The CPA Profession: Trouble on the Horizon?
Source: VeraSage Institute
Recently, the AICPA published its CPA Horizons 2025 Report. The goal was to examine trends affecting CPAs and to gather “opinions on how these trends will impact CPAs in the years ahead, and how the profession could meet the challenges and leverage opportunities now and in the coming years.”
In this guest blog post, CPA Richard Muscio offers his comments on the report. Here are a few highlights:
The report: “The services that CPAs provide have become so varied and diverse that the concept of core services is no longer representative of the profession.”
Muscio's comment: “[If] the AICPA-interviewed CPAs say that core services (preparing tax returns and financial statements) are no longer representative of the profession, then why do customers of CPAs not seem to know that?”
The report: “The profession must find solutions to offer investors and stakeholders up-to-date, real-time financial information and to increase transparency.”
Muscio's comment: “How about CPAs helping their business customers to predict how much cash the business will have in the bank at the end of next week, next month, or at September 30, 2012? [If] CPAs cannot help customers to peer intelligently into the future, then irrelevance of the CPA profession will certainly be the result.”
The report: “CPAs must embrace mobile technologies and social media to modernize and enhance interaction and collaboration with clients and colleagues.”
Muscio's comment: “I flat out disagree, because my customers want consistent and repetitive face-to-face interaction, which includes ideas for value creation. The technology is merely how we transmit certain information.”
He goes on to wonder “whether perhaps the AICPA should have interviewed 5,600 customers . . . of CPA firms instead, because it doesn't sound like very many of the 5,600 CPAs who were interviewed asked their customers what they want . . . from the CPA profession.”
For the complete blog post, read “Guest Blog: Richard Muscio, CPA, on CPA Horizons 2025 Report.”
From VeraSage Institute, http://www.verasage.com/index.php/community, December 20, 2011.