Blake Oliver

CPA and co-host @AcctPod 🎧 a weekly news roundup for accountants. Founder @earmarkcpe — earn free CPE anytime, anywhere for listening to podcasts

[Blake Oliver @BlakeTOliver]

Would you trust financial statements you knew were missing $347 billion of commitments?

That’s the situation at Meta. GAAP allows purchase commitments to stay off the balance sheet until delivery. Future leases stay off until they commence.

But when one of these commitments turns into a default, who gets the blame? The auditors.

We talked all about it on Ep 502 of The Accounting Podcast: https://t.co/ccgSDtQQW9

[Blake Oliver @BlakeTOliver]

$80 billion is currently sitting in Microsoft's accounts receivable. In fiscal year 2022, its AR balance was $44 billion.

What changed? AI.

OpenAI, a company Microsoft has invested billions into, owes at least $6 billion of that. OpenAI buys compute from Microsoft but doesn't pay cash for it, yet Microsoft still books the revenue.

We broke down these wild numbers on Ep 502 of The Accounting Podcast: https://t.co/ccgSDtQQW9

[Blake Oliver @BlakeTOliver]

Revenue and cash aren't the same thing.

Alphabet and Amazon reported negative free cash flow, meaning they spend more on capital investments (like AI data centers) than they generate from operations.

We dig into these cash flow red flags on Ep 502 of The Accounting Podcast: https://t.co/ccgSDtQQW9

[Blake Oliver @BlakeTOliver]

Intuit posted $21.4B in revenue, up 14%. Yet the stock dropped after management admitted price is now the #1 reason DIY tax clients leave TurboTax.

It costs roughly $0.25 in compute to process a basic return. When AI makes marginal cost visible, charging $100–$200 for standard filing gets hard to defend.

We covered the story (and what clients are still willing to pay for) in Episode 503 of The Accounting Podcast: https://t.co/hUYQAYaJz1

[Blake Oliver @BlakeTOliver]

At age 20, Britton Ratcliffe became the youngest appointee to the New Mexico Public Accountancy Board.

As an accounting student, his primary interest is private equity.

When you remove partner equity from the long-term career track, what keeps young accountants in public accounting?

We interviewed Britton on Episode 503 of The Accounting Podcast: https://t.co/aNMBJ8fiVh

[Blake Oliver @BlakeTOliver]

ChatGPT scored a 1 out of 13. Gemini scored a 0.

That was on a test of two AI-generated cost segregation studies against the IRS's actual guidelines.

Over six weeks, three prospective clients brought Heidi Henderson of Engineered Tax Services studies built entirely with ChatGPT and Gemini. They wanted her licensed engineering firm to sign off on them.

On Ep 504 of The Accounting Podcast, we talked about how clients are using these tools and expecting a rubber stamp from professionals: https://t.co/qvp5pqlEnQ

[Blake Oliver @BlakeTOliver]

$8.5 billion. That's what liquidators are seeking from PwC over the collapsed Chinese property giant Evergrande.

PwC is using the same defense every global network relies on: the international entity was just a coordinating body, and liability stops at the local member firm.

But if a Hong Kong court decides the international entity is on the hook for roughly $5.3 billion, that's entirely different. That’s a lawsuit that could pierce the corporate structure every global network firm is built on.

We talk about it on Episode 504 of The Accounting Podcast: https://t.co/qvp5pqlEnQ

[Blake Oliver @BlakeTOliver]

Overall accounting salaries are up, but median entry-level pay dropped from $75,000 to $73,000.

We've spent the last few years trying to fix the accounting pipeline by passing alternative CPA pathways, but if entry-level pay falls, that's a massive red flag.

We talk about it on Ep 504 of The Accounting Podcast: https://t.co/qvp5pqlEnQ

[Blake Oliver @BlakeTOliver]

Register here: https://t.co/CvflzXpqw1

[Blake Oliver @BlakeTOliver]

20 years in accounting and I've never been to a CCH conference. For most firms, AI will show up inside software they already use. I'm going to watch it happen at CCH Connections, Oct 25-28. (Sponsored by Wolters Kluwer. Opinions mine.)

[Blake Oliver @BlakeTOliver]

EY is paying employees up to $25,000 to catch their own AI's mistakes.

They’re calling it a bonus for "human checks". But let's call it what it is: a bounty program for AI slop. This comes right after all four Big Four firms faced major incidents involving fabricated AI citations in their consulting divisions.

We talk about it on Episode 504 of The Accounting Podcast: https://t.co/qvp5pqlEnQ

[Blake Oliver @BlakeTOliver]

Your AI agent is the most remote worker you'll ever hire. It's brilliant, but it's stuck in a cubicle in another dimension, and the only way it can reach you is a text message. And that's why you're struggling to manage it.

[Blake Oliver @BlakeTOliver]

Audit fees at the UK's biggest listed companies rose 75% in a few years. Last year: under 2%.

It's AI. Cloud tools cut my CAS practice’s labor costs 5x. Audit never got that moment. Now it has.

Why a solo CPA could soon run a full audit practice: https://t.co/GkrAU4900T

[Blake Oliver @BlakeTOliver]

Claude caught six errors on my tax return that the software missed.

This year I handed my S-corp and partnership tax returns to Claude Cowork instead of working through TaxAct myself like I always do. I expected it to save me time. I didn't expect it to start finding bugs in the tax software itself.

I wrote about all six errors and what they mean for how firms should think about AI in tax prep on the blog: https://t.co/BEgw6m4Uet

[Blake Oliver @BlakeTOliver]

$3.6 trillion.

That’s how much AI company debt is tied up in circular deals between companies that buy from and sell to each other.

For scale, subprime loans made up about $1 trillion of the U.S. mortgage market before 2008.

On Ep 506 of The Accounting Podcast, we traced where we’ll feel the pain if this unwinds: https://t.co/3kydqH23Mi

[Blake Oliver @BlakeTOliver]

A French property company added €20 million to its EBITDA for AI savings... that haven’t even happened yet.

Bloomberg reported that Emeria booked expected efficiency gains from an AI rollout planned over the next two years, and counted them in its trailing 12-month earnings.

Why? Debt.

Companies create a new flavor of adjusted earnings when the real numbers don’t tell a story management wants to tell. As we mentioned on Ep 506 of The Accounting Podcast, it’s a great way to spot a bubble getting ready to pop: https://t.co/3kydqH23Mi

[Blake Oliver @BlakeTOliver]

The fastest way to write an SOP is to stop writing it yourself.

On Ep 506 of The Accounting Podcast, David Leary shared a story about a firm that closed for half a day so every department could document its processes. That’s one idea, but here’s the shortcut I use instead.

Pick one process. Invite everyone who touches it to a one-hour meeting. Record it in Zoom or Teams with transcription turned on. Have the team walk you through exactly how they do the work today. Then drop the transcript into Claude, ask it to write the SOP, and then ask it how to streamline it.

Listen to the full episode to find out how we let AI handle the tedious part of building SOPs: https://t.co/3kydqH23Mi

[Blake Oliver @BlakeTOliver]

A 76-year-old farmer tried to return $20,000 to the IRS. Years later, the IRS is still charging him interest.

According to CPA Practice Advisor, Wilson Perry Kirby mistakenly received a $20,000 refund in 2022. Knowing it wasn’t his money, he returned the check.

The IRS responded with endless notices and interest charges.

Get the full story (and our take on how to prevent something like this from heppening to your clients) on Ep 506 of The Accounting Podcast: https://t.co/3kydqH23Mi

[Blake Oliver @BlakeTOliver]

41 out of 42. That's how many Polymarket bets a mystery trader won on companies KPMG audited.

Federal investigators are looking into whether a KPMG employee is behind it.

I broke down what this means for firms in my latest post: https://t.co/A4WFmZO5jE

[Blake Oliver @BlakeTOliver]

Xero just spent a week apologizing to accountants after a sponsored Instagram post featured a UK entrepreneur bragging about saving hundreds of pounds a month by replacing her accountant with Xero and Claude AI.

Accountants noticed.

The backlash was so fierce that Xero pulled the ad and issued a public apology.

We dive into this fiasco on Ep 505 of The Accounting Podcast: https://t.co/m9k3fbFWWB