The 2021 Top 100 People: The major issues facing accountants

December 6, 2021 9:00 AM

Unsurprisingly, the Great Resignation was far and away the most urgent issue on the radar of this year’s Top 100 Most Influential People.

Recruiting and retaining talent, as well as making the profession as a whole more attractive to prospective accountants, were common answers to the question, “What is the most important issue currently facing the accounting profession?”

Additionally, the Top 100 mentioned other staffing concerns, such as diversity and inclusion, as meriting attention, along with challenges in a host of other areas, including the pending tax reform and the profession’s recent pivots into nonfinancial reporting and emerging technologies.

(To see the full responses of all the candidates for the Top 100, click here.)

Two top issues that remain consistent in their impact on the accounting profession are the ability to attract and retain talent — especially diverse talent — and the ability to innovate and adapt in a changing environment.
— Joe Adams, managing partner and CEO, RSM US

The Great Resignation! I don’t believe most firm leaders are really worried about it, but they should be. The business model has not changed fast enough and now our team members have a clearer vision of what they personally want their work to look like in terms of hours, connection with people, flexibility and true life/work balance. The opportunities for them to leave—not just their firm but the profession—are readily available. We simply have to make our profession more inclusive and welcoming. We are behind and we have a lot of catching up to do.
— Sandra Wiley, president, Boomer Consulting Inc.

The profession — along with regulators and policymakers — is being tasked with determining how to best disclose material nonfinancial information, such as ESG data on climate change, human capital management and more. These issues play a role in a company’s long-term value creation, and we know that investors are increasingly using this information to make investment decisions. And investors and other stakeholders deserve to have the same confidence in ESG and other nonfinancial information as they do in financial disclosures.
— Wes Bricker, vice chair, U.S. trust solutions co-leader, PwC US

Finding the balance between the financial statement user’s desire for more granular information with the costs of providing it.
— Richard Jones, chair, FASB

The biggest issue facing us is the attractiveness of the profession as compared to other career options. This starts with getting high school graduates to choose accounting as a major as they enter college, and then keeping those students on the 150-hour path, winning accounting graduates over to our lower-paying entry level jobs, and then keeping them in the profession once they join a firm and find all of the aspects of the business model and traditional mindsets that simply have to change. The potential loss of all of this bright young talent is my No. 1 worry for our profession – which offers so much promise. We are waking up to this as a systemic issue and one that needs each of us to take immediate action, but the change is glacially slow and we’re still losing ground.
— Jennifer Wilson, co-founder and partner, ConvergenceCoaching LLC

We recently polled 600 accountants and bookkeepers on that exact question, and there was a very clear answer: keeping up with demand. This has proven even harder as the industry reimagines how and where work is done. Accountants’ value to their clients has increased far beyond keeping track of debits and credits. As clients seek more advisory and tech-enabled services, accountants need to invest in growth, from adding new services to investing in data analytics and automation, but at the end of the day it also comes down to talent and building a future-focused team with diverse skill sets.
— René Lacerte, CEO and founder, Bill.com

The most important issue facing the profession is the lack of diversity. This inadvertently fosters exclusive working environments and a lack of equity throughout the profession. As the world becomes smaller, those who work in the profession must reflect the communities they serve and be inclusive and equitable in opportunity. IMA and CalCPA’s study revealed that less than half of accountants (48%) believe the profession is equitable, while 43 to 55% of female, nonwhite and LGBTQIA respondents said they have left an accounting firm because they saw a lack of equitable treatment, with at least 30% leaving due to a perceived lack of inclusion.
— Darryl Jackson, director of diversity, equity and inclusion, Institute of Management Accountants

Johnson-Dobek-Sarah-Innovautus Consulting

The professions mental health and business model. People are leaving in droves. I can’t go a week without hearing about someone else leaving the profession because of the working hours and demand. Even with all that firms are doing, getting past the mindset of a 2,400 hour year isn’t going to cut it.
— Sarah Dobek, president and founder, Inovautus Consulting

The most critical issue facing the accounting profession is hiring and retaining talent. Companies are struggling to build a pipeline of qualified diverse talent due to biased recruiting processes and a decline in interest in the accounting field among high school and college students. Additionally, the accounting profession is being impacted by AI, which is rapidly increasing the need for accountants to upskill continuously. AI is also creating a need for more diversity among scientists, researchers, and academia to ensure new technology is equally beneficial to its users and is without bias toward those impacted by it.
— Guylaine Saint Juste, president and CEO, National Association of Black Accountants

To retain the best and the brightest team members, and to ensure that audit remains relevant, we need to shift to a model that empowers team members to think innovatively about using technology in the audit. We need a model that moves the focus away from billable hour quotas to a focus on the deliverables. Instead of worrying about whether someone is putting in the requisite hours, a better approach is to make them accountable to completing the task, at a high level of professional quality, by a specified deadline. This approach works well in the remote world. If someone finds a tech tool or a process that enables them to complete the task in fewer hours, they should be rewarded for their innovation. Our current system punishes them for not meeting billable hour quotas.
— Alan Anderson, founder and president, Accountability Plus

I worry there are not enough buyers to take over all the firms being sold by retiring Baby Boomers. We risk losing the local/small firm if we don’t create more supply of small firm entrepreneurs.
— Jeff Phillips, CEO, Padgett Business Services

Talent – We can’t go back to the way we were. We can’t go back to fill all that office space we were and are currently leasing. We can’t go back to creating firm cultures the way we did in the past. Our team members didn’t just get a taste of the remote work environment. They lived it and it became the new way to do business. As owners of firms the office space issue is our problem and we’ll get past it. We’ll find new ways to develop strong cultures without coming into the office every day. Let’s protect our most valuable assets, our talent – our team members. Let’s listen to what they want and let’s work together to build stronger firms. Let’s not resist this change, let's embrace it and not run the risk of losing talent to other industries.
— Jim Bourke, managing director of advisory services, WithumSmith+Brown

Looking ahead, we need to invest in the future of the profession. We have a unique opportunity to reimagine how we tell the story of our profession, because the work we do is incredibly meaningful. We must focus on how we can help make the accounting profession an attractive destination for college students – and do what we can to remove barriers to entering it.
If there are any impediments blocking the pathway into the accounting profession, and perhaps, limiting diversity, we need to transcend those roadblocks and focus on access.
— Kelly Grier, U.S. chair and managing partner and Americas managing partner, EY

Everyone knows staffing is the most critical current issue. But the bigger issue is lack of strategic future-think, due to lack of bandwidth. It’s a perfect time for competitive players to infiltrate and leave us with nothing but compliance work, while they grab the more lucrative non-compliance market opportunities.
— Gale Crosley, president and founder, Crosely+Co.

First, the accounting profession, like most professions, is struggling to get young people to become accountants. There is tremendous competition for college graduates and there are lots of alternative professions. Second, the last and the current administrations are very tax policy centric. Keeping up with what federal tax changes that might be enacted is critical and complicated. Clients are constantly looking to advice on how to react to real or possible tax changes. Third, state governments are very active in discussions about changes to their own taxes. State and local taxes are often a very significant part of a client’s tax burden.
— Scott Peterson, VP, U.S. tax policy and government relations, Avalara

Capacity. We hear it time and again, and yet firms have been slow to adopt new technologies that automate repetitive tasks. The profession has more stressors, higher demand and a war for talent going on – my hope is that during these important strategy planning months, we see greater adoption of key AI solutions.
— Kacee Johnson, senior director, strategy & innovation, CPA.com

Continuing to instill trust with stakeholders by demonstrating extraordinary integrity, professionalism and quality. These tenets are foundational to succeed in our business. Today, how we increase the use of technology, build quality into all that we do, and reimagine how we work and develop talent are essential as we think about the future of the profession in the context of rapid digitization and the rise of ESG. It’s also impossible to separate those focuses from the imperative of advancing diversity, equity and inclusion within our firm and the profession.
— Paul Knopp, U.S. chair and CEO, KPMG LLP

Ensuring that the information provided to financial statements users is relevant and useful in making investment and capital allocation decisions. From a standard- setting perspective, that means continuously focusing on understanding the evolving needs of financial statement users.
— Hillary Salo, technical director, FASB; chair, Emerging Issues Task Force

The advancement of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), and strengthening the pool of diverse talent through upskilling, reskilling, and other investments, continue to be among the most important issues and opportunities facing the profession. The business landscape is dramatically shifting. Among the changes is unprecedented interest from investors, asset managers, proxy advisors, consumers, and other stakeholders, for companies to incorporate DEI into their core strategies. DEI is also incredibly important to the work we do, and we need teams that reflect diversity of thought and perspectives to help solve our clients’ most challenging issues.
— Joe Ucuzoglu, CEO, Deloitte US

The most important issue facing the profession is the shift in business dynamics – after decades of focusing solely on financial measures, the future is non-financial; it’s human capital, ESG, etc. Our profession must ensure we have the skills to lead in these spaces. The addition of nonfinancial measures also requires us to stay on top of rapidly evolving advocacy issues. The regulations and guidelines for these non-financial measures are currently being developed and we must ensure our profession has a seat at the table when crafting the framework around these measures.
— Anthony Pugliese, president and CEO, Institute of Internal Auditors

Most urgent: Burnout and morale which is going to require firms to carefully assess their clientele to consider the longer-term cost/benefit of keeping certain customers. The sooner firms do this the better — like 2021/2022 is pretty critical. Delay will dilute firms’ ability to thrive sufficiently over the next two to three years.
— Michelle Golden River, owner/president, Fore LLC

Our biggest challenge right now is a societal one — and that’s a labor shortage and a hyper-competitive market for talent in the U.S.
— Tim Ryan, chair and senior partner, PwC US

The most important issue currently facing the profession is what I call the “race for relevance.” The business environment is disruptive and fast moving, and we live in a “VUCA” world filled with volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity. The challenge is in ensuring that professionals are adequately equipped with the skills they need in the future – data science, analytics, and visualization (including statistics and applications coding), and the ability to develop and successfully communicate long-term strategy. This requires new thinking on education and post-graduate training, which the profession has so far been moving toward only gradually. We need a greater sense of urgency in upskilling our profession to remain relevant and influential, now and well into the future.
— Jeff Thomson, president and CEO, Institute of Management Accountants