Accounting
Inside the 2024 Best Firms for Young Accountants
What’s the secret to recruiting and retaining the next generation of accountants?
It’s a combination of trust, flexibility and investment, according to the 2024 class of Best Firms for Young Accountants (see the list on page 10).
In a professional landscape stressed by an ongoing talent shortage, fostering an attractive firm culture where young talent wants to work and stay is more important than ever. That involves identifying their needs and wants, which differ from those of previous generations.
Young talent wants the opportunity to grow and to feel trusted by their firms, but they also value work-life balance. They want to feel fulfilled by their professional lives and still have the time to enjoy their personal lives.
While each of the Best Firms for Young Accountants takes its own approach to retaining talent, all of their efforts point to the shared themes of trust, flexibility and professional development.
“Basically anything that needs to cater to your life, we’re up for it because we want to keep our good people, and happy people make happy workers,” said talent and engagement coordinator Kendra Anderson at Rudler, a Fort Wright, Kentucky-based firm with more than 60 employees.
Establishing trust
In a shrinking talent market, the search for new talent is shifting further upstream in the pipeline. Many firms are extending internship offers to college students as young as sophomores and beginning outreach programs to high schools.
Building out a robust internship program is a great way to build for the future, according to Holly Feltenberger, director of talent acquisition and retention at McKonly & Asbury, a Camp Hill, Pennsylvania-based firm with over 120 employees: “If you don’t have the students coming in to learn and grow, then you’re going to stagnate, and your employees are going to stagnate and they’re going to be, I think, unhappy.”
A student’s internship experience is crucial to their decision to stay at the firm. That means training them and trusting them with real work — not just having them push paper. “We expect you to do the same job,” Janice Snyder, assurance and HR partner at McKonly & Asbury, said. “We’re not putting on a show. We want you to know what it’s really like to work here.”
Meanwhile, Austin, Texas-based Maxwell Locke & Ritter focuses its recruiting efforts on experienced hires with five or more years of experience. By focusing on this demographic, new hires require less training than interns and can hit the ground running, clients are better served, engagement teams can be slimmer, and the firm experiences lower turnover.
One significant application of trust is remote work. At Maxwell Locke & Ritter, “We don’t have a policy. We basically tell people to work what’s best for them,” leading partner Kyle Park said. “We expect you to be available and accessible — not only to people inside the firm, but to your clients — and as long as you are, we don’t really care where you’re at. … We treat everyone as a professional. We’re not babysitting or hand-holding anyone.”
Of the firm’s 138 employees, roughly a third are remote and based outside the office’s locality, another third are remote and local, and the remaining third work a range of schedules from hybrid to fully in office.
Meanwhile, WilkinGuttenplan, based in East Brunswick, New Jersey, has employees working across 11 states. Of its 138 employees, “pretty much everybody” is remote unless they choose to work in the office, said talent acquisition and development manager Fatima Sabir.
“People have different obligations outside of work, so we want to make it easy for them,” Sabir said. “That correlates to working parents, but it doesn’t even have to be working parents — it could be anybody. You could be taking care of your own parents. You could have a dog. Whatever the case is, obviously we know these individuals are important to you, even pets.”
Susan Yohn, director of HR at Brown Plus, a 124-person firm in Camp Hill, Pennsylvania, explained the benefits of allowing employees the freedom to work from home: “What it has allowed us to do is retain our team members. … We are able to look outside of our geographical region for talent. The talent shortage is real, so we’re able to bring in great talent from different locations.”
Transparent leadership and upper management is also crucial to fostering a culture of trust that retains young accountants. At Brown Plus, leadership is very visible: “For every new hire that comes in, we have a morning mixer for them where people can come down and talk to them and just say hi. We provide breakfast and just kind of get them more acquainted with people in the firm,” Yohn said.
There needs to be a consistent message between what people hear and what people see. Management must practice what they preach. That increases trust and, in turn, opens the door for candid conversations and feedback.
The Brown Plus Emerging Professionals group facilitates just that. The group is comprised of employees with zero to seven years of experience. Together, they host volunteering and networking events, as well as lunch-and-learns. Once a year, BEP members present their feedback and concerns to the board and offer suggestions for improvement. “Last year, our paid parental leave policy paid for two weeks of paid leave, but they were looking to increase that. So we increased to three weeks of paid leave,” Yohn said.
Groups and committees such as these give young people a stake in the firm without being a stakeholder. Allowing them to contribute ideas and shape the firm fosters a sense of belonging.
Even something as simple as the dress code comes down to trust, too. The best firms all follow a “dress for your day” or “dress to your client” policy. So on days with no meetings, employees are welcome to wear jeans and sneakers, or even shorts and hoodies in some offices. On days they meet with clients, they’re expected to dress to the client’s standard.
“How someone is dressed doesn’t affect how they do their jobs,” McKonly & Asbury’s Snyder said. “When we go to our clients, we dress how they dress. If the client is in suits, we’re in suits. If our client wants us to wear jeans, then we’re going to wear jeans. We’re going to respect their wishes. But when someone’s in our office, it just doesn’t matter.”
Making the investment
Next-generation accountants want their firm to invest in them as much as they’re investing in the firm. That’s why the top Best Firms for Young Accountants all have professional development in common. That can look like reimbursements for continued education, CPE courses and tracking, CPA exam prep, days off for taking the exam, bonuses for passing, and support groups for those studying.
“There’s a lot more to development than just doing a job,” McKonly & Asbury’s Feltenberger said. “There’s a lot more relationally, there’s a lot more emotional intelligence that people have to develop … People don’t realize that.”
At her firm, that looks like interns being assigned a buddy when they start. This is the “baseline,” Feltenberger said. “When you don’t feel comfortable going to your supervisor or direct report, you can ask your buddy questions. You can be a little more open and honest and feel more comfortable.”
Everyone at the firm also receives a direct report — a manager who is personally invested in driving their career and works with partners and leaders to facilitate that employee’s growth — as well as a mentor, whom the employee chooses.
Keeping it real
The focus on mental wellness and enabling work-life balance is perhaps among the most important aspects of what makes these firms the best for young people, who simply want to be treated as human beings.
That means feeling heard and seen. “Bring it on. Tell us what you don’t like,” Snyder said. “I have meetings with younger staff and say, ‘Tell me something you think I don’t want to hear.'”
WilkinGuttenplan utilizes a commitment schedule basis rather than implementing across-the-board hours requirements. Accountants decide on a minimum target of hours worked (billable and nonbillable) that they want to meet through the year. “Do they want to just work that minimum target, or do they want to exceed that minimum target?” Sabir said. “We give them the opportunity to tell us what makes sense for them.”
There, accountants can start their day whenever it works best for them, whether that’s 8 a.m. or 11 p.m., and the firm encourages people to establish boundaries and push back if they are asked to work outside of their set schedule.
“That’s kind of our human approach to everything,” Sabir explained. “When we get on calls, we understand we’re all humans, and it’s a very comfortable environment where you can vocalize and have open communication, candid feedback, everybody truly just understands one another.”
At Rudler, Anderson finds unique ways to plan fun, de-stressing activities for both in-office and remote employees. “Anything that we do in office, I try to make a version of it that caters to the remote people,” she said.
During tax season, for example, they hire a massage company to come to the office, while remote workers get mailed an at-home spa kit. On Valentine’s Day, Anderson took inspiration from nostalgic elementary school years and had employees decorate tissue boxes to collect candy and cards. “Of course one of the guys had to do a beer box,” she joked. “We just try to keep it really lighthearted.”
“Whatever a person needs to flourish mentally, we really try to cater to that,” Anderson continued. “Burnout, we know that’s real. That’s why we do a lot of fun things throughout tax season, like the coffee carts, playing games, weekly bingo, massages.”
These firms also adhere to their core values and make tangible, consistent efforts to demonstrate them.
“We’re flexible. We’re very employee-friendly. By flexible, I mean in terms of working hours — where you work, how you work, that type of thing. Friendly, meaning we want you to live life outside of the office,” Maxwell Locke & Ritter’s Park said. “We have a saying that no success at work is worth failure at home, and you can interpret that however you want it to be.”
“We genuinely care about one another,” Holocombe added. “We care about each other as employees and coworkers, but we really care about each other as people.”
Captive audience; some disagreement; game of 21; and other highlights of recent tax cases.
Barrington, Illinois: Tax preparer Gary Sandiego has been sentenced to 16 months in prison for preparing and filing false returns for clients.
He owned and operated the tax prep business G. Sandiego and Associates and for 2014 through 2017 prepared and filed false income tax returns for clients. Instead of relying on information provided by the clients, Sandiego either inflated or entirely fabricated expenses to falsely claim residential energy credits and employment-related expense deductions.
Sandiego, who
He was also ordered to serve a year of supervised release and pay $2,910,442 in restitution to the IRS.
Ft. Worth, Texas: A federal district court has entered permanent injunctions against CPA Charles Dombek and The Optimal Financial Group LLC, barring them from promoting any tax plan that involves creating or using sham management companies, deducting personal non-deductible expenses as business expenses or assisting in the creation of “captive” insurance companies.
The injunctions also prohibit Dombek from preparing any federal returns for anyone other than himself and Optimal from preparing certain federal returns reflecting such tax plans. Dombek and Optimal consented to entry of the injunctions.
According to the complaint, Dombek is a licensed CPA and served as Optimal’s manager and president. Allegedly, Dombek and Optimal promoted a scheme throughout the U.S. to illegally reduce clients’ income tax liabilities by using sham management companies to improperly shift income to be taxed at lower tax rates, improperly defer taxable income or improperly claim personal expenses as business deductions. As alleged by the government, Dombek also promoted himself as the “premier dental CPA” in America.
The complaint further alleges that in promoting the schemes, Dombek and Optimal made false statements about the tax benefits of the scheme that they knew or had reason to know were false, then prepared and signed clients’ returns reflecting the sham transactions, expenses and deductions.
The government contended that the total harm to the Treasury could be $10 million or more.
Kansas City, Missouri: Former IRS employee Sandra D. Mondaine, of Grandview, Missouri, has pleaded guilty to preparing returns that illegally claimed more than $200,000 in refunds for clients.
Mondaine previously worked for the IRS as a contact representative before retiring. She admitted that she prepared federal income tax returns for clients that contained false and fraudulent claims; the indictment charged her with helping at least 11 individuals file at least 39 false and fraudulent income tax returns for 2019 through 2021. Mondaine was able to manufacture substantial refunds for her clients that they would not have been entitled to if the returns had been accurately prepared. She charged clients either a fixed dollar amount or a percentage of the refund or both.
The tax loss associated with those false returns is some $237,329, though the parties disagree on the total.
Mondaine must pay restitution to the IRS and consents to a permanent injunction in a separate civil action, under which she will be permanently enjoined from preparing, assisting in, directing or supervising the preparation or filing of federal returns for any person or entity other than herself. She is also subject to up to three years in prison.
Los Angeles: Long-time lawyer Milton C. Grimes has pleaded guilty to evading more than $4 million in federal taxes over 21 years.
Grimes pleaded guilty to one count of tax evasion relating to his 2014 taxes, admitting that he failed to pay $1,690,922 to the IRS. He did not pay federal income taxes for 23 years — 2002 through 2005, 2007, 2009 through 2011, and 2014 through 2023 — a total of $4,071,215 owed to the IRS. Grimes also admitted he did not file a 2013 federal return.
From at least September 2011, the IRS issued more than 30 levies on his personal bank accounts. From at least May 2014 to April 2020, Grimes evaded payment of the outstanding income tax by not depositing income he earned from his clients into those accounts. Instead, he bought some 238 cashier’s checks totaling $16 million to keep the money out of the reach of the IRS, withdrawing cash from his client trust account, his interest on lawyers’ trust accounts and his law firm’s bank account.
Sentencing is Feb. 11. Grimes faces up to five years in federal prison, though prosecutors have agreed to seek no more than 22 months.
Sacramento, California: Residents Dominic Davis and Sharitia Wright have pleaded guilty to conspiracy to file false claims with the IRS.
Between March 2019 and April 2022, they caused at least nine fraudulent income tax returns to be filed with the IRS claiming more than $2 million in refunds. The returns were filed in the names of Davis, Wright and family members and listed wages that the taxpayers had not earned and often listed the taxpayers’ employer as one of the various LLCs created by Davis, Wright and their family members. Many of the returns also falsely claimed charitable contributions.
Davis prepared and filed the false returns; Wright provided him information and contacted the IRS to check on the status of the refunds claimed.
Davis and Wright agreed to pay restitution. Sentencing is Feb. 3, when each faces up to 10 years in prison and a $250,000 fine.
St. Louis: Tax attorneys Michael Elliott Kohn and Catherine Elizabeth Chollet and insurance agent David Shane Simmons have been sentenced to prison for conspiring to defraud the U.S. and helping clients file false returns based on their promotion and operation of a fraudulent tax shelter.
Kohn was sentenced to seven years in prison and Chollet to four years. Simmons was sentenced to five years in prison.
From 2011 to November 2022, Kohn and Chollet, both of St. Louis, and Simmons, who is based out of Jefferson, North Carolina, promoted, marketed and sold to clients the Gain Elimination Plan, a fraudulent tax scheme. They designed the plan to conceal clients’ income from the IRS by inflating business expenses through fictitious royalties and management fees. These fictitious fees were paid, on paper, to a limited partnership largely owned by a charity. Kohn and Chollet fabricated the fees.
Kohn and Chollet advised clients that the plan’s limited partnership was required to obtain insurance on the life of the clients to cover the income allocated to the charitable organization. The death benefit was directly tied to the anticipated profitability of the clients’ businesses and how much of the clients’ taxable income was intended to be sheltered.
Simmons earned more than $2.3 million in commissions for selling the insurance policies, splitting the commissions with Kohn and Chollet. Kohn and Chollet received more than $1 million from Simmons.
Simmons also filed false personal returns that underreported his business income and inflated his business expenses, resulting in a tax loss of more than $480,000.
In total, the defendants caused a tax loss to the IRS of more than $22 million.
Each was also ordered to serve three years’ supervised release and to pay $22,515,615 in restitution to the United States.
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The American Institute of CPAs is still concerned about the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board’s new firm and engagement metrics standard, despite some modifications from the original proposal.
During a board meeting Thursday, the PCAOB
Under the new rules, PCAOB-registered public accounting firms that audit one or more issuers that qualify as an accelerated filer or large accelerated filer will be required to publicly report specified metrics relating to such audits and their audit practices. The metrics cover the following eight areas:
- Partner and manager involvement;
- Workload;
- Training hours for audit personnel;
- Experience of audit personnel;
- Industry experience;
- Retention of audit personnel (firm-level only);
- Allocation of audit hours; and,
- Restatement history (firm-level only).
The AICPA reacted cautiously to the announcement. “We’re still studying the components of the final firm metrics requirements but, as we stated in our comment letter to the PCAOB this past summer, these rules will place a significant burden on small and midsized audit firms and could lead some to exit public company auditing altogether,” said the AICPA in a statement emailed Friday to Accounting Today. “This is not just conjecture: a majority of respondents (51%) to a recent survey we did of Top 500 firms with audit practices said they would rethink engaging in public company audits if the requirements were approved.”
The PCAOB it made some modifications to the original proposal in response to the comments had received since April:
- Reduced the metric areas to eight (from 11);
- Refined the metrics to simplify and clarify the calculations;
- Increased the ability to provide optional narrative disclosure (from 500 to 1,000 characters); and,
- Updated the effective date. (If approved by the SEC, the earliest effective date of the firm-level metrics will be Oct. 1, 2027, with the first reporting as of September 30, 2028, and engagement-level metrics for the audits of companies with fiscal years beginning on or after Oct. 1, 2027.)
The AICPA welcomed those changes but doesn’t think they go far enough. “We’re glad the PCAOB took some comments to heart by extending implementation dates, particularly for smaller firms, and lowering the number of required metrics,” said the AICPA. “But the potential consequences of the remaining requirements — reduced competition and market diversity in the public audit space — are a significant risk. We hope the SEC will give these unintended outcomes the weight they deserve before giving final approval to the requirements.”
The Securities and Exchange Commission would still need to give final approval to the standard, as well as the new firm reporting standard. Last week, the PCAOB decided to
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