would ask taxpayers calling in and many people could not remember. I have trouble remembering how many different addresses or what banks I’ve used in the past. And with the new ID.me and facial recognition technology using biometrics, the pass rate immediately jumped to the 70% range and has continued to go upward to the 80% percent range. So taxpayers are able to get in, and IRS is protecting the Treasury as well as taxpayers’ private information.
Video if you’re not into huge blocks of text:
Grant Thornton profiled a senior manager in tax who can bench 365 pounds on a career page.
That’s all for me on this fine Monday morning. As always, dear reader is encouraged to email or text with any comments, tips, or links to stories we should be talking about. Have a good one, you.