Accounting
Commitment to DEI is a leadership imperative
The research is clear: Diverse teams and inclusive work environments produce better results.
A 2018 report from Deloitte revealed that diverse teams are twice as likely to meet or exceed financial targets, three times as likely to be high-performing, six times as likely to be innovative and agile, and eight times more likely to achieve better business outcomes than monochromatic teams. Research from CNBC also shows that 78% of the workforce says it’s important to work for an organization that prioritizes diversity and inclusion, leaving employers with happier workers and better retention.
Yet, despite all the well-researched positive attributes that a demonstrated commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion can bring to the workplace, the economy and to a person’s overall well being, DEI progress is stalling. In fact, leadership consulting firm DDI noted, “Many companies are taking steps backward, to the brink of a DEI backslide.”
This comes at a time when the accounting industry is grappling with a critical challenge: finding talent. Demographic trends and financial hurdles have led to fewer people entering the profession, resulting in over 135,000 anticipated job openings through 2031, according to the
We must prioritize DEI to combat the talent shortage. A
- Drive meaningful change by establishing DEI as a business strategy and embedding it in all parts of the business. This approach tells employees their leaders are committed. It establishes momentum and drives sustainability.
- Establish a DEI philosophy that is both human-centered and systems-oriented. The human element emphasizes the power of personal connection and equips individuals with greater awareness of bias and tools for interventions, while the systems approach ensures that biases in processes like recruitment, hiring and promotion get addressed.
- Identify problems and solutions that are unique to our profession and your organization. The accounting field must address systemic barriers that inhibit access to internships for students from underrepresented communities.
- Nurture an authentically inclusive workplace culture. We interviewed numerous young career entrants for the report. They consistently emphasized the importance of work cultures that make them feel valued, offer mentoring, maintain active employee resource groups, and make space for honest conversations about the differences.
- Hold everyone accountable. Organization-wide accountability, starting at the top, drives responsibility and ensures action. Measures can be as varied as manager performance objectives linked to DEI, transparency about setbacks, and all-employee celebrations of success.
In every industry, and especially in accounting, leaders have an inclusion mandate. As we work to leverage DEI strategies that support workers and enhance performance, let’s start by communicating shared values that most people can agree on: Diversity means we cast a wide talent net to hire a representative group of qualified candidates. Equity means we craft systems and processes that enable everyone to do their best. And inclusion reminds us to create cultures of belonging where all employees can thrive.
Within SAP Fieldglass, Joule can recommend best-fit templates to generate job postings and statements of work with prefilled information such as the start date and the number of skilled workers needed. Joule embedded across the SAP Business Network can analyze, categorize and transform unstructured invoice rejection errors into structured, actionable insights to reduce the cost of resolving exceptions. Further planned capacities will eventually help match suppliers with new business opportunities. Within SAP Ariba, Joule will enable users to create RFPs and request help with routine inquiries and surface risks. These capabilities will also provide buying recommendations along with supplier summaries from different data sources. In addition, a sustainability scorecard from SAP Ariba helps customers make decisions that align with their organizations’ environmental, social and governance objectives.
Overall, Joule will manage 80% of the most frequently performed tasks in the SAP Ariba portfolio of intelligent spend management and business network solutions.
Krisztian Bocsi/Bloomberg
During his presentation yesterday at SAP Spend Connect Live, Manoj Swaminathan, president and chief product officer for intelligent spend and business network at SAP, noted that the company has accounted for people’s concerns regarding security and privacy.
“SAP is dedicated to delivering best-in-class solutions infused with AI, empowering you to prioritize strategic initiatives over mundane tasks,” he said during his keynote. “We understand and hear the concerns surrounding data security when implementing AI, which is why we have made no compromises in ensuring our AI capabilities set the standard for compliance. From third-party advisory boards to adhering to the
Beyond Joule’s integration into the wider portfolio of SAP products, he also announced the upcoming release of the SAP Ariba Intake Management solution, designed to address how businesses handle employee requests and process orchestration, starting with procurement. It provides employees with a single place to go for procurement inquiries and visibility on their status. The solution collects employee requests, orchestrates processes across landscapes and applications, and provides visibility on status while shielding employees from process complexity. SAP plans to make SAP Ariba Intake Management available in the first quarter of 2025.
Swaminathan also announced that SAP Business Network will launch a new promote subscription in the first quarter with value-added features to help suppliers differentiate themselves, attract new buyers and grow their businesses. Swaminathan said the subscription will give suppliers recommendations to improve discoverability, advanced search results, supplier profile verification and network catalog APIs. With the help of generative AI tools, suppliers can load their full suite of offerings into the network catalog faster and with enhanced product descriptions and summaries. The new promote subscription will help suppliers identify sales opportunities based on regional search data and use advanced insights to track business growth on the network.
He also announced a new analytics add-on with AI capabilities for SAP Fieldglass solutions, which helps procurement, vendor management and HR professionals to implement agile multichannel talent strategies. The analytics add-on for SAP Fieldglass solutions lets users review performance against over 50 external workforce key performance indicators; access global market intelligence including rates, talent supply and demand, and time-to-hire trends; and track sustainability initiatives such as spend with diverse suppliers and worker health and safety, while observing cost overruns, worker fatigue, and on- and offboarding compliance.
“With SAP Business AI as the foundation of our intelligent products, customers can improve productivity and gain insights from their spend data no matter where it sits,” said Swaminathan. “Whether it is managing cost, mitigating risk or supporting scope three emission reduction, SAP empowers companies with the right solutions for agile and effective spend management and supply chain functions.”
The Internal Revenue Service says it has processing underway on some 400,000 claims for the Employee Retention Credit, representing about $10 billion of eligible claims.
Work on the claims for small businesses and others is ongoing as the agency continues to wade through claims from the complex — and at times misused — pandemic-era credit. A significant number of the ERC claims came in during what the IRS calls “a period of aggressive marketing” by promoters, leading to a large percentage of improper, ineligible claims.
“In recent weeks, the IRS has made substantial progress in separating eligible claims from the wave of ineligible claims that have come in,” said IRS Commissioner Danny Werfel in a statement, “and we continue working to refine our models to identify more eligible claims.”
The claims being processed include eligible and ineligible claims, with most being processed for approval. Checks are being mailed for eligible claims with refunds.
The ERC program increasingly became the target of aggressive marketing well after the pandemic ended. Some promoter groups called the credit by another name, such as a grant, business stimulus payment, government relief or other names. The IRS is continuing to work denials of improper claims, intensifying audits and investigating potential fraud and abuse.
Last month, the agency opened a
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