Accounting
DEI goes into stealth mode
Diversity, equity and inclusion is on the chopping block at accounting firms.
In a February media flurry, big firms like Deloitte and KPMG said they were scrapping their DEI goals and initiatives amid the current political landscape.
As big firms pull back, and presumably more firms quietly do the same, it can be easy to assume that this is the end of DEI as we know it. But things may not be as bleak as they seem, some leaders say.
“You have to look at the profession through a number of different lenses to really understand the impact,” said Jina Etienne, CEO of Etienne Consulting.
Staying the course, quietly
The wave of pullbacks — in the accounting profession and across broader
In particular, firms that are government contractors, or firms with clients who are federal contractors, risk losing their funding by keeping their “noncompliant” DEI programs up and running.
“Organizations probably can’t really boast about what they are doing anymore,” said Crystal Cooke, director of diversity and inclusion at the American Institute of CPAs. “It’s not in their benefit if they’re trying to protect the people in their workplace, because if they make too much noise that makes them a target.”
“I hear a lot about people saying, ‘Why isn’t everyone being loud and proud?'” Cooke continued. “I feel you don’t have to be loud and proud to show your actions and how you support this. If you still see that organization doing things that support programming, if the people who work there feel like they are still being supported, then they are achieving their goals. We can’t always shout things from the rooftops, especially in this environment, because we just don’t know how it’ll affect people who could be impacted. But that doesn’t mean the work’s not being done.”
Accounting is a risk-averse profession by nature. Firms may not want to expose themselves to the reputational risk, or the possibility of losing clients, by publicizing their DEI efforts.
“As accountants, predominantly in public accounting, you have to stay under the radar. We do not want to attract attention to ourselves and give rise to questioning the quality, the independence,” Etienne said. “The assurance work that we do will no longer feel like assurance if we were under attack.”
Many firms, Etienne speculates, will minimize the publicity surrounding their DEI programs while still maintaining them internally. Some firms may drop the name “DEI” and swap it for less politicized language such as “culture,” “inclusion,” “wellbeing” and “belonging.”
“The letters in a sequence D-E-I have become a word. That word has a meaning. It is so much more complex and nuanced than that,” Etienne said. “I’ve always struggled with and invited clients to decouple the terms and really think about the body of work that is behind diversity, equity and inclusion because they’re distinctly different things.”
“But everyone is responding to ‘DEI,’ which the term now has been co-opted,” she continued. “It has been co-opted to mean reverse discrimination — that people who are not qualified for jobs are getting jobs, and people who should have jobs don’t have those jobs — and it’s all coded for race.”
The silver lining
Accounting firms have
(Read more: What can
“I think firms are kind of caught between a rock and a hard place because clients are looking at this and they don’t want to alienate clients,” said Jennifer Harrity-Cantero, ESG and sustainability director at Top 100 Firm Sensiba. “But the accounting world over the last few years has really seen what DEI can do for employee satisfaction, for lowering turnover rates, for employee engagement — and that is something that is hugely valuable to accounting firms.”
DEI improves the bottom line, research shows. Companies in the the top quartile for gender diversity on executive teams are 25% more likely to have above-average profitability than companies in the bottom quartile, and companies in the top quartile for ethnic and cultural diversity outperformed by 36% in profitability, according to
Etienne sees an unexpected silver lining in the crackdown on DEI. In the past, she sensed an aspect of performative activism fueling firms’ DEI efforts. Following the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police in 2020, corporate America renewed its commitments to DEI initiatives, such as implementing diverse recruitment practices, increasing pay equity, establishing employee resource groups, and hosting trainings on topics such as unconscious bias and microaggressions.
But in her work as a consultant, she has found, “Many leaders felt that the demonstration and the evidence of their commitment is the fact that they’re talking to me right now. ‘Yeah, I’ve hired you. How much more committed can I be?'” she said. “So I don’t think there was a deep understanding, or an interest in having a deep understanding, of how DEI is already woven into the ecosystem of an organization. It touches everything. But they didn’t want to do that.”
By removing the social reward of championing DEI, Etienne explained, “We can all stop patting ourselves on the back and putting pretty words on the website and saying, ‘Yay, yay, yay,’ and we can do the work.”
A Republican attempt to block states from enforcing new artificial intelligence rules over the next decade has drawn growing bipartisan objections, exposing tension in Washington over allowing for more unchecked AI development.
The proposal, buried on pages 278 and 279 in the sweeping tax bill passed by the House last month, has drawn sharp criticism from Republican Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene and Senator Marsha Blackburn, as well as Democratic Senators Ed Markey and Elizabeth Warren. More than 200 state lawmakers from both parties also urged Congress this week to scrap the measure.
“We have no idea what AI will be capable of in the next 10 years,” Greene
Markey and Warren have also been forceful in pushing back against the measure, arguing that it violates Senate rules that bill language included in the budget reconciliation process must relate to spending. “This backdoor AI moratorium is not serious. It’s not responsible. And it’s not acceptable,” Markey said. Meanwhile, Senate Commerce Chair Ted Cruz (R-Texas) has said he’s “not certain if that provision will survive,” though he has expressed support for it.
Since returning to the White House, President Donald Trump has taken steps to
But bipartisan resistance to the proposed moratorium on AI rules highlights a fierce divide in Washington over how much to let the industry regulate itself.
Congress has yet to pass a federal framework on AI, which has effectively left the states to take the lead on figuring out how to set rules around the technology. California, New York, Utah and dozens of others have introduced or enacted AI laws in recent years, including bills to address concerns about data privacy, copyright and bias raised by the technology.
If Congress backs away from the proposal, it would mark a setback for top AI developers. In March, OpenAI asked the White House to
So far, the leading AI companies have largely stayed quiet as the fight over the measure plays out. Meta Platforms Inc. declined to comment. Alphabet Inc.’s Google didn’t respond to a request for comment. OpenAI declined to comment beyond its previous policy suggestions.
TechNet, a trade group representing Google, OpenAI and other tech companies, echoed the ChatGPT maker’s concerns about the “developing patchwork” of state AI bills. “In 2025, over 1000 AI bills have been introduced in state legislatures — many containing incompatible rules and requirements,” Linda Moore, chief executive officer of TechNet, said in a statement to Bloomberg News. “A consistent national approach is critical,” she added, to address AI risks and “ensure America remains the global leader in innovation for generations to come.”
Anthropic, a safety-focused AI startup that has called for more regulation generally,
“Ten years is a long time,” Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said at the company’s developer conference on May 22, speaking about the moratorium. “It’s one thing to say, ‘We don’t have to grab the steering wheel now.’ It’s another thing to say, ‘We’re going to rip out the steering wheel and we can’t put it back in for 10 years.'”
Some Republican senators have raised doubts that the AI provision can pass through the reconciliation process, but this camp has also expressed support for an interim ban on state rules to avoid an overly fragmented and complex regulatory landscape.
“I wouldn’t put my money on anything right now until it actually passes,” John Curtis, a Republican senator from Utah, previously
State legislators, however, worry that the provision would rob them of the ability to protect their constituents from the rapidly evolving technology.
“Over the next decade, AI will raise some of the most important public policy questions of our time,” state lawmakers from 49 states wrote in a
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This week’s stats focus in part on the job titles seeing the greatest losses at the IRS during layoffs; as well as the states that have proposed or passed alternatives to the 150-hour rule; the percentage of master’s in accounting program applicants since 2020; the number of PwC employees laid off in May; the projected size of Deloitte’s new New York City headquarters; and the amount of 2026 HSA annual contribution limits, depending on coverage.
CrowdStrike Holdings Inc. said U.S. officials have asked for information related to the accounting of deals it’s made with some customers and said the cybersecurity firm is cooperating with the inquiry.
The Austin, Texas-based company said in a filing Wednesday that it has gotten “requests for information” from the U.S. Department of Justice and the Securities and Exchange Commission “relating to the company’s recognition of revenue and reporting of ARR for transactions with certain customers.” ARR refers to annual recurring revenue, a measure of earnings from subscriptions.
The company said the federal officials have also sought information related to a CrowdStrike update last year that crashed Windows operating systems around the world.
“The company is cooperating and providing information in response to these requests,” the filing states.
U.S. prosecutors and regulators have been investigating a $32 million deal between CrowdStrike and a technology distributor, Carahsoft Technology Corp., to provide cybersecurity tools to the Internal Revenue Service, Bloomberg News first reported in February. The IRS never purchased or received the products, Bloomberg News
The investigators are probing what senior CrowdStrike executives may have known about the $32 million deal and are examining other transactions made by the cybersecurity firm, Bloomberg News
Asked for comment about the filing, CrowdStrike spokesperson Brian Merrill said, “As we have told Bloomberg repeatedly, this is old news and we stand by the accounting of the transaction.”
A lawyer for Carahsoft previously declined to comment on the federal investigations, and representatives didn’t respond to subsequent requests for comment about them.
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