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Learning from your failures | Accounting Today

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As an accounting firm owner, professor, athletic coach and parent, I spend a great deal of time with young people. Do they drive me crazy at times? You bet! But unlike many boomers among my peers, I have incredible confidence in millennials and Gen Zers, and I look forward to them becoming the next generation of leaders. 

Everyone knows NextGen is great with technology. But I’ve also found them to be more entrepreneurial than earlier generations. They’re not afraid to take risks and they’re less likely to be attracted to corporate life and the notion of security. They’re also more socially conscious and better attuned to work-life balance and preserving mental health than my “grind it out” generation. Again, that gives me hope. 

But I have a lot of concerns about today’s young people and that’s part of what motivated me to write my latest book, Making a Difference: Life Skills You Can Learn from Sports, Academics, Work (and Failure).

Time management

I still can’t get over how many smart, motivated, well-educated young people struggle with time management. From my young staffers to my students to my athletes, they just can’t seem to think beyond what’s due today. Chipping away at assignments and deliverables that will be due next week, next month or the end of the quarter might as well be 20 years down the road because they just can seem to look that far ahead. I don’t know if it’s from all the distractions of their screens and social media, but they have much more trouble staying focused than my young employees, students and athletes did 10 or 20 years ago.

In my book, I devote a lot of time to the power of writing things down (with a pen or pencil, not a stylus). Because when you put things in writing, it seems to have permanence. When you put things in an app, online calendar or spreadsheet, it seems too easy to close it or look the other way. I’ve also found young people today don’t like to check their work. I’m amazed at how fast they get things done — often with great accuracy — but they just don’t have the patience to double-check the numbers, proofread their grammar and spelling, and make sure documents and presentations are presented cleanly and professionally. It’s the same for my students as it is for my young employees. Life just seems like an endless race to check things off the list as quickly as possible. For a Generation Selfie that documents every minute detail of their lives on their phones, they seem surprisingly unattuned to details in the real world.On a related note, young people today don’t seem to want to communicate with their superiors when a task or assignment is completed. They just seem to want to get it done as quickly as possible and then move on to the next thing on the list. I suspect all the time on screens and social media is accelerating their attention span.

Accountability

In my book and in my daily interactions with students, athletes and my young associates, I’m constantly reminding them to take a deep breath, double-check their work, ask themselves if they’ve really given it their best effort. If the answer is yes, then great, let me know you’ve completed the assignment to the best of your ability. Don’t assume I’ll find it somewhere without you letting me know. Perhaps they’re afraid of criticism or suggestions, but eventually they’ll have to document and defend their work. Might as well let your superior(s) know that you’ve turned in your work. I’m not sure why everything in their lives must be a race.

Despite their hyper-accelerated lifestyle, I’ve found that many of today’s young people are procrastinators. Maybe it’s because they operate at hypersonic speed, but it’s almost expected that they’ll wait until the very last minute to get something done before the deadline. It doesn’t seem to matter if we’re talking class assignments, college applications, client work or final preparations for a major athletic competition. Pulling “all-nighters” may be a badge of honor in many circles, but it just creates unnecessary anxiety in real life — which can cause serious mental and physical impairment. In this age of life hacks, participation trophies and helicopter parents, I worry that we’ve insulated our young people too much from failure. I’m all for work-life balance and technological efficiency, but I worry that we have forgotten how to roll up our sleeves, how to grind through adversity and just work hard when we need to. 

German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche famously said, “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.”This may seem extreme and this quote certainly gets butchered a lot, but if I’ve learned nothing else in life, it’s that you can get stronger and better at something without going through some adversity.My parents always told my siblings and me that work is a privilege, not a form of drudgery. In my latest book, I’ve tried to elevate the notion of hard work into a mindset that young people can adopt, without risking burnout or jeopardizing relationships with friends, family and significant others. It’s taken me almost seven decades on the planet to realize this, but I’ve found some very simple but impactful techniques for having a successful career and a more fulfilling life: 

  • The incredible power of writing things down; 
  • Making your money work for you 24/7;
  • Treating work as a privilege, not as an obligation; 
  • Showing gratitude for what you have vs. lamenting what you don’t have; 
  • Being accountable for your actions;
  • Committing to lifelong learning;
  • Using failure to your advantage; 
  • Overcoming prejudice and discrimination; and,
  • Tapping the power of positive visualization (envision the ball going into the       net).   

I believe you can set ambitious, but realistic, goals through a disciplined and balanced approach to life. Trust me, it took me a long time to grow up, and I have made plenty of mistakes in my life, but I learned something valuable with each stumble. Hopefully the next generation can learn from the mistakes I made and incorporate those teachable moments into their own lives.

Lessons from mistakes

When it comes to learning from your mistakes, here are four key concepts that I ask my employees, students and athletes to keep in mind at all times: 

  1. Accountability: Acknowledge that you made a mistake. For instance, you filed an incorrect tax return.  
  2. Analysis: Research briefly why it happened. For instance, we rushed the filing without cross-checking all the supporting tax information. 
  3. Check and doublecheck: Put a quality control step in place. We use checklists (requiring two review signatures before we file) so the same mistake does not happen again. 
  4. Understand that mistakes have consequences: Filing an amended return is costly since the client does not pay us for the extra work, and it reflects poorly on our reputation. Acknowledge the mistake, work hard to correct it and make sure it doesn’t happen again. 

From working in a flea market to sweeping floors in New York City’s Diamond District to being rejected by over 500 accounting firms before landing my first real job, my story is one of resilience and inspiration (with lots of perspiration). It’s taken me more than half a century to connect the dots between athletics, academics and work to find my true calling, but they’re all related by putting in the “reps,” bouncing back from setbacks, managing my time, working toward short-term and long-term goals and not taking shortcuts. If that makes me “old-school,” I’m proud to call it my alma mater.

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IAASB tweaks standards on working with outside experts

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The International Auditing and Assurance Standards Board is proposing to tailor some of its standards to align with recent additions to the International Ethics Standards Board for Accountants’ International Code of Ethics for Professional Accountants when it comes to using the work of an external expert.

The proposed narrow-scope amendments involve minor changes to several IAASB standards:

  • ISA 620, Using the Work of an Auditor’s Expert;
  • ISRE 2400 (Revised), Engagements to Review Historical Financial Statements;
  • ISAE 3000 (Revised), Assurance Engagements Other than Audits or Reviews of Historical Financial Information;
  • ISRS 4400 (Revised), Agreed-upon Procedures Engagements.

The IAASB is asking for comments via a digital response template that can be found on the IAASB website by July 24, 2025.

In December 2023, the IESBA approved an exposure draft for proposed revisions to the IESBA’s Code of Ethics related to using the work of an external expert. The proposals included three new sections to the Code of Ethics, including provisions for professional accountants in public practice; professional accountants in business and sustainability assurance practitioners. The IESBA approved the provisions on using the work of an external expert at its December 2024 meeting, establishing an ethical framework to guide accountants and sustainability assurance practitioners in evaluating whether an external expert has the necessary competence, capabilities and objectivity to use their work, as well as provisions on applying the Ethics Code’s conceptual framework when using the work of an outside expert.  

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Tariffs will hit low-income Americans harder than richest, report says

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President Donald Trump’s tariffs would effectively cause a tax increase for low-income families that is more than three times higher than what wealthier Americans would pay, according to an analysis from the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy.

The report from the progressive think tank outlined the outcomes for Americans of all backgrounds if the tariffs currently in effect remain in place next year. Those making $28,600 or less would have to spend 6.2% more of their income due to higher prices, while the richest Americans with income of at least $914,900 are expected to spend 1.7% more. Middle-income families making between $55,100 and $94,100 would pay 5% more of their earnings. 

Trump has imposed the steepest U.S. duties in more than a century, including a 145% tariff on many products from China, a 25% rate on most imports from Canada and Mexico, duties on some sectors such as steel and aluminum and a baseline 10% tariff on the rest of the country’s trading partners. He suspended higher, customized tariffs on most countries for 90 days.

Economists have warned that costs from tariff increases would ultimately be passed on to U.S. consumers. And while prices will rise for everyone, lower-income families are expected to lose a larger portion of their budgets because they tend to spend more of their earnings on goods, including food and other necessities, compared to wealthier individuals.

Food prices could rise by 2.6% in the short run due to tariffs, according to an estimate from the Yale Budget Lab. Among all goods impacted, consumers are expected to face the steepest price hikes for clothing at 64%, the report showed. 

The Yale Budget Lab projected that the tariffs would result in a loss of $4,700 a year on average for American households.

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At Schellman, AI reshapes a firm’s staffing needs

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Artificial intelligence is just getting started in the accounting world, but it is already helping firms like technology specialist Schellman do more things with fewer people, allowing the firm to scale back hiring and reduce headcount in certain areas through natural attrition. 

Schellman CEO Avani Desai said there have definitely been some shifts in headcount at the Top 100 Firm, though she stressed it was nothing dramatic, as it mostly reflects natural attrition combined with being more selective with hiring. She said the firm has already made an internal decision to not reduce headcount in force, as that just indicates they didn’t hire properly the first time. 

“It hasn’t been about reducing roles but evolving how we do work, so there wasn’t one specific date where we ‘started’ the reduction. It’s been more case by case. We’ve held back on refilling certain roles when we saw opportunities to streamline, especially with the use of new technologies like AI,” she said. 

One area where the firm has found such opportunities has been in the testing of certain cybersecurity controls, particularly within the SOC framework. The firm examined all the controls it tests on the service side and asked which ones require human judgment or deep expertise. The answer was a lot of them. But for the ones that don’t, AI algorithms have been able to significantly lighten the load. 

“[If] we don’t refill a role, it’s because the need actually has changed, or the process has improved so significantly [that] the workload is lighter or shared across the smarter system. So that’s what’s happening,” said Desai. 

Outside of client services like SOC control testing and reporting, the firm has found efficiencies in administrative functions as well as certain internal operational processes. On the latter point, Desai noted that Schellman’s engineers, including the chief information officer, have been using AI to help develop code, which means they’re not relying as much on outside expertise on the internal service delivery side of things. There are still people in the development process, but their roles are changing: They’re writing less code, and doing more reviewing of code before it gets pushed into production, saving time and creating efficiencies. 

“The best way for me to say this is, to us, this has been intentional. We paused hiring in a few areas where we saw overlaps, where technology was really working,” said Desai.

However, even in an age awash with AI, Schellman acknowledges there are certain jobs that need a human, at least for now. For example, the firm does assessments for the FedRAMP program, which is needed for cloud service providers to contract with certain government agencies. These assessments, even in the most stable of times, can be long and complex engagements, to say nothing of the less predictable nature of the current government. As such, it does not make as much sense to reduce human staff in this area. 

“The way it is right now for us to do FedRAMP engagements, it’s a very manual process. There’s a lot of back and forth between us and a third party, the government, and we don’t see a lot of overall application or technology help… We’re in the federal space and you can imagine, [with] what’s going on right now, there’s a big changing market condition for clients and their pricing pressure,” said Desai. 

As Schellman reduces staff levels in some places, it is increasing them in others. Desai said the firm is actively hiring in certain areas. In particular, it’s adding staff in technical cybersecurity (e.g., penetration testers), the aforementioned FedRAMP engagements, AI assessment (in line with recently becoming an ISO 42001 certification body) and in some client-facing roles like marketing and sales. 

“So, to me, this isn’t about doing more with less … It’s about doing more of the right things with the right people,” said Desai. 

While these moves have resulted in savings, she said that was never really the point, so whatever the firm has saved from staffing efficiencies it has reinvested in its tech stack to build its service line further. When asked for an example, she said the firm would like to focus more on penetration testing by building a SaaS tool for it. While Schellman has a proof of concept developed, she noted it would take a lot of money and time to deploy a full solution — both of which the firm now has more of because of its efficiency moves. 

“What is the ‘why’ behind these decisions? The ‘why’ for us isn’t what I think you traditionally see, which is ‘We need to get profitability high. We need to have less people do more things.’ That’s not what it is like,” said Desai. “I want to be able to focus on quality. And the only way I think I can focus on quality is if my people are not focusing on things that don’t matter … I feel like I’m in a much better place because the smart people that I’ve hired are working on the riskiest and most complicated things.”

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