Accounting
Misconceptions and mismatches: Dealing with the staff shortage
Of all problems the tax and accounting profession faces, staffing seems the most persistent. Older and younger accountants alike are bailing, driven by a sometimes hard combination of perception and reality.
“The industry as a whole is not attractive to the younger population, and it’s difficult for our staff to work remotely,” said Paul Miller, a CPA and managing partner at
“It certainly seems as though the pool of qualified candidates has begun to shrink and the attraction of qualified staff has become increasingly more difficult,” said Mark Giallonardo, a partner and tax services and tax technical director at Cherry Bekaert in Coral Gables, Florida.
Are there any new answers out there?
Perceptions
According to a
Other problems with the pipeline of American accountants include:
- The ongoing high volume of work accountants have been experiencing makes a career in accounting feel more challenging than other careers;
- Students perceive that their starting accounting salary will not compete with that of other professions;
- Inconsistencies in the makeup of the additional 30-hour education requirement detracts from its value and is a great hurdle;
- Students perceive the CPA exam to be too difficult to study for and pass; and,
- Students don’t know an accountant, lack access to information about the benefits of the career and aren’t attracted to an accounting career because they’ve heard negative things about the profession on social media.
Almost half of the respondents to the survey added that turnover is highest after three to five years of employment. Miller said that his longest-term employee has been with his firm 30 years and his average employee has been with the firm more than 10 years.
Luis A. Orozco/Cin8 – stock.adobe.com
Niches can work against a firm. “It’s been difficult to hire and retain talented staff. This is especially true at my firm, where our niche of foreign tax compliance and reporting requires additional knowledge,” said Manasa Nadig, an Enrolled Agent and owner at MN Tax and Business Services and a partner at Harris Nadig in Canton, Michigan. “We’ve been exploring hiring off-shore talent.”
Solutions?
Firms are getting increasingly creative with staffing fixes: giving once-outlandish raises and bonuses,
In a
The total-dollar picture can cause an employee to pause before jumping to another firm because of just a salary bump, blogger Amanda Lilley writes.
“We pay our staff above [the] industry average, we offer excellent benefits, we have a matching pension plan. More important,” Miller said, “we treat people well and respect our staff.”
“Following the Great Resignation, we were proud to see our turnover level decline and stabilize at less than pre-pandemic levels,” said Elizabeth Newman, chief administrative officer and chief HR officer of CBIZ in Cleveland. “Top talent have options in our industry, so the onus is on us to offer a compelling value proposition and experience.”
“We find that our team members want visibility into their career paths and a better understanding of not only opportunities for advancement but what’s required to advance,” Newman said. “We’ve invested in articulating clear career paths, including aligned learning and development.”
Team members have clear expectations when it comes to innovation and new technologies, and the firm also has mentoring programs, employee resource groups and community engagement initiatives, among other plusses.
Mismatch
Accountants can also benefit from what they haven’t traditionally done: network with other fields.
“Every employer seems to be having issues with finding and retaining staff,” said Larry Pon, a CPA in Redwood City, California. “As employers, we need to understand where this new crop of graduates came from. I hear from recruiters that many are lacking in social skills, especially graduates who went to college virtually.”
“There’s definitely a mismatch,” he added, between “staff expectations and employer needs.”
Thirteen accounting firms have united to form
Operating in an alternative practice structure as Sorren CPAs PC for attest services and Sorren Inc. for business advisory and non-attest services, the combined firms have 85 partners and approximately $170 million in revenue, with plans to add more firms going forwards.
Many of the founding firms met as members of the BDO Alliance, and their leaders had gotten to know one another as attendees at alliance meetings and managing partner roundtables, according to Josh Tyree, the president of Sorren, who was previously president of Harris CPAs, an Idaho-based firm that was the first of the group to go the PE route, signing up with DFW in January 2024.
“Harris had started looking at that process with DFW for a good chunk of 2023,” Tyree recalled, “and I remember we were having a managing partner roundtable meeting in Nashville that year in the fall, and they were all there and I raised my hand after two hours of talking about PE and I said, ‘Hey guys, I think I’m going to jump in feet first and you guys should all come and join us.'”
And they did — with individual firms joining up with DFW over the course of 2024, and a large group in January 2025.
“There was a level of comfort,” he explained. “We knew all of our firms and our people and what we do and how we do it because we’d shared so much information over the years.”
Apart from Harris, the other firms currently comprising Sorren are:
- Acuity (Georgia);
- Aycock & Co. (Texas);
- Capital Nomics Valuations (California);
- Chigbrow Ryan Murata (Idaho);
- Hoerber Tillman & Co. (Florida);
- JRJBF (Illinois);
- KDP Advisors (Oregon);
- KMA Advisors (Wisconsin);
- Pisenti & Brinker (California);
- Roeser Accountancy (California).
- SBF Advisors (Florida);
- Stockman Kast Ryan & Co. (Colorado).
Allan Koltin, CEO of Koltin Consulting Group, said in a statement, “What makes Sorren stand out is the way these firms came together — with intention, shared values, and a commitment to staying deeply connected to their local markets. This group didn’t just merge for size; they united around a common purpose. It’s a blueprint for how innovative firms can grow, while staying true to who they are.”
The firms all have a strong focus on small and middle-market businesses and nonprofits that want a local firm feel and relationship, even if they need services across the country. As it adds new firms, Sorren will prioritizing those that are a fit with their current culture.
“If we go into another region, we want to start with leadership and good people; we’re not just randomly going out to try and find any firm that meets [a client need],” Tyree explained. “It really has to fit our culture and it has to have a leader in that area for us to go into that services.”
He also made the point that Sorren is still very much a work in progress — relying on current firm expertise to build national practices in tax, assurance, CAS and advisory.
“One goal when we originally started was we wanted to get to enough mass size that we could really start to build this by using leadership from and talent from all the firms that came on board,” Tyree said.
“It’s going to be super fun, but it’s a lot of work,” he added. “If all you’re looking to do is do a rollup or something like that, that’s probably not our style. We’re trying to create this for our type of client and our type of cultures. And we think there’s a little void there where we can do it.”
Donald Trump’s promise to strip Harvard University of its tax-exempt status prompted criticism Friday from a former Internal Revenue Service commissioner in the president’s first term, who said the process would take years and need a judge’s approval.
“The IRS will not allow itself to be weaponized,” former IRS Commissioner Charles Rettig said in an emailed statement to Bloomberg News. Rettig, who oversaw the agency from 2018 to 2022, was asked to respond to Trump’s social media post early Friday that said: “We are going to be taking away Harvard’s Tax Exempt Status. It’s what they deserve!”
Trump made the announcement after weeks of threatening a change to the school’s tax-exempt treatment, stepping up his attack on the Ivy League school.
Federal criminal law bars President Trump or the vice president from ordering the IRS to punish his political opponents or reward his allies. Rettig said the Treasury Department’s Inspector General for Tax Administration “closely monitors and investigates efforts to possibly influence IRS operations.”
The IRS cannot take any action on an organization’s tax-exempt status “without conducting an appropriate examination that would provide relevant information objectively supporting such an action,” Rettig said. “The IRS does not and should not conduct a ‘fishing expedition’ designed to hopefully uncover a relevant issue.”
Organizations also have administrative and judicial appeal rights that can take years to resolve before a federal judge approves a change in tax-exempt status, he said. “Throughout that process, there are many opportunities for resolution that would not result in the removal of the tax-exempt status of an organization,” he wrote.
Trump’s fight with Harvard escalated after it rejected his administration’s demands to reform campus policies to combat antisemitism and promote viewpoint diversity. The administration has frozen $2.2 billion in funding that supported projects including ALS and tuberculosis research.
On April 21, Harvard sued the U.S., claiming the funding freeze violated its free speech rights, and the government cannot dictate what it teaches, who it hires, and which students it admits.
In Trump’s second term, four people have held the IRS commissioner’s job on an acting basis.
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