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Overworked vs. overlived | Accounting Today

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The following statement is going to ruffle some feathers, but here we go: Work-life balance is a myth. As productivity guru, David Allen, once said: “You can do anything, but not everything.” 

If you’re in the early stages of your career, you’ll likely choose one of two paths:

1. Overworked. You choose to focus on your career by working long hours and gaining as many skills, experiences and professional contacts as you can. You’ll feel overworked at times, but that diligence will hopefully pay off down the road. By working your tail off and acquiring some battle scars early on, you’ll eventually have great skills, contacts and hopefully a decent bankroll. At this point, you’ll have a wide variety of options about what you want to do next. 

2. Overlived. You choose to take advantage of your freedom, good health and youth. You want to enjoy yourself, pursue your passions and take in as many life experiences as possible before “settling down” into career and family life. Money may be tight, but you’ll have a lifetime of memories, and a robust social media feed. Great. But that could lead you to approaching the next stage in your life/career with noticeably fewer career skills and work experiences. 

Which camp is the right camp?  This is totally up to you.  

I know this may sound stark, because most young people will tell you they want a balance between paying their dues at work and enjoying life. But fast forward 10 years and they almost never find the balance they hoped for. Ask any successful person who claims to have great work-life balance and they’ll tell you about how hard they worked as a young professional, how tough their bosses were, how many red-eye flights they endured flying coach and how much adversity they had to overcome. They have flexibility that seems attractive now because they have already put in the hard work. Now they can reap the rewards of their early sacrifices. To borrow a sports analogy: You have to do the reps; you have to do the work if you want to make gains.

Another way to look at the overworked vs. overlived dilemma is to ask yourself what kind of a team do you want to be on at this stage of your life? 

Do you want to be on a Super Bowl champion like the Kansas City Chiefs or do you want to be on a fun-loving cellar-dweller like the Texas State Fighting Armadillos from the 1991 movie Necessary Roughness. That team partied all the time, had no scholarship players, and relied on a 40-year-old has-been quarterback to lead them. 

If you’re a young person starting your career, you’re not pursuing a job as much as you’re choosing a team. Some of the teams “recruiting” you will stress their culture: “We have flexible hours. Everyone’s really nice. The pay is decent. We have pizza every Friday and fun team-building exercises,” they’ll tell you. “Sure, we get some work done, but it’s really about balance and having a good time,” they’ll add. Think Michael Scott and the fictional Dunder Mifflin paper company from The Office.

But other teams, like the high-performing ones, will tell you straight off the bat that you’re going to work long hours, and you won’t get to work from home or choose which days you get off. They also won’t sugarcoat how stressful work will be at times. Their expectation is that stress within reason can be a good tool for leveraging better performance.

So why would you want to join a team like that?

Because those teams are at the top of the profession. Their culture is about everyone growing and pursuing excellence. It won’t be as much fun on this team, but after a few years, you’ll have incredible skills and experience to put on your resume and an enormous network of contacts who can help you throughout your career. Many members of the New England Patriots championship dynasty didn’t love playing for Coach Bill Belichick, but they sure loved the bonus money and the Super Bowl trophies.

Here’s the key: If you don’t want to practice hard, and you don’t care about winning games or championships and you aren’t passionate about getting better, then pick the easier, fun-loving team. There’s nothing wrong with that. But when you look back 10 years from now, which team will you say you wish you were on? 

The really nice team, with the calm, relaxing, supportive environment may not have had high expectations, but the stress level was low and you’ll have made good friends there. But how many games did you win? The other team told you: “We’re here to work hard. We’re here to do great work for our favorite clients, whom we love being a resource for. They come to us because they know we’re the champions.” This level of commitment comes at a cost. Do some people get burned out on a championship team like that? Sure. That kind of culture isn’t for everyone. 

No shortcuts to success

It all comes down to how much you want to grow and how fast you want to grow. Ben Horowitz’s book The Hard Thing About Hard Things shows there are no shortcuts to success. Anyone who tells you they “work smart, not hard” has already put their reps in and pushed through a lot of adversity to get to where they are today. Again, there’s nothing wrong with taking a more laid-back approach to your career. Just set your goals accordingly. 

If I’ve learned one important lesson throughout my life and career, it’s that the harder thing is usually the right thing. It’s usually the path to fulfillment. As author Jerzy Gregorek said, “Hard choices, easy life. Easy choices, hard life.”

How did you decide which team you wanted to be on? I’d love to hear from you. 

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Accounting

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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Accounting

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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Accounting

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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