Accounting
AICPA prepares for possibility of PCAOB being folded into SEC
The AICPA & CIMA’s new president and CEO, Mark Koziel, told a group of accountants that the association is preparing for the possibility that the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board is “rolled up” into the Securities and Exchange Commission under the Trump administration.
He noted that
“Paul Atkins actually is former PwC, friendly to the profession, so we are hopeful there that we can continue strong relationships with the SEC as we go forward,” said Koziel during a speech at a meeting Monday of the Accountants Club of America in New York.
He noted that the new Office of Management and Budget director, Russell Vought, has already moved to shut down the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and could do the same with the PCAOB.
“I do think that as we look at things going forward, you’re going to see more of that,” said Koziel. “There are rumors we’re dealing with currently, and Paul Atkins, in his prior stint with the SEC, was already pretty vocal about the fact that he wouldn’t mind seeing the PCAOB be shut down, and anything that the PCAOB does get rolled up into the SEC. So that is something that we are working on today in preparation. People have said, ‘Are you for or against PCAOB?’ For us, whatever they decide to do, we’re going to work with whatever regulator we need to work with as a profession to make sure that we’re serving the public interest the way it needs to be. And so if that means trying to help them along the way to make that happen, to help with standard setting, whatever that might be, those are the things that we need to work on today.”
Unlike the moves by the Trump administration’s Department of Government Efficiency to shut down the CFPB and the U.S. Agency for International Development, the PCAOB might not have as many advocates fighting in court for it to survive.
“When you think about the fact that the PCAOB, if they were to shut it down, and DOGE would be able to take credit for it, who would oppose it?” said Koziel. “Because it’s not one of those agencies that the average public is generally aware of. It has a $400 million budget, none of which is paid for by taxpayers. It is all funded by issuers as part of the SEC system. But it’s a $400 million win, if they could say it publicly in some way, shape or form. Now that $400 million would have to be reallocated, and they’re still going to have people doing reviews and doing audits of the audits along the way. This is all speculative, but there are rumors on the Hill that PCAOB — that is a possibility as we get out there. Our view is that we are willing to work with whoever the oversight agency is to the profession, and happy to provide any input that we can, and any assistance that we can along the way.”
Koziel was later asked about what might happen to the PCAOB if it went away or became part of the SEC. “The PCAOB, because they’re not technically a federal agency, if they come under the SEC, they’re subject to governmental rules, and I do think they’re going to have a harder time recruiting than they do as a separate entity, as they are today,” he responded. “I also worry about if that were to happen, there’s a couple factors. Number one, if it rolls up into the SEC, any of the findings could become public under the SEC versus where it’s today with the PCAOB. So there are a lot of good things as to how it is today. And I don’t have an opinion one way or the other. We will work with whoever the oversight agency is at that time. They’re a fine organization, but I do think that the reality is today, that there is some likelihood that they may not be here.”
IRS changes
Koziel also discussed the changes at the Internal Revenue Service and how those might affect tax season as well as the new nominee for
“The hiring freeze is out there,” said Koziel. “It does exempt military and border security. There’s been a number of buyouts that have been talked about. The president is encouraging people to retire early, take the buyout, and get out of the government.”
He noted, however, that IRS employees have since been told they will need to
“As far as the hiring freeze itself, we’ve been talking to the IRS, we’ve been talking to Treasury, and all of the hiring that needed to take place to ramp up for the busy season of 2025 happened before the hiring freeze took place,” said Koziel. “The IRS is trying to give us comfort as best they can that they will be functional.”
Even if the IRS isn’t fully functional, CPAs can assist with answering taxpayer questions, perhaps even by staffing the phone lines. “We want to try and help the IRS anyway we can,” said Koziel. “Is there a way for us to help populate the help lines to make it better for getting the phone calls? The courtesy hangup that we used to talk about in years past, that’s still happening. If they put you on hold, there is some point in time that the IRS says you’ve been on hold long enough, so we’re just going to disconnect you. These are people issues. There are going to be retirements that are going to happen in the very near term. We want the IRS to be able to answer our members’ questions, and take care of our members so that they can take care of their clients. I look forward to the conversation. I am already due to meet with the IRS commissioner in March, provided that Billy Long is the appointed IRS commissioner. We’re happy to have those conversations, to really have the best possible working relationship that we can.”
He is also looking forward to working again with Mike Faulkender, who has been named deputy Treasury secretary. Faulkender worked previously for former Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin during the first Trump administration and kept Koziel and other AICPA officials like CPA.com president and CEO Erik Asgeirsson informed about the
Tax bill
Another top issue for the AICPA is the ongoing discussions in Washington over the expiring provisions of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. Republicans are aiming to pass the tax bill through the budget reconciliation process so they can avoid a possible filibuster in the Senate by Democrats, but it’s unclear right now whether it will be part of a single bill along with immigration reform and spending, or be introduced as two separate bills. In either case, Koziel believes it’s unlikely the tax legislation would pass before December. He noted that during the first Trump administration, Republicans weren’t able to pass the TCJA under the reconciliation procedure until late December.
“Even if they got it into one reconciliation bill, this is not the same Congress and White House that we had in his first term,” he said. “The margin of control is paper thin.”
A potential government shutdown on March 14 could upend tax season. “Imagine, all of you tax practitioners, the government shutting down on March 14, so that all of the clients that you’re working on for a March 15 deadline are going to be even that much more challenging if that happens,” said Koziel. He believes a shutdown is unlikely, but warned it’s possible.
DEI impact
Accountants will also need to keep an eye out for the impact of the tariffs that Trump has ordered on countries like Canada, Mexico and China, as well as his
“It’s one that worries me a bit, to be honest, because I think we’ve made strides as a profession, a profession that in the days before we identified it, we did not look like the communities we serve,” said Koziel. “We still are not looking entirely like the communities we serve. We’ve done better to try and bring more underrepresented minorities into the profession, to try and get women leaders to be owners and firms and organizations, but we can’t stop that in fear of any type of retaliation. And there could be. We are a federal contractor actually, the AICPA, we provide content to the federal government, and so there are things that we have to watch and some words that most likely will need to change based on all this, but we don’t ask people to do preference hiring based on any of that. We don’t make promotions based on preference promotions for anyone. We’re just saying we need more people in the profession. We need to focus on communities where we are underserved or underserving those communities because we don’t have representation in those communities to be able to do that. And so it definitely has a lot of folks nervous. There were a lot of DEI-related hires within the federal government that have since been laid off. So for us, we want to keep doing what we’re doing. We just may have to change the words along the way as we make that happen, but I am standing here saying we are fully supportive of being a more diverse profession than we have been in years past, and we’re going to continue to drive that as we go forward.”
Pipeline issues
Koziel pointed to the need for the accounting profession to continue to work on increasing its pipeline. He plans to continue the strategic plan of AICPA & CIMA, on implementing the
“We need to drive more into the profession,” said Koziel. “We need to increase the pipeline. They came out with the recommendations about a year ago. I’ve been through those and they hit it right on the head with all the things that need to be done in this profession.”
He has been mentoring eight young people and encouraging them to enter the accounting profession. “All of us have responsibility for the pipeline, not just the AICPA, not just the state societies, but we can all do our part to try and increase the pipeline,” he said.
He pointed to work being done in different states on providing alternative paths to a CPA license beyond the traditional 150 credit hours, as in
“We’ve got to make sure that mobility stays intact as best we can,” said Koziel. “That is something that we continue to work on.”
He noted that two exposure drafts went out for comment late last year
Accounting Today asked whether the recent news about a
“We still have a lot of work to do,” he responded. “We have to make sure they stay and still work with the schools around that. Getting them to licensure is always going to be something that’s really important.”
Before becoming
“They said all of our accounting departments are full, so accounting must be doing great because all the schools are full. I said, no, the schools in the Southeast are full. The schools up north are still struggling. They’re still challenged to try and find people,” said Koziel.
Some universities such as the University of Alabama and Louisiana State University are offering generous scholarships to attract accounting students, while other students are enticed by factors such as the weather and climate. “It’s a different environment than when a lot of us went to school, so we still have a lot of work to do, but it’s encouraging to see the 12% increase for sure,” said Koziel. He is inviting CPAs to provide him with feedback by emailing him at AskMark@aicpa-cima.com.
Ed Mendlowitz, an emeritus partner at Withum and Accounting Today columnist, was watching the Accountants Club of America meeting online. “Mark provided insights into a lot of the areas CPAs are concerned about,” he said in an email. “Mark said we should be encouraged by the recent increase in accounting student enrollments, but not be complacent about it. We need to make sure they stay and get their CPA license. That requires effort and making sure our firms are using the latest technology to remove the repetitiveness of functions that our staff previously had to do. He also said that adapting technology and how CPA firms are governed are two major areas that need to be jumpstarted. While using technology might be obvious, less so are the many practices that are still being run by a managing partner with huge books of business not being the way to continue. Practices need to be professionally managed and that needs a dedicated CEO leading a C-suite team responsible for running segments of the practice.”
The National Treasury Employees Union, which represents workers at the Internal Revenue Service among 37 federal agencies and offices, has asked a federal judge for emergency relief to preserve the union rights of federal employees while NTEU’s legal challenge to President Trump’s executive order stripping unions of collective bargaining rights can be heard in court.
Trump signed an
NTEU’s
“NTEU seeks emergency relief to protect itself and the workers it represents from this unlawful attempt to eliminate collective bargaining for some two-thirds of the federal workforce,” the request stated.
The NTEU contended that the Trump administration’s executive order claims that allowing workers to join a union was a threat to national security were absurd.
“We all know this has nothing to do with national security and that the true goal here is to make it easier to fire federal employees across government,” said NTEU national president Doreen Greenwald in a statement Friday. “Just five days after declaring the administration would no longer honor our contract with Health and Human Services, thousands of brilliant civil servants who work tirelessly to improve public health were let go for spurious reasons and little recourse to fight back.”
The union pointed out that Congress declared 47 years ago that collective bargaining in the federal sector was in the public’s interest by giving employees a voice in the workplace and allowing labor and management to work together. It acknowledged there is a narrow exemption in the law for groups of employees whose work directly impacts national security, but argued that Trump’s executive order is blatant retaliation against federal sector unions and ignores the laws passed by Congress creating the agencies.
In agencies where a reduction-in-force has been announced, NTEU’s contracts provide time for employees to respond to a RIF notice and explore alternatives to mitigate the impact of the layoffs.
Earlier this week, after two court rulings in California and Maryland, the IRS’s acting commissioner, Melanie Krause, announced the IRS would be
A bipartisan bill has been introduced in Congress to preserve collective bargaining rights for federal employees. The Protect America’s Workforce Act (H.R. 2550), sponsored by Rep. Jared Golden, D-Maine, and Brian Fitzpatrick, R-Pennsylvania, would overturn Trump’s executive order stripping collective bargaining rights from hundreds of thousands of federal workers at multiple agencies. Separately,
The political calculus involved with the details of estate planning next year and beyond may be distracting financial advisors and clients from a larger, simpler conversation, one expert says.
On the off chance that the federal estate-tax exemption levels of $13.99 million for individuals (and double for couples) revert to half those amounts when Tax Cuts and Jobs Act provisions expire in 2026, only 0.2% of households would face potential duties upon transfer of assets, according to Ben Rizzuto, a wealth strategist with
With
“For financial advisors and clients, I would expect for many of them not to have to worry about federal estate taxes next year,” he said in an interview. “Even though they may not have to worry about it, there are still a lot of good conversations to be had.”
READ MORE:
The 1%
Trust tools that reduce the value of the assets that will transfer to spouses or other beneficiaries upon a client’s death, combined with the available statistics about the shrinking share of estates subject to taxes, could bring some peace of mind to clients. The 2017 tax law itself pushed down estate tax liability as a percentage of gross domestic product to a quarter of its 2001 level,
At the same time, advisors could raise any number of questions with clients
“We’re seeing a fundamental shift in client expectations,” Trust & Will CEO Cody Barbo said
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Get back to the planning basics
In that context, advisors and their clients should steer clear of trying to make sense of a complicated, ever-changing flow of news from Capitol Hill as Trump and the GOP pursue major tax legislation with a year-end deadline, Rizzuto said. If clients truly could be on the hook for estate taxes, a
“Why not gift them upstream?” Rizzuto said. “My father holds it. I tell him, ‘Dad, you have to do these things: Live for another 12 months, make sure you don’t sell, make sure that you update your will or your instructions to gift it back to me when you die.’ That’s another idea that we’ve been talking about with advisors.”
From another perspective, these possible paths forward may beckon to clients this year, if they are tuning into Beltway news about the progress of the tax legislation, he said. To bypass the risk of client perceptions that their advisor isn’t doing any tax planning at all, Washington’s complex maneuvering around the future rules is, “if nothing else,” a “great opportunity for advisors to bring this up at a very high level,” Rizzuto said.
“Advisors will really need to go back to basics and have some foundational conversations with clients,” he said, suggesting their goals with taxes as one key point of discussion. “‘What is it that we actually control within your financial and tax plan?’ When it comes right down to it, it’s really just incomes and deductions.”
Accounting
Developing future leaders in accounting: the new imperative in an AI and automation driven era
As technology continues to automate routine tasks, the role of finance professionals is evolving, demanding deeper capabilities in critical thinking, communication and business acumen.
Many of PrimeGlobal’s North American firms are focused on cultivating these skills in their future leaders. Carla McCall, managing partner at AAFCPAs, Randy Nail, CEO of HoganTaylor, and Grassi managing partner Louis Grassi shared their views with PrimeGlobal CEO Steve Heathcote on the need for future leaders to balance technological proficiency with human-centered skills to thrive.
AI is transforming the sector by streamlining workflows, automating data analysis and reducing manual processes. However, rather than replacing accountants, AI is reshaping their roles, enabling them to focus on higher-value tasks. In the words of Louis Grassi, AI can be seen as a strategic partner, freeing accountants from routine tasks, enabling deeper engagement with clients, more thoughtful analysis, and ultimately better decision-making.
Nail emphasized the importance of embracing AI, warning that those who fail to adapt risk being replaced by professionals who leverage the technology more effectively. HoganTaylor’s “innovation sprint” generated over 100 ideas for AI integration, underscoring why a proactive approach to adopting new technologies is so necessary and valuable.
McCall advocates for an educational shift that equips professionals with the skills to interpret AI-generated insights. She stressed that accounting curricula of the future must evolve to incorporate advanced technology training, ensuring future accountants are well-versed in AI tools and data analytics. Moreover, simulation-based learning is becoming increasingly crucial as traditional methods of education become obsolete in the face of automation.
Talent development and leadership growth
As AI reshapes the profession, firms must rethink how they develop and nurture their future leaders. To attract and retain top talent, firms need to prioritize personalized development plans that align with individual career goals.
HoganTaylor’s approach to talent development integrates technical expertise with leadership and communication training. These initiatives ensure professionals are not only proficient in accounting principles but also equipped to lead teams and navigate complex client interactions.
Nail underscored the growing importance of writing and presentation skills, as AI will handle routine tasks, leaving professionals to focus on higher-level analytical and decision-making responsibilities.
Soft skills are the success skills
While technical proficiency remains vital, future leaders must also cultivate critical thinking, communication and adaptability — skills McCall refers to as the “success skills.” McCall highlights the necessity of business acumen and analytical communication, essential for interpreting data, advising clients and making strategic decisions.
Recognizing teamwork and collaboration remain crucial in the hybrid work environment, McCall explained in detail how AAFCPA fosters collaboration through structured remote engagement strategies such as “intentional office time,” alcove sessions and stand-up meetings. Similarly, HoganTaylor supports remote teams by offering training for career advisors to ensure effective mentorship and engagement in a dispersed workforce.
McCall emphasized why global experience can be valuable in leadership development. Exposure to diverse markets and accounting practices enhances professionals’ adaptability and broadens their perspectives, preparing them for leadership roles in an increasingly interconnected world.
Grassi reminded us that an often-overlooked leadership skill is curiosity. In his view the most effective leaders of tomorrow will be inherently curious — not just about emerging technologies but about clients, market shifts and global trends. Encouraging curiosity and continuous learning within our firms will distinguish the true industry leaders from those simply reacting to change.
A balanced future
What’s clear from speaking to our leaders is PrimeGlobal’s role in fostering trust, community and knowledge sharing. McCall recommended member-driven panels to discuss AI implementation and automation strategies and share best practice. Nail, on the other hand, valued PrimeGlobal’s focus on addressing critical industry issues and encouraged continuous evolution to meet professionals’ changing needs.
The future of leadership in the accountancy profession hinges on a balanced approach, leveraging AI to enhance efficiency while cultivating essential human skills that technology cannot replicate, which Grassi highlights skills including leadership and building client trust.
As McCall and Nail advocate, the next generation of accountants must be agile thinkers, skilled communicators and strategic decision-makers. Firms that invest in these competencies will not only stay competitive but will also shape the future of the industry by developing well-rounded leaders prepared for the challenges ahead.
By investing in both AI capabilities and essential human skills, firms can not only future proof their leadership but also shape a resilient and forward-thinking profession ready to meet the challenges of the future.
As Grassi concluded, while technical skills provide the foundation, leadership in accounting increasingly demands emotional intelligence, empathy and adaptability. AI will change how we perform our work, but human connection, trust and nuanced judgment are irreplaceable. Investing in these human-centric skills today is critical for firms aiming to build resilient leaders of tomorrow. To remain relevant and thrive, professionals must prioritize developing strong success skills that will define the leaders of tomorrow.
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