As Mahatma Gandhi famously said, “If you don’t ask, you don’t get it.” I bring this up because young accountants (and soon-to-be accounting graduates) are increasingly telling me they must take any assignment their firm gives them. 

I understand not wanting to make “waves” when you’re just starting your career. But if you don’t have a clear vision of your future self as a CPA, then you’re never going to get there. And when you continually settle, you could be on the fast-track to burn out. Tri-Merit’s CPA Career Satisfaction Survey, among other studies, have shown that burnout is not only caused by long hours and constant stress. It can also be caused by boredom or just feeling increasingly disengaged from your job and your colleagues.

In a perfect world, your company or firm should collaborate with you to align your work with your career goals. This is huge for recruiting and retaining top talent like you. Unfortunately, it doesn’t always work out that way. That means you need to take charge of controlling your career and for being your own advocate. That means getting clear about your passions. 

Identifying your passions

I’ve had a lifelong love affair with entertainment, gaming and numbers. As a child I always claimed the role of banker when playing Monopoly. Growing up, I loved playing video games with my siblings too, whether it was Mario Kart battles or teaming up in co-op adventures. Outside, we spent hours playing football and basketball where competition and strategy were just as exciting. That drive for competition and the thrill of winning — whether in video games or sports — fueled my love for gaming.

Watching characters evolve and worlds unfold has always inspired me. It’s part of what drives my passion for connecting finance to these industries. In many ways, a financial statement is a big puzzle to solve.

I started my career at the Big Four firm where I had interned in college. I was thrilled to have a job at such a prestigious firm even though I knew my first stop — auditing for a large retail chain in Florida — was not where I wanted to spend my career. To lay the groundwork for a transfer to a more interesting area, I made sure I was always one of our group’s strongest performers and used my spare time to scour the firm’s website to identify the partners and managers in charge of the media and entertainment practice. I stayed up on current events in the entertainment industry and even took CPE courses to learn more about accounting issues and nuances of the media and entertainment business.

Once the retail audit in Florida was done, I reached out to my resource director and asked if she knew of any job openings in the media and entertainment practice. The firm had NBC as a client in Los Angeles and New York. It had just opened up a smaller audit for the Puerto Rico division that was headed up in Florida. I liked my chances. But the retail group needed someone year-round in my role. Since I was one of the strongest performers, they didn’t want me to go. So, I kept working hard but never stopped pushing for a transfer and was finally offered an audit assignment for NBC New York. Right before I accepted the transfer, an older colleague I was close with told me that if I really wanted a career as an entertainment industry accountant, then I would have to be in Los Angeles where all the action was. Plus, I didn’t want to go back to the cold weather after my time in Florida.

Instead of moving to New York, I kept looking for opportunities on the West Coast. Eventually, a recruiter told me about Siegried, a nationwide leadership and financial advisory firm with a growing presence in the Los Angeles entertainment market. I flew out for a weekend interview. I was hired soon thereafter as a 23-year-old senior accountant and moved to LA. 

I quickly got exposure to entertainment industry leaders such as Caesars and Fox. The Fox assignment was especially rewarding as we had to create 16 new financial statements from scratch for different parts of the company that never had their own financial statements before.

From Siegfried, I moved on to Netflix and ITV America before starting my own firm, KCK CPA, which provides accounting and financial advisory services to entertainment and cryptocurrency companies. I had always been interested in entrepreneurship, so going out on my own felt like a natural career progression. I even started CPAcon, a conference designed to help change the narrative in accounting and to bring excitement, competition and community through gamified learning into the profession. CPAcon is essentially the accounting industry’s Super Bowl!

5 keys to charting your ideal career path

1. Clarify your goals: Understand why you’re passionate about an industry and how it aligns with your skills and career aspirations. Even if you don’t know what your true passion in life is, that’s OK. What types of things do you find yourself doing when nobody is forcing you to do it? What energizes you? For example, if you like shopping, you could look into career opportunities in retail. If you love cooking and hosting dinner parties, you could consider the restaurant or hospitality industry. Try to get part-time jobs or internships in those industries, so you’ll get a feel for which parts of the industry you like and which parts you don’t like before making a full-time commitment there.

2. Do your research: Learn about your current (or prospective) firm’s involvement in your desired industry. The web and AI have made it incredibly easy to do research on targeted companies and industries. But you must also get out and talk to people in those industries and ask them what their experiences have been like. Also talk to the managers and their direct reports at your firm who are working in your targeted industry. They’re tasked with helping to develop talent and so they’ll appreciate knowing what you’re really interested in and think you might be good at. Lean into face-to-face interaction, even if that makes you uncomfortable at first.

3. Show your value: Highlight your performance and explain how your interests could benefit the firm, such as bringing fresh perspectives or expanding the client base. There’s always a need for fresh ideas and approaches in our profession. Accounting firms are prone to SALY (Same as Last Year) thinking. But you’re young. You can bring in a fresh take such as: “Hey, I understand how you guys do this. But I learned this: x, y and z. Do you think this would be interesting to you?” They might not agree, but it shows you have an interest in their business and that you’re taking the initiative to learn. That will help you stand out.

4. Have a thoughtful conversation: Schedule a meeting with the managers and resource directors at your firm to discuss your career development, share your interests and propose actionable steps, like taking on relevant projects or clients. They usually have control over your schedule and how your time is allocated at the firm. Make them your allies. 

5. Be patient but persistent: The influencers you’re trying to reach are busy people and may not have the same sense of urgency as you do. This is one of the hardest lessons for young professionals to learn. Just because you sent someone a text or email doesn’t mean they’re going to drop everything to read it. You must keep reminding them who you are and what you’re seeking. You may need to follow up every week or two (put it in your calendar or reminder tool) to keep the heat on. Don’t worry about being too pushy —- they’ll let you know if you’re over-stepping. More often than not, they’ll appreciate the courteous, professional reminders. 

No one knows you better than yourself and it’s on you — not your employer — to chart your most fulfilling career path. Be your own advocate. My journey from retail auditing to entertainment industry accounting wasn’t just luck — it was the result of careful planning, persistent networking and a clear vision of where I wanted to go. You can too.

Cutting IRS staffing in half over the next 10 months would mean less help and longer waits for many U.S. taxpayers and increase the risk that wealthy tax cheats escape paying what they owe.

It also would leave the Internal Revenue Service with its smallest workforce since at least the 1960s, according to official IRS data.

The Trump administration plans to cut the number of IRS employees in half by the end of the year, Bloomberg Tax reported Tuesday. But gutting the workforce so dramatically and so quickly could mean slower refunds and processing of returns for many Americans, taking the agency back to the difficulties it experienced before an infusion of tens of billions in new funding under the 2022 tax-and-climate law known as the Inflation Reduction Act, according to tax professionals.

“This strikes me as foolhardy, unless your intention is to bankrupt the US government by essentially making tax-paying optional,” said Kimberly Clausing, a tax law professor at the University of California at Los Angeles and a former Treasury Department official under President Joe Biden. “I think the approach they’re following so far seems to be taking a wrecking ball to the system without concern for the consequences.”

The planned job cuts in an IRS workforce that in January was roughly 100,000 would come across the agency. They would include attrition, layoffs, and two already-announced efforts: the firing of probationary employees, and Trump adviser Elon Musk’s “deferred resignation” plan, under which some employees have resigned in exchange for getting paid through this September.

About 12,000 employees have already left the agency under those two efforts.

“The IRS needs more people, not less,” said Lee Meyercord, a partner at Holland & Knight. Job cuts like these “will reverse the dramatic improvement in recent years in taxpayer service, collection, and enforcement.”

Tax cheats “will sleep better at night,” Clausing said, anticipating that audits of wealthy people would be more drawn-out, less efficient, and less probing when they happen at all.

Structure changes, uncertainty

Not everyone has the same view of the workforce changes.

Halving staff numbers “will force the IRS to rethink how it’s structured and how it operates,” said David Kautter, federal specialty tax leader at RSM US LLP and a former Treasury Department tax official during President Donald Trump’s first term. The administration still wants to collect taxes, but the huge cuts are an expression of the idea that the IRS “needs to change” and “do something different,” he said.

But large staffing cuts would mean longer waits for taxpayers to resolve disputes with the IRS, said Nikole Flax, a principal at PricewaterhouseCoopers and a former commissioner of the IRS’s Large Business & International division.

There would be “less opportunities for tax certainty” if dispute-resolution programs like appeals, fast-track settlement and advance pricing agreements become less accessible to taxpayers, she said.

Longer waits on dispute resolution would also cost companies money, in the form of continuing legal fees and interest that keeps accruing on their tax bills.

‘Distrust of the government’

Which areas will feel the greatest impact will depend on exactly where the job cuts ultimately are made, said Monte Jackel, principal at Jackel Tax Law and a former IRS official. Whether they’re from employees generally or focused on IRS divisions such as LB&I and the Office of Chief Counsel; whether they’re primarily in Washington or outside Washington.

“I don’t know how they’re going to prioritize it,” Jackel said.

The consequences of the job cuts could be long-lasting, said Janet Holtzblatt, senior fellow at the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center.

Next year’s filing season was already looking “shaky” anyway, she said, because IRS funding via the Inflation Reduction Act is supposed to dry up by the end of this year, and layoffs will only deepen the problems with IRS performance.

“In combination, it adds to the distrust of the government and it creates further vulnerabilities in the IRS’s ability to administer the tax code,” Holtzblatt said.

The threat of major job cuts has already decimated morale among IRS employees, said David Carrone, an IRS revenue agent and a chapter president for the National Treasury Employees Union in Arkansas and Louisiana.

“Your whole routine is gone. You’re waiting for that tap on your shoulder,” Carrone said. Employees continue to do their work, he said, but “the reality of the situation is everybody’s head is spinning.”

Kautter said the job cuts will spur the agency to adopt technology rapidly to carry out its work.

But improved IRS technology isn’t a substitute for the people needed to conduct complex audits of wealthy people’s complicated returns that are needed to force them to pay up, Carrone said.

“The computer can’t catch those.”

Aprio, a Top 25 Firm based in Atlanta, has acquired JMS Advisory Group, a firm that specializes in unclaimed property compliance and escheat process development, also based in Atlanta 

Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. Aprio ranked No. 24 on Accounting Today’s just released 2025 list of the Top 100 Firms, with $485.34 million in annual revenue. JMS Advisory Group is bringing 12 team members and two partners to Aprio, which currently has over 2,100 team members and 205 partners. 

JMS was founded in 2006 and helps clients mitigate risk and capitalize on opportunities through managed unclaimed property compliance. The team includes attorneys, CPAs, CFEs and others.

JMS has a wide range of clients, including enterprise companies, financial institutions, credit unions, insurance companies, hospitality and health care organizations.

“As Aprio continues its rapid growth, we are committed to expanding our services to meet the evolving needs of our clients,” said Aprio CEO Richard Kopelman in a statement Tuesday. “The addition of JMS gives us the opportunity to continue strengthening our position as a future-focused advisory firm. JMS’s focus on escheat management and asset recovery not only enhances our current capabilities but also allows us to deliver even more impactful solutions to help businesses navigate complex compliance challenges.”

JMS president and CEO James Santivanez is joining Aprio as a partner and provides guidance to clients on unclaimed property and state and local tax issues. 

“We created JMS to make an impact nationally in the unclaimed property consulting industry, and I’m proud of our nearly 20-year history of helping clients mitigate risk and capitalize on opportunities resulting from accurate and properly managed unclaimed property compliance,” Santivanez said in a statement. “Joining with Aprio takes us to the next level, allowing us to build upon our success while providing even greater value to our clients. This is an exciting next step in our journey.”

JMS founder and director Sherridan Santivanez is also joining Aprio as a partner. He specializes in representing clients before state enforcement authorities and managing complex audits and voluntary disclosures for some of the world’s largest companies. She provides strategic guidance on audit preparation and navigates interactions with state and third-party auditors.

Aprio received a private equity investment last July from Charlesbank Capital Partners in Boston. The firm recently announced plans to open a law firm in Arizona known as Aprio Legal LLC, in partnership with Radix Law. (KPMG has also recently opened a law firm in Arizona known as KPMG Law US.) Aprio has completed over 20 mergers and acquisitions since 2017, adding Ridout Barrett & Co. CPAs & Advisors last December, and before that, Antares Group, Culotta, Scroggins, Hendricks & Gillespie, Aronson, Salver & Cook, Gomerdinger & Associates, Tobin & Collins, Squire + Lemkin, LBA Haynes Strand, Leaf Saltzman, RINA and Tarlow and Co.