CPA Trendlines Podcasts

Employees lose stability and firms lose money through churn

Big 4 Transparency
By Dominic Piscopo, CPA
For CPA Trendlines

A growing body of compensation data suggests that accounting firms may be unintentionally penalizing their most loyal employees.

In a recent solo episode of the Big 4 Transparency, founder Dominic Piscopo unpacks what he calls the “loyalty tax” — the pay gap between internally promoted employees and externally hired peers performing the same role. Drawing on 2024–2025 compensation data from thousands of U.S. and Canadian professionals, Piscopo outlines how this structural imbalance is reshaping career incentives across the profession.

The loyalty tax, as defined in the episode, is the percentage difference in pay where externally hired employees earn more than internally promoted employees at the same level. According to the data, that gap is far from trivial. In the U.S., first-year senior associates hired externally earn roughly 6.3% more than internally promoted seniors, while first-year managers see an 8.9% premium. Even at the senior manager level, the gap persists. Canadian data shows a similar pattern, with especially pronounced spreads at the senior and senior manager levels.

The disparity is even more striking in consulting and advisory roles.

Curiosity, problem-solving, and creative habits help strengthen marketing, improve client experiences, and bring more humanity to an AI-driven profession.

The Disruptors
With Liz Farr
For CPA Trendlines

Karen Reyburn, managing director of We Are PF and author of the new book Accountants, You Are Creative, wants accountants to embrace their innate creativity.

Reyburn's first book, The Accountant Marketer, laid out the building blocks of marketing for accounting firms based on what worked for the firms that she and PF worked with. She noticed that just having a playbook and structure for marketing wasn’t enough. “The accountants who were seeing the greatest success, the greatest transformation for themselves and their clients, were the ones that either knew that they were creative human beings, they knew they had creativity within them, or at least they were open and curious about what that looked like, and willing to try,” she explains.

As she watched AI’s rapid advancements over the last few months, she nearly shelved the manuscript. “Is this even relevant anymore? With all this stuff about AI, does anyone care about this mindset of creativity?” she wondered. But as she thought about AI and talked to accountants, she realized she was seeing a “both, and” moment. “You're seeing leaning into AI to help you with tasks and repetition, and you're seeing people want more humanity, more opportunity to trust you, more case studies, more in-person events,” she explains.

Technology, consolidation, and changing expectations expose weaknesses in business strategies.

Accounting Voices
With Rob Brown

Accountants help clients plan for growth, manage risk, and prepare for uncertainty. But what happens when they turn that same scrutiny on their own firms?

The answers may be uncomfortable.

In this episode of Accounting Voices, reflections from 48 interviews conducted in late 2025 reveal a recurring concern: The profession’s ability to solve other people’s business problems does not always translate into a willingness to confront its own.

The discussion centers on a deceptively simple question: What changes your thinking about accounting? Across conversations with firm leaders, technology specialists, coaches, consultants, and others, familiar assumptions begin to unravel — about who should run a firm, what makes advisory services valuable, and how much protection technical expertise actually provides.

One challenge, attributed in the episode to leadership and organizational development specialist Alice Gray Harrison, brings the issue into sharp focus: If your firm were your client, would you fire yourself for lacking a five-year strategic plan?

It is a question that makes the episode less a reflection on the past than a test of what leaders are willing to change now.

The expectation that tax preparation can happen instantly is creating real pressure.

It's Not Just the Numbers
With Penny Breslin and Damien Greathead
For CPA Trendlines

Tax season is supposed to be predictable. The work comes in, the work goes out, the deadlines hold. But this year, something broke for accounting firms across the board — and it wasn't the tax code.

The culprit wasn't client volume or staffing shortages. It was prioritization and communication, specifically, the gap between where priorities were being set and where the people doing the work were actually looking.

If your firm made it through but felt like you were always reacting, always chasing, always a step behind — this breakdown is for you.

ARC hosts debate credentials, accountability, and the risks of advice that exceeds a provider’s expertise.

Accounting ARC
With Liz Mason, Donny Shimamoto, and Byron Patrick
Center for Accounting Transformation

A business owner asks for financial reports. A bookkeeper delivers them. For years, the arrangement appears to work — until another accountant examines the numbers and discovers that the reports do not add up.

The owner receives exactly what he requests. What he misses is someone qualified to question the request.

That story, shared by Byron Patrick on the Accounting ARC podcast, captures a problem that reaches beyond bookkeeping: Small-business owners may know they need financial help without knowing how to evaluate the people providing it.

For accountants, that creates both a responsibility and an opportunity. Explaining professional value requires more than listing credentials or promising accurate books. It means showing owners what an effective accounting relationship can help them understand, decide, and accomplish.

When leaders admit they don’t have all the answers, they create room for others to contribute.

MOVE Like This
With Bonnie Buol Ruszczyk
For CPA Trendlines Research

Randy Crabtree founded an accounting firm, then came to a difficult realization: Being its founder didn’t make him the right person to lead it. His decision to step aside as managing partner of Tri-Merit opens a bigger conversation about what happens when leaders admit they don’t have all the answers.

On MOVE Like This, Crabtree joins host Bonnie Buol Ruszczyk to explore how vulnerability can build trust, help people find roles that fit their strengths, and give teams the confidence to try something new. Now retired from Tri-Merit and focused on speaking, advising, and The Unique CPA podcast, he challenges a leadership model that asks people to appear invulnerable while carrying more than they can sustain.

Crabtree’s perspective on vulnerability is deeply personal. Twelve years ago, he suffered a stroke. While his physical recovery was relatively quick, the mental recovery took years as he dealt with panic attacks, PTSD, and depression. That experience forced him to acknowledge something leaders are often conditioned to resist: he couldn’t do everything himself. It also prompted him to question other things he had long accepted as true about work and leadership, including the idea that leaders always need to have the answers, hide weakness, and prove their value by how much they can carry.

That questioning eventually led Crabtree to one of the most difficult decisions of his career.

"People don't want to work themselves to death for a third of the year."

The Disruptors
With Liz Farr
For CPA Trendlines

Logan Graf, owner of The Graf Tax Co and founder of the Counter community, is proof that there’s a better way to run a tax firm. Last tax season, after restructuring, hiring a manager, and implementing a tax scheduling system, neither he nor his manager worked more than 40 hours a week. He believes accounting firms should operate like modern businesses. “We don't have to look at what’s been done in the past and copy them,” he says.

Graf, who launched his own firm in 2020, took mental notes of what he liked and what he didn’t like at the firms he worked at. At his last place of employment, Scott & Aderholt near Austin, TX, he was given an unusual level of autonomy. “I was basically running a firm within a firm,” he recalls.

In addition to technical work, he also handled client onboarding, return preparation, review, billing, workflow design, and documentation, all of which made going out on his own easier. “It was like a seamless transition,” he says. The extra money as a firm owner was a welcome surprise. “I was basically making double the amount of money and working the same amount of hours, if not less,” compared to his prior jobs.

"I make more money now, but more importantly, I'm not miserable."

Big 4 Transparency
By Dominic Piscopo, CPA
For CPA Trendlines

Jaimie Nichols expected her accounting practice to grow faster. Two years after leaving firm life, she is glad it didn’t.

Nichols started the practice around the time she learned she was going to become a mother. Now, she tells host Dominic Piscopo on The Big 4 Transparency that she has earned more than she did at her former job while spending far more time with her young son.

“It was the best decision ever,” she says.

Nichols reports $120,000 in revenue and roughly $10,000 in expenses for 2025. She says she worked fewer than 20 hours a week, even during tax season, and fewer than 10 hours a week outside it. Family members helped with childcare for several weeks during tax season, but she had no paid childcare that year. She estimates that saved her at least $35,000 in infant care costs.

The numbers are striking. Nichols is just as interested in what they leave room for.

Accounting teams must ensure their people can recognize anomalies, challenge outputs, and apply sound judgment.

It's Not Just the Numbers
With Penny Breslin and Damien Greathead
For CPA Trendlines

AI is everywhere in accounting right now.

It's in your inbox, on the Super Bowl, and probably inside at least one tool your firm uses for tax prep. But there's a conversation happening inside serious accounting firms, the ones processing thousands of returns, managing global teams, and serving clients who expect more than a spreadsheet, that the vendor demos don't cover.

That conversation is about critical thinking.

It may be the most important skill your firm could be developing right now, precisely because AI is making it easier to stop using it.

The profession isn't slowing down, but accountants can build clarity, visibility, and career capital to move forward with greater control.

Accounting Voices
With Rob Brown

Accountants have spent years preparing for demanding work. Far fewer are prepared for what happens when the nature of that work changes almost overnight.

Artificial intelligence, private equity, mergers, leadership changes, shifting client expectations, regulatory pressures, and persistent talent shortages are reshaping accounting at the same time. The result is not simply a busier profession. It is a profession in which many people are quietly asking a much bigger question: Is this still the career I signed up for?

In this reflective episode of Accounting Voices, listeners are encouraged to pause before charging into another year of goals, deadlines, and transformation projects. The conversation acknowledges something professionals do not always feel permitted to say: An extraordinary level of change takes a personal toll.

Feeling tired, cautious, unsettled, or less fulfilled is not necessarily evidence that someone is failing. It may be a normal response to an abnormal pace of disruption.