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Baby season vs. busy season

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Having a second child wasn’t even in the cards for Erica Goode until she knew she was going to quit her accounting job.

Goode started her career at the Big Four before moving to corporate accounting. Instead of a busy tax season, she had a busy audit season, so when she got pregnant with her first kid she requested a part-time schedule for when she returned from maternity leave. 

“I can do the math,” she said. “I realized that my kid was going to spend more of their waking hours with their daycare provider than they would with me, and I just wasn’t OK with that.” 

Her request was approved after some back-and-forth (flexible work schedules were not something her company at the time was accustomed to offering pre-pandemic), and Goode worked 32 hours a week, four days a week, with Fridays off to spend with her newborn. But not long after returning, she was offered a promotion to a director role that didn’t allow for a reduced schedule. Still, she accepted. 

Then she hit rock bottom. Raising an infant while in her new position left her burned out and depressed: “It was probably the lowest point in my career. It was awful. I didn’t feel good at anything.” 

“I always felt like I was dragging my kid behind me through work,” she said. “I couldn’t even fathom having a second child because I felt like I was not excelling at either being an employee or being a mother, and I like to do things excellently.”

“One day, my husband, who’s also a CPA, brought up the idea, ‘If you quit your job, could we have another kid?'” she recalled. “And it wasn’t until the thought of quitting my job that growing our family felt like something we could actually do.”

So that’s what they did. Goode took a demotion to her previous role, she and her husband worked out their finances, she had their second child and worked a reduced schedule for a year before handing in her resignation to be a full-time, stay-at-home mom. 

After two years, she started her own practice. Now, living in Idaho, she works 15 hours a week — Mondays, Tuesdays and Thursdays while her kids are in school — offering fractional CFO, bookkeeping and tax planning services to 10 clients. 

Not alone
Goode is one of many accountants whose plans to start a family were put on hold or rescheduled to accommodate the profession and its busy seasons. 

In June, Logan Graf, a CPA and firm owner based in Texas, made a post on social media that spotlighted this trend: “This is how toxic public accounting is: We feel the need to time the birth of our children around busy seasons. I’m guilty of this. It’s messed up. I’m not letting busy season dictate when I can have another child anymore.”

Graf wrote the post after his wife had a miscarriage as they were trying for their third child, which they planned to have in the summer following tax season. 

“I think we need to recognize that this is toxic, and the way we’re thinking about it is toxic,” Graf said. “We can choose to think about it differently without virtue signaling and try to create more boundaries for ourselves and ultimately our clients and our employers.”

His post struck a nerve. Over 100 accounting professionals responded across Twitter and LinkedIn shared similar stories of how they had also planned their pregnancies around busy season deadlines, how they had returned to work sooner than they wished, how they were fired or penalized by employers for taking time off for their children’s births, how finding work-life balance in the accounting profession can feel near-impossible at times. 

Goode was one of those respondents. She wasn’t surprised to see how many had experienced similar pressures and done the same as her.

“Collectively, we do a really good job of faking it and everybody looks like they’re doing fine, and I was the same. People would tell you that I looked fine, but I was really crumbling on the inside,” she said. “It was so relieving to feel like you’re not alone. But you also can’t openly talk about it because who are you going to talk about it with? The people in your work who either pay you or rely on you as a peer?”

“It’s something that everybody feels and few people talk about,” she said.

The problem
Planning personal milestones around your work schedule is often simply the most practical and logical decision; the accounting profession is by no means unusual in that regard. But this is the crux of the problem: Accountants are making the intimate, personal choice of pregnancy around antiquated aspects of the profession that experts say need to change anyway. 

Of the accountants who “timed it right,” many say they returned to the office sooner than they wished, or they worked remotely while on leave, because they feared falling behind in their career progression.

For example, after Jody Padar, from Wisconsin, had her first child, she returned to work part-time during the day and went to school for her master’s degree in tax at night: “I felt like if I stayed in this part-time mommy track I was going to lose out. I felt like I wasn’t going to be given the same opportunities.”

But despite any amount of planning, babies will come when they will. Two years later, Padar gave birth to her second child a month and a half prematurely. He stayed in the neonatal intensive care unity for six weeks, and she took another six weeks to care for him at home. But when she returned to the office in mid-June, she was fired immediately. She founded her own firm when her daughter was six and her son was four. She later sold that firm in 2020 and is now a speaker and author known as “The Radical CPA.”

Padar isn’t hesitant to admit that the chip on her shoulder is part of the reason why she — and many other women, she believes — is driven to innovation: “When you’re faced with all of that, you work 10X to get to the same place.”

For Sharon Perry, it took a cancer diagnosis to change her perspective on the profession. Perry, who lives in Canada, worked during tax season through all three of her maternity leaves. She changed firms with each pregnancy. After having her first child, she was put on probation when she returned to work. After her second, she was denied her annual raise. After her third, she lost certain work flexibilities that she had previously established. 

She left her last firm to start her own when her youngest was 15 months old. Then she got cancer. Bedridden for six months, she was forced to downsize her firm and let go of roughly three-quarters of her 1,000 clients. Now nearly a dozen surgeries later, she’s working 25 hours a week and making more now with her smaller client base than she did before. 

Perry’s theory on it all? “Firms need to start recognizing that their people come first,” she said. “I think maybe the top have lost perspective on life. Or maybe they’re out golfing and they’re forgetting the grueling hours that they put in, which was at a different time in society. The times have changed. Quality is more productive than quantity.”

The causes
The pressure to avoid having children during busy season reaches beyond CPAs. Rachel Anevski, founder of a human resources consulting agency in New Jersey, felt it when she was working at an accounting firm as an HR director. She planned to have her two children be born in May and August before the start of the second wave of tax returns. 

It’s ingrained in the profession, she said: “I knew over the years that every baby was born outside of tax season. No September-through-October babies, and no January-through-April babies.”

“No one ever said, ‘We encourage you to have babies where it’s not interrupting business,'” she clarified. “It was that your performance was based upon how many hours you put in. Everything is hour-driven.”

Anevski said the problem is multifaceted. First, the hours-based model for high performance is to blame: “Somebody that can take on more work in the same hours as someone that takes on longer work — you’re not comparing apples to apples all the time, because every client possesses their own specific issues. There are too many variables. You also can’t say that someone who works more hours is the more productive one because sometimes the person who works more hours is just slower.”

The profession’s staffing model needs reworking. “There’s a lack of succession planning, cross-training and development of people. It’s like having a baseball team and you only have one pitcher and no backup. That’s how a lot of these firms manage their clientele,” Anevski said.

It was the profession’s weakness in cross-training staff that Terra Scharf, a bookkeeper from Arkansas, felt when she had her firstborn. She tried to plan the birth for after tax season, but the baby arrived early on April 18. She stayed with her child in the NICU for two weeks, and clients came to the hospital to meet with her because there was simply no one else to do the work. With the birth of her second child, she was back in the office after only two weeks.

Heather Chappelle, director of HR at BMSS, an Accounting Today Best Firm to Work for in Alabama, highlighted another root of the problem: The leadership of accounting firms does not always practice what they preach.

“It’s one thing to say you can take off early and go to every basketball game that your son has, but when none of the partners do it, it makes you feel like you can’t actually do it,” Chappelle said. “The younger staff are definitely looking and watching, and when they see all the senior managers and partners sitting in their office for 60 hours a week and missing their kids’ stuff, it makes it hard to feel like you can take advantage of whatever the firm is doing.” 

That was the case for Isaac St. John from Michigan, while working at a Top 15 firm. “Even though the HR policies are there, people aren’t taking it because it’s perceived that it’ll take away from your ability to progress quickly,” he said. 

St. John was on the path to partner when he started his family. Both his children were born in February, and both years St. John apologized to his team partner for what felt like leaving them in the lurch.

“I started to realize that no one was really doing family life like I wanted to,” he said — so he left to start his own firm. 

Aaron Krafft from Indiana calls it “an unwritten rule to not take time off.” It dawned on him while working at the Big Four as a newlywed when he left work to have Valentine’s Day dinner with his wife. Afterward, he returned to the office to make up the hours but was reproached for having left at all.  

“I went through three busy seasons there, and it was blatantly obvious to me that the way I wanted to raise a family was just not going to be possible there,” he said. So Krafft left and started his own firm. He’s two for two on summer births and hates that tax season is the reason why. 

Similarly, Logan Allec from California married while working at a Big Four firm. It wasn’t easy, and that was enough for him to leave and start his own firm before having kids. 

“If I can’t even hack it with just being married, how am I going to hack it with kids? It’s just a recipe for divorce,” Allec said. “And I’ll probably offend some people out there, but at least for me, I could not see how I could be a good husband and father while working those kinds of hours.”

The repercussions
For firms, the consequence of this trend is losing out on innovative talent amid an ongoing labor shortage. Many accountants cited the need for more flexibility to start a family as a reason they founded their own firms. But the impact of the work pressures on the individual accountant can be profound too. 

Jackie Meyer had worked in the Big Four and then at a small firm before starting her own practice in Texas. When she started having kids (both planned and born in December), she was diagnosed with chronic fatigue, a medical condition that causes long-term extreme exhaustion and impacts concentration and short-term memory.

Though the causes of chronic fatigue aren’t well understood, Meyer says the start of her symptoms coincided after the birth of her first child when she was skipping lunches and working through the nights because it was the only time she could work undisturbed. 

“These are basic things that I think accountants tend to overlook all the time because they’re always prioritizing the work,” she said. 

Meyer said these habits were instilled into her. While starting out in the Big Four, she remembers once getting chewed out by a partner for taking a day off during the slow season for Lasik eye surgery, and “constantly competing with other staff members on who would stay the latest and who would show up the earliest.”

The solution
Making resources accessible is the first part of a multistep solution. Wiss, another Accounting Today Best Firm to Work For, based in New Jersey, is taking steps to do this: It uses software called LeaveLogic that helps employees confidentially plan their leaves by pulling together federal and state laws along with the company’s supplemental programming. 

The push to install the system came from its chief people officer Lauren Dunn’s own experience with pregnancy and understanding the feeling of not being ready to tell employers or HR yet, but still wanting to plan ahead.

Building a strong operations or HR department so accountants have support beyond their managers and partners is crucial too. “Ultimately, it’s about being transparent and being human, and communicating that,” Dunn said. 

Many firms have programs for new parents or people planning to start families, but getting accountants to actually utilize those programs and take the time off they want is the real challenge. That requires a greater change at the firm-wide level.

For one, the measure of success needs to shift away from the number of hours an accountant can clock. Wiss, for instance, has no minimum hour requirements, and redesigned its annual performance reviews around alternative measures of success such as collaboration, conscientiousness, attitude, professionalism, communication, IT and computer skills, and problem-solving. When looking to promote, in addition to reviews, they consider factors such as client relationships, business development, financial performance, strategic alignment and leadership potential.

Firm leadership must also play an active role in setting the tone. Wendy Edgar, Americas HR director at EY, points to the Big Four firm’s new global chief executive, Janet Truncale, as an example: “When you have leaders at the very top that also did this — Janet has had her children and done the work — it builds inside the culture. I don’t think it’s as hard for people to say, ‘I’m taking time off. I’m going to be with my family. I’m going to take my full parental leave,’ because they’re working for people that did that too and that was important to them.”

“The more companies that do it, the more it becomes societal,” Edgar added. “If everybody did more with time off, if everybody did more with wellbeing, then the work environment is stronger.” 

The final solution, and perhaps the tallest of orders, is mitigating the slam of busy season by managing client load and client expectations, and establishing processes to distribute the work of the crunch periods throughout the entire year. 

Until then, the pressures on individual accountants need to be alleviated to enable a sustainable work-life balance. This can be achieved by improving the staffing model “by cross-training, by recognizing that you need teams to understand certain clients, and then preparing for it and building strong boundaries,” Anevski said. 

But the hard truth is that some firms simply lack the bandwidth to install sweeping change, and the jury is still out on how quickly — or rather, how slowly — the ones that do have the bandwidth are doing it. 

Goode said that she sees change happening, but not quickly enough: “I don’t think they’re the Big Four yet. I don’t think they’re middle market. I think they’re smaller firms that are doing it right and they will slowly change the path.”

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Tax Fraud Blotter: Feeling entitled

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Custom-made; alter ego trip; super Genius; and other highlights of recent tax cases.

Cerritos, California: Customs broker Frank Seung Noah, of Corona, California, has pleaded guilty to defrauding importers out of more than $5 million, including after he had been indicted on fraud charges, and to committing more than $1 million in tax evasion.

Noah owned and operated Comis International, a logistics and supply-chain company that offered customs import brokerage services on behalf of businesses. From 2007 to 2019, Comis was an import broker for Daiso, a Japan-based variety and value store with stores in the U.S. Noah provided Daiso with false customs duty forms and invoices to support fraudulent requests for reimbursement for duty fees. These forms inflated the total amounts, resulting in Daiso overpaying Noah nearly $3.4 million.

After Noah was indicted for defrauding Daiso in 2022, he continued to defraud other clients out of more than $2 million using a different scheme. Noah defrauded two other client companies by invoicing and receiving funds from the two victim companies and then pocketing the money and later altering bank statements to cover his fraud.

Noah also evaded payment of federal taxes, resulting in a loss to the IRS of approximately $2.4 million, with penalties and interest continuing to accrue. After agreeing with the IRS that he owed more than $1 million in taxes in 2014, he dodged IRS attempts to collect, including by paying for two homes in his former girlfriend’s name, using check-cashing businesses to avoid IRS levies of his bank accounts, lying to IRS agents and spending thousands of dollars on country club memberships, travel and golf.

Sentencing is May 8. Noah faces up to 20 years in prison for each of two counts of wire fraud and up to five years for the tax evasion count.

Tampa, Florida: Terence Taylor has pleaded guilty to obstructing and impeding the administration of the internal revenue laws for actions seeking to defeat the collection of back taxes he owed to the IRS.

Taylor was sentenced in 2012 for failing to file his income taxes for several years while he lived in New York. He owed more than $810,000 in taxes and was required to pay the tax debt during the term of his sentence.

For more than seven years, continuing after he moved to Florida, Taylor engaged in a series of acts to defeat IRS collection. He hid assets, placed other assets and income in the names of alter egos or nominees such as his wife, and used money that he could have used to pay off his back taxes to buy assets including boats, jewelry and a home.

Taylor continued to earn income as a financial consultant during those years after 2012. He used that income for numerous personal purposes and expenses and only minimally paid his federal tax debt.

The IRS had made extensive efforts to collect Taylor’s debt between 2004 and 2008. Aside from contacting Taylor many times, IRS officers sent numerous forms for him to detail his financial situation. He responded with false or incomplete information about his assets, including boats, and about his business and its accounts and dates of operation. Taylor used his business income and bank accounts after 2012 to pay personal expenses, including marina and yacht club expenses, boat expenses and jewelry purchases.

Taylor also failed to file personal income tax returns for several years after his New York sentence had ended. 

He faces a maximum of three years in prison.

Hands-in-jail-Blotter

Pennsauken, New Jersey: Business owner Tri Anh Tieu, of Camden, New Jersey, has admitted to conspiring to defraud the IRS by concealing cash wages paid to employees.

Tieu owned Tri States Staffing, which provided temporary workers to local businesses. Between the third quarter of 2018 and the second quarter of 2022, Tri States received more than $2.5 million in payments from customers.

Tieu paid employees in cash and failed to pay over the payroll taxes on those wages. He spent at least some of the unpaid taxes on personal expenditures, including gambling.

He admitted that he caused a tax loss of some $305,332.

The count of conspiracy to defraud the U.S. carries a maximum of five years in prison and a fine of up to $250,000. Sentencing is June 26.

Charleston, South Carolina: Business owner Jonathan Ramaci, of Mt. Pleasant, South Carolina, has been sentenced to 18 months in prison after pleading guilty to wire fraud and filing a false income tax return.

Ramaci defrauded the Small Business Administration in his application and receipt of some $214,000 in Paycheck Protection Program and Economic Injury Disaster Loan funds, submitting fraudulent tax documentation to the SBA for the PPP loan. For the EIDL loans, Ramaci falsely represented to the SBA the revenue and costs of goods sold for the businesses he was applying for.

From 2017 to 2021, Ramaci either failed to file or filed false income tax returns and owes the IRS $289,531. He paid personal expenses from a business he owned and operated, Elements of Genius, and did not report the expenses paid as income.

Los Angeles: Attorney Milton C. Grimes has been sentenced to 18 months in prison for evading more than $7.2 million in federal and state taxes over more than two decades.

He pleaded guilty late last year to one count of tax evasion relating to his 2014 taxes and admitted that he failed to pay $1,690,922 to the IRS. Grimes did not pay federal income taxes due for 23 years, 2002 through 2005, 2007, 2009 through 2011 and 2014 through 2023. The amount owed totaled $5,921,260, including tax, penalties and interest. Grimes also admitted he did not file a 2013 federal  return.

In addition to the federal tax evasion, Grimes admitted that he owed more than $1,313,231 in delinquent California taxes from 2014 to 2023.

Beginning in September 2011, the IRS attempted to collect Grimes’ taxes by issuing more than 30 levies on his personal bank accounts. From at least May 2014 to April 2020, he avoided payment by not depositing income he earned from his clients into his personal bank accounts. Instead, he purchased some 238 cashier’s checks totaling $16 million to keep the money out of the reach of the IRS. Grimes would also routinely purchase cashier’s checks and withdraw cash from his client trust account, his interest on lawyers’ trust accounts and his law firm’s bank account rather than pay the IRS.

Grimes was ordered to pay $7,236,556 in restitution, both to the IRS and to the California Franchise Tax Board.

Howey-in-the-Hills, Florida: Business owner Dorian Farmer has pleaded guilty to one count of failure to pay employment trust fund taxes and two counts of willfully failing to file returns. 

Farmer owned several area businesses and for years collected employment trust fund taxes from his employees. Rather than turning the money over to the IRS, Farmer took large, unreported cash distributions from one of his businesses. He also failed to file returns for himself and one of his businesses, Titleist Technologies, d.b.a. Summit Joint Performance, for tax year 2000.

Farmer’s acts resulted in a total tax loss of $806,653.

He faces up to five years in prison for the employment trust fund offense and up to a year in prison for each offense of willful failure to file a return.

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AICPA releases framework for stablecoin reporting

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The American Institute of CPAs published information on reporting on stablecoins, a type of cryptocurrency, providing a framework to stablecoin issuers for presenting and disclosing information related to the tokens they issue, and to report on the availability of cash or other assets that back them.

Stablecoins are a kind of digital asset where the value is pegged to the assets backing them, such as U.S. currency, exchange-traded commodities like precious or industrial metals, or some other form of crypto.

The purpose of the AICPA’s Assurance Services Executive Committee document, 2025 Criteria for Stablecoin Reporting: Specific to Asset-Backed Fiat-Pegged Tokens, is to offer a framework for presenting and disclosing information about stablecoins to promote consistent reporting among issuers and boost trust in the stablecoin space.

The release comes as the Trump administration is taking a decidedly more welcoming attitude to the crypto industry, including announcing a crypto reserve and setting up a crypto task force at the previously skeptical Securities and Exchange Commission. 

Next month, as a second part of the stablecoin reporting criteria, the Assurance Services Executive Committee plans to release Proposed Criteria for Controls Supporting Token Operations: Specific to Asset-Backed Fiat-Pegged Tokens for public comment. As these control criteria are part of overall stablecoin reporting, they eventually will be incorporated into the 2025 Criteria for Stablecoin Reporting document once they’re finalized. 

“This is the first available framework for stablecoin issuers to report on stablecoins, and the AICPA is excited to be at the forefront of bringing transparency and consistency to the digital assets space,” said Ami Beers, senior director, assurance and advisory innovation at the AICPA & CIMA, in a statement Thursday. “These criteria will serve as the basis for evaluating the availability of redemption assets that back stablecoins in attestation services that practitioners provide to their clients, driving this dynamic practice area forward for the accounting profession.”

The 2025 Criteria for Stablecoin Reporting: Specific to Asset-Backed Fiat-Pegged Tokens can be found here. For more information relevant to stablecoins, practitioners can access the stablecoin reporting and assurance page.

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CPA execs feel shakier about US economy

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CPA business executives’ outlook on the U.S. economy appears to be dimming, thanks to persistent inflation and growing worry over tariffs, according to a new survey from the AICPA & CIMA.

The quarterly survey found that the post-election jump in business executives’ optimism about the U.S. economy has moderated, dropping from a more than three-year high of 67% in the fourth quarter to 47% in the first quarter of this year. The survey polls chief executive officers, chief financial officers, controllers and other CPAs in U.S. companies who hold executive and senior management accounting roles.

The survey was conducted before the Trump Administration imposed tariffs this week on Canada, Mexico and China (and then delaying the tariffs today on Canada and Mexico for a month), but respondents were asked their general views about unspecified tariffs if they were put in place. Fifty-nine percent indicated that tariffs would have a negative effect on their businesses, while 85% said uncertainty surrounding the subject had influenced their business planning to some degree — nearly one in five (18%) described that impact as significant.

Inflation remained the top concern for CPA business execs, followed by issues related to staffing — employee and benefit costs (No. 2), availability of skilled personnel (No. 3), and staff turnover (No. 10). Domestic political leadership, which was absent from last quarter’s top 10 concerns, reemerged at No. 6.

“There are a lot of warning signs right now for business executives, particularly around inflation, payroll costs and consumer confidence, with tariffs adding another layer of uncertainty,” said Tom Hood, AICPA & CIMA’s executive vice president for business engagement and growth, in a statement Thursday. “That said, it’s important to recognize that economic optimism remains higher than at any point since mid-2021, aside from last quarter’s notable increase. Additionally, expansion plans have held steady from the previous quarter.”

The survey also found that business executives who said they were optimistic about their own organization’s outlook over the next 12 months dropped from 53% to 50%, quarter over quarter.

Revenue and profit expectations for the next 12 months both eased from the fourth quarter’s large increases. Revenue growth is now anticipated to be 3%, down from a 3.3% projection in the fourth quarter. Profit projections are now 2%, down from 2.2% last quarter.

Survey respondents who expect their businesses to expand over the next 12 months remained unchanged at 57%.

Some 39% of the business executives polled indicated they had too few employees in the first quarter, a 1% increase from the fourth quarter. One-in-five said they were ready to hire immediately, unchanged from last quarter.

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