Accounting
Founder Files: Stephen Buller broke the Big Four mold
While most accountants dread conducting on-site inventory observations — often considered one of the rote tasks shoved onto those at the bottom of the food chain — Stephen Buller loved them.
While working for a Big Four firm, he remembers going to a lumber yard in his home state of Washington for an inventory count. He recalls walking around the snowy fields in soaked sneakers and socks, looking every bit the ill-dressed, out-of-place accountant, but loving every moment of it.
“I really enjoyed those experiences because I got to see the nuts and bolts of the business,” Buller said. “I think a lot of what I’ve taken into my own business now is that numbers are just numbers. Is a million dollars a lot? I don’t know, what’s the context? Is this a good revenue number? Am I paying too much for payroll?”
“The numbers are not enough,” he said. “You have to have context in the business.”
It’s one of the reasons he was never content working at the Big Four. Buller wanted to spend his hours helping business owners put more money in their bank account, not telling the Securities and Exchange Commission that a company’s finances check out.
“I never felt much satisfaction from the actual work that was being accomplished, and maybe that has to do with the intangible nature of numbers,” he said. “The final delivery of a $100,000 audit is a single page, written up, signed by the partner that basically says, ‘We don’t find any problems with your finances.’ That’s just the industry — it’s not necessarily a criticism of that product.”
‘It was really painful for me’
Buller studied accounting at the University of Washington. He was a member of Beta Alpha Psi, the accounting and finance honors society. From his interactions with recruiters through the society, he interned at the Big Four firm before graduating with his master’s degree and joining full time. But it wasn’t what he expected.
“It was really painful for me,” he said.
Buller didn’t enjoy the number of hours spent behind a desk. While the firm had an efficient and detailed audit methodology, he felt as though seniors and managers were always creating more work — even after the job was done.
“There were a couple of people I worked with, supervisors and managers, who bucked this trend,” he said. “They were really focused on, ‘These are the things we need to get done, and when we get those done we’re done. We don’t have to work hours we don’t need to.'”
He said it boils down to the billable hours you can charge a client: “I got the sense that partners never wanted to report fewer hours because that might justify a cut in the fee.”
Buller felt his proposed ideas for improving processes were usually shut down before even being considered. “This isn’t necessarily a criticism directly of [the firm] but just of any very large organization,” he said, referencing the “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” mentality.
He also disliked the lack of work-life balance: “The overall perspective of the public accounting industry is that 45 to 50 hours a week is a break. That’s like vacation to them.”
Buller left the firm in 2010 after about three years. He jumped around a variety of tech companies, startups and public companies as an accountant and controller. Around the same time as leaving the Big Four firm, Buller took his first swing at building his own company. He dropped a few thousand dollars on setting up a website to start an e-commerce business selling self-defense and security products, like pepper spray and tasers. The venture was unprofitable and he jumped ship after one of his managers told him he needed more time before he’d be ready to run a business.
He finally started his own practice, Buller Accounting, in 2015 after acquiring a bookkeeping firm from a local tax accountant who was selling. Buller’s firm offers a variety of services including bookkeeping, in-house payroll and more. With his five employees, he manages about 50 clients, mostly small-business owners based in Washington State and the Northwest Coast.
‘We can do things differently’
Buller’s creed is that he can do things differently at his firm.
“I felt like at [the Big Four firm] I was not treated like a human being, with thoughts and feelings, good ideas and bad ideas, wants and dreams, and hopes and fears. I felt very much like I was a tool. I was meant to be used, and when my productivity or patience had run out I was to be discarded. And I think that is awful,” he said. “I think there are plenty of good things that I take from [the Big Four firm], and then there are things that I say we can do differently.”
But Buller isn’t trying to rebuild the wheel. One of the things that he carries on from his time in the Big Four is the mantra, “If it’s not documented, it’s not done.”
Oftentimes, a business owner hiring an accountant doesn’t necessarily care how the work gets done — just as long as it gets done. Problems usually don’t arise until someone is audited, it’s tax season, or they receive a surprise letter from the IRS. That’s why showing his work is so important.
“Everybody messes up from time to time, and we can do our best to build processes that avoid mistakes, but they will still happen,” Buller said. “And so our real goal should not necessarily be to ensure no mistakes ever happen, but to ensure we can support what we did and why we did it.”
Where Buller does diverge from big firms is in his pricing model. He explained, “For me running my business, a huge part of being successful is knowing how much revenue is going to come in, and how many expenses are going to go out.”
It seems simple, he said, but it’s hard to do for many business owners who don’t know anything about accounting. For instance, when Buller tells a client they need to amend a filing, which may take a couple hours and result in an additional $500 added onto their bill, clients can feel blindsided.
So instead, Buller works with his clients for a couple of months to develop a thorough scope of what services they actually need, and then he quotes them a flat-rate fee. “If we do work outside of that scope, I do my best to tell the client ahead of time, ‘This is outside of scope, I think it’ll take about this much. Is that OK?’ And then anything that’s in scope that just happens to take us longer, then that’s on us.”
“So I just need to manage my hours very carefully and see what clients are consistently going over budget or under budget, and adjust accordingly,” he added.
For clients that consistently take him and his team less time than he has budgeted, he’ll voluntarily reach out and tell them he’s decreasing their bill by a certain amount. For clients that consistently take more time, he explains what he missed in the estimate that constitutes a higher bill, but he purposefully works on a month-to-month basis so as not to make clients feel as though they’re locked in to an unfavorable agreement.
Buller’s first piece advice, for young accountants especially, is the reminder, “You don’t know everything.”
“I think a really good way to start your career is to go to work in an industry that interests you. Work for a company, boss, team and people that you respect and enjoy,” he said.
He also does not recommend trying to start a business right out of college, warning that most people will lack the experience and knowledge necessary to do so effectively. “Instead, I would go to work for somebody who does what you want to do, learn as much as you can from them about what not to do and what to do, and then maybe move on to starting a business.”
And as someone who did not feel like he fit into the traditional accountant mold but loved the accounting itself, Buller emphasizes the broad scope for applying accounting skills: “Once you have that framework and you understand the debits and credits, the different accounts and how it all works, you can look at any business with a perceptive eye.”
“A lot of businesses come out of a couple of people working at some company, seeing the same complaint over and over again, and then saying, ‘Why don’t we start our own business and solve this problem?'” Buller said. “That’s the heart of entrepreneurship — seeing a problem and solving it — and people will pay you to do that.”
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U.S. prosecutors and regulators are investigating a $32 million deal between CrowdStrike Holdings Inc. and a technology distributor to provide cybersecurity tools to the Internal Revenue Service, according to two people familiar with the matter and a document seen by Bloomberg News.
Investigators for the Justice Department and the Securities and Exchange Commission have been interviewing people and collecting records related to the deal, according to the document and people. They spoke on condition of anonymity because they are not authorized to discuss the matter.
Carahsoft Technology Corp. paid CrowdStrike for the deal that the cybersecurity firm closed on the last day of a fiscal quarter in 2023, but the IRS never purchased the products, Bloomberg first reported in October. The transaction under investigation was big enough that it could have made the difference between CrowdStrike beating or missing Wall Street projections for the period, although the Austin, Texas-based company has declined to detail how it accounted for the deal. The day after CrowdStrike reported results for the record quarter, its shares rose 10%.
The parallel probes, which haven’t been previously reported, also represent additional scrutiny of Carahsoft, a dominant reseller of technology to the U.S. government. The FBI
CrowdStrike spokesperson Brian Merrill said in an email, “we stand by the accounting of the transaction.” A lawyer for Carahsoft, Samarth Barot, declined to comment.
A spokesperson for the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York, Nicholas Biase, declined to comment. An SEC spokesperson, Cory Jarvis, said the agency doesn’t comment on “the existence or nonexistence of a possible investigation.”
As early as last fall, SEC and DOJ investigators were questioning former CrowdStrike employees involved in the deal, as well as IRS staff, and they’ve continued to pursue interviews in recent weeks, according to the people and documents. They’ve also collected records related to the deal, including written communications from employees of the IRS, CrowdStrike and Carahsoft.
The investigators asked witnesses detailed questions about the interactions between CrowdStrike sales staff and IRS officials in the lead-up to the deal’s closure, one of the people said. They’ve inquired repeatedly whether the agency purchased the CrowdStrike software and were told no, the person said.
IRS officials did not respond to calls and emails seeking comment.
Prosecutors from the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York are among those working on the investigation, according to the person.
The deal under scrutiny is complex and some specifics of it remain unclear. Documents from Carahsoft and CrowdStrike show that it was for identity threat protection software to be used by the IRS. The agency, however, never bought it.
CrowdStrike closed the deal on the last day of its third fiscal quarter in 2023. In a subsequent earnings call, Chief Executive Officer George Kurtz highlighted it by saying, “identity threat protection wins in the quarter included an eight-figure total deal value win in the federal government.”
Carahsoft has been making on-time payments to CrowdStrike, the cybersecurity firm told Bloomberg last fall. Both companies explained then that they had a “non-cancellable order” between them, but declined to say why they struck the deal without a purchase in place from the IRS, or what became of the millions of dollars worth of software subscriptions that were at stake.
In an earnings report in November 2024, CrowdStrike excluded roughly $26 million
CrowdStrike representatives have declined to elaborate or say whether the comments were related to the deal involving the IRS and Carahsoft.
At the time of the deal, some CrowdStrike staff raised internal concerns that the company was “pre-booking” the transaction, which they viewed as incomplete because it was unclear whether the IRS would ever make the large purchase, Bloomberg previously reported. U.S. regulators have in some cases sued and fined companies over alleged pre-booking, also known as channel stuffing, claiming they misled investors by improperly recognizing revenue to inflate their financial figures.
A CrowdStrike spokesperson previously said it was “demonstrably false” that there was any pre-booking and that the deal was reviewed and “given a clean bill of health.”
U.S. investigators have already spent years examining Carahsoft, a leading player among resellers and distributors that help technology companies navigate the complexities of selling to government agencies. In September, agents from the FBI and the U.S. Department of Defense searched the company’s Reston, Virginia, headquarters.
A Carahsoft spokesperson said at the time that it was cooperating with the FBI probe, which involved “an investigation into a company with which Carahsoft has done business in the past.” The Justice Department is also conducting a separate civil investigation of Carahsoft and SAP SE for potential price fixing on government contracts, as
There’s no known link between CrowdStrike and the civil investigation nor the search of Carahsoft’s office. A representative of the cybersecurity company previously said it’s not connected to either.
Federal investigations, especially of complex cases, often run for years and many end without any formal accusations of wrongdoing.
Adam Pritchard, a professor at the University of Michigan Law School and former SEC lawyer, said that regardless of what investigators find, the probes will cost CrowdStrike and Carahsoft in legal fees and managers’ time, and draw scrutiny from their boards of directors. He said investigators will likely be interested in whether the companies had any “additional understandings” about the deal beyond their contract and, if so, whether they were disclosed to auditors.
“If I were investigating, I would want to know if there were implicit understandings that if the deal didn’t go through with the IRS that they could work out the money over the course of their ongoing relationship,” said Pritchard.
Thousands of IRS employees around the country reported to work Thursday prepared for an email announcement that they were being placed on leave.
For many, the email never arrived. Not because they weren’t being terminated — they were — but because of a technical glitch that prevented officials from notifying them via email, according to an agency employee and messages reviewed by Bloomberg News.
The agency has resorted to paper: “All terminated employees, whether they received the email or not, will be receiving a paper copy of the letter via UPS overnight tracked mail,” an internal message said, referring to United Parcel Service Inc.
The IRS didn’t respond to a request for comment. The agency is planning to terminate about 6,700 probationary workers, a category that includes new hires as well as people recently promoted or reassigned, as billionaire Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency project enacts sweeping job cuts across the federal workforce.
Replacing email termination with overnight letter delivery added a potentially ironic wrinkle to the IRS job cuts: additional costs. Full details weren’t available Friday, but overnight letter delivery from UPS can cost more than $30 between adjacent areas, according to published rate schedules.
Spread across the roughly 6,700 employees scheduled to be terminated this week, the inability to deliver the bad news electronically could mean more than $200,000 in postage.
Cutting thousands of federal workers all at once has proved harder than anticipated for DOGE and the Trump administration. Last week, officials at the Small Business Administration sent termination notices to probationary staff,
The Department of Energy laid off nuclear bomb specialists,
There was no indication the IRS was having second thoughts about the cuts, only having trouble with last-minute paperwork.
A copy of the IRS termination notice reviewed by Bloomberg said the agency was abiding by an executive order to “terminate probationary employees who were not deemed as critical to filing season.”
“We don’t have many details that we are permitted to share, but this is all tied to compliance with the executive order,” the message said.
President Donald Trump is expected to sign a memorandum Friday that opens the door to levies in response to digital services taxes some countries impose on U.S. tech giants, people familiar with the plans said, the latest step to expand a tariff war aimed at addressing imbalances in global trade.
The memo, which the people familiar discussed on condition of anonymity before it is made public, focuses broadly on digital trade issues. Friday’s action directs the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative to develop remedies for the taxes that foreign governments impose on U.S. tech companies such as Alphabet Inc. and Meta Platforms Inc., the people said.
The memo is not expected to implement tariffs immediately and it does not set a timeline for when such duties might take effect, according to the people familiar.
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The move addresses an issue that has long been a concern for Trump — dating back to his first stint in the White House. In 2019, the USTR initiated separate probes into the tax systems for France, Italy, Spain, India and other countries, with the U.S. concluding at the time that the taxes were discriminatory and disproportionately hurt American firms.
Some nations have since withdrawn their digital services tax plans and instead joined a global negotiation for a minimum tax on tech companies — but those talks have stalled repeatedly.
According to the Computer and Communications Industry Association, approximately
Trump’s action comes ahead of a visit from French President Emmanuel Macron, whose country has a digital tax that hits major U.S. tech multinationals, and whose finance minister said earlier this month they intended to keep in place.
France was one of the first countries to implement a digital services tax. The two sides negotiated a truce, under which France would have withdrawn the tax after global rules on taxing digital multinationals came into effect. Those negotiations, however, never concluded.
U.S. retaliation over digital taxes threatens to roil already tense relations with France and other European countries already at odds with Washington over Trump’s push to negotiate an end to the war in Ukraine directly with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Trump and his allies have railed against what he sees as unfair practices from Europe over trade, taxation and efforts to counter mis- or dis-information on social media that he says target U.S. tech companies. More broadly, Trump’s plans highlight how in his second term he has sought to employ tariffs to reshape global trade ties and force companies to move production to the U.S.
The president has already imposed a blanket 10% tax on imports from China, ordered — and then paused — 25% tariffs on goods from Canada and Mexico, unveiled plans for a 25% levy on U.S. imports of steel and aluminum and directed his administration to propose a round of reciprocal tariffs for each trading partner. He’s also said tariffs on automobiles, semiconductors and drug imports are forthcoming.
Trump’s second term has seen Silicon Valley executives seek to woo the new president, with the prominent CEOs of some of the country’s largest tech companies visiting him at his Mar-a-Lago estate during the transition and attending his inauguration last month. Trump has vowed to target policies abroad he says harm those giants but many of his moves, such as fresh tariffs, threaten to squeeze tech companies that rely on global supply chains.
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