Tax Fraud as a Service
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David Leary: [00:00:00] Want to learn what sets LiveFlow apart from thousands of other QuickBooks Online apps. Do you want to learn how LiveFlow saves time for hundreds of accountants and bookkeepers. Want to learn how LiveFlow helps accountants and bookkeepers. To use life successfully in their firm. Stay tuned to hear more from our sponsor Live Flow later in the episode.
Blake Oliver: [00:00:22] There's lots of options now, and unfortunately, most accounting programs just steer people toward one path, which is CPA. Big accounting firms, lots and lots of hours. And that is no longer the only path it used to be. It no longer is now. Especially if you can learn, if you can teach yourself stuff like if you can learn those spreadsheet skills and you can learn those app skills, it's way more important to be able to demonstrate ability and knowledge like skills are more important than they ever were.
David Leary: [00:00:55] Coming to you weekly from the OnPay Recording Studio, this is the Cloud Accounting Podcast.
Blake Oliver: [00:01:05] Welcome to the Cloud Accounting Podcast. I'm Blake Oliver.
David Leary: [00:01:08] I'm David Leary. Are you standing to see me play?
Blake Oliver: [00:01:11] I am standing this week.
David Leary: [00:01:12] Yes. You had a swing when the music was going on.
Blake Oliver: [00:01:15] That's right. I've been on an exercise kick, so I'm trying to keep it going. All right. Trying to stay.
David Leary: [00:01:21] Mobile. I have not been exercising. You start to get old and things hurt and break, and then you kind of get off the horse. I had to get back on again.
Blake Oliver: [00:01:29] I have an important question for you, David, before we get started, which is, did you get your car?
David Leary: [00:01:34] So believe it or not. Believe it or not, Wednesday night, my wife got a weird email from Ford. Well, actually, I noticed last week the dates vanished off of the website. The date they vanished maybe Thursday night or Friday night. And I was like, Oh, God, I hope my wife does not see this.
Blake Oliver: [00:01:55] Well, okay, so for those who haven't followed the journey, you ordered a Ford Mach-e a while.
David Leary: [00:02:01] Christmas of last year.
Blake Oliver: [00:02:02] Okay. And you've been waiting for it.
David Leary: [00:02:04] So first we knew the supply chain. It takes a while for it to get into production. Then you had to compromise. Like, All right, we're. We're okay. If you pull out one of the computer chips or you don't. You ship it without it, so you have to make some concessions. And they finally build the car. It was built like end of May. Right. It was May 24th. It was built. And then they said it was shipping and we expected it to arrive July 15th or whatever it was supposed to arrive. And then we went on until late August. We finally got an email that said, The new date is going to be October. After we went round and round calling the dealership, I've been tweeting to Ford, right? Trying to get this car deliver. The communication ultimately is the big problem. So then we get this weird email Wednesday or Thursday and my wife forwarded it to the sales guy that the dealership locally that was kind of working with us. And he's like, I replied back, Oh yeah, your car's here. I'm like, He might. I think it's been there for four days, five days, six days, like crazy to like how I don't know if people are just overworked, but just basically customer service. So really, here's what I would like to do. I want to find the slowest transferring service we can find.
Blake Oliver: [00:03:17] And pay them and.
David Leary: [00:03:18] Pay them and be like.
Blake Oliver: [00:03:20] Just let it.
David Leary: [00:03:20] Get. Sorry, your money is on the dock. Yeah. An Argentine. Kansas. And there's nothing we can do about it. Right? Right. Just every time they ask me where the money is, like it's still in the same spot. I don't have any updates and or worse. I'll be like, I'm going to go research it and get back to you and then never get back. That's actually the. But this is like it's basic customer service. One is kind of the experience, but in theory. By the time people listen to this, there might be a picture of my wife's new car and I'll definitely try to play The Cloud Accounting Podcast on one of the TV screens in there because these cars are just tablet. They're basically big TV screens or big cell phones with wheels. So hopefully we'll see what we get here.
Blake Oliver: [00:03:59] Well, good luck on that. By the way, for those of us who are for those of you who have joined the live stream, the phone lines are open. So feel free to use the call in feature on Riverside. If you would like to chat with us, we'd love to hear from you. We have a lot of listener feedback, some mail that we've collected over the last few weeks. We could get into that.
David Leary: [00:04:22] We could do that and have a review. So if you've got mad.
Blake Oliver: [00:04:31] All right. So this is from Stuart. He says, Hi, Blake and David. I am a college student at the University of Notre Dame, doing a project on Intuit and QuickBooks for a class. I've seen some of your posts on your website and podcasts, and I figured if anyone would know about the future of cloud based solutions in the industry, that it would be you. I was wondering if the cloud based solutions provided by QuickBooks, Xero and other comparable products is the future. And more importantly, how long will it eventually take before most small businesses are using these products? Will eventually all small businesses use cloud based solutions for accounting? Looking forward to hearing from you, Stuart. So, David, what do you think?
David Leary: [00:05:08] I can take this. I mean, I replied to Stuart when he said that email in like I only own four stocks in my portfolio. Everything else is mutual funds. And for one case, who knows what's even invested in. Right? But I own Intuit, Zero, Oracle, NetSuite and Sage Intacct. I mean, you have to buy Sage and you have to buy Oracle. But essentially the for cloud accounting packages because. Oh, really? I'm long, long, long on cloud accounting. Right. So that's kind of where my stance in view of this is. Right. And the other thing I kind of framed up for him, I had this old slide. That I used in some decks because in two it used to release the number of QuickBooks Online subscribers every quarter that used to release that. And I had quarter by quarter an Excel spreadsheet somewhere I don't maintain anymore. And you could see the growth and really it all turned in November of 2013 when Intuit decided to make CapEx online a priority, and then they started onboarding 250, 300,000 online small business small businesses to QuickBooks Online. Right? A quarter. And now I think we're at almost, what, 10 million? I mean, QuickBooks Online's got, let's say, five and a half million zeros now at three and a half million, and that's pushing almost nine. Right. So we're getting close to 10 million to 11 million. Cut it out. People on Cloudaccountingpodcast.com counters.
Blake Oliver: [00:06:27] So how many businesses are there in the U.S.? You know, like, well, what is.
David Leary: [00:06:31] That? Why everybody counts this different ways. Like, I think I've heard numbers like globally there's 200 million small businesses and like, you know, counting people with coffee beans in a basket. You know, I don't know how you want to count it, but I think like addressable, if you really take like New Zealand, Australia, South Africa, UK, India, Canada, US, like people that are going to spend money on software, maybe Singapore. Right. I think the addressable market is probably 54 million ish. I always kind of reference it as like globally an ultramarathon, a marathon, 26 million or 26 miles and arguably there was about 2526 million small businesses and the old desktop days when desktop only did North America or US market and now globally the opportunity is 54 million. It's kind of.
Blake Oliver: [00:07:16] Yeah, I don't remember the exact numbers that I've seen, but I feel like we covered a story. It was a little while back about how in Enterprise anyway, we were over the 50% mark with cloud, and I know that it's more than that with small businesses. So we've already passed it. Right, So. Kyle said. I was considering calling in to discuss the sketchy amount of R&D tax credit studies being pumped out by fly by night type R&D credit shops. You talked about this two episodes or so ago. Kyle, feel free to call in if you want to talk about this. We await the ring.
David Leary: [00:07:50] Oh.
Blake Oliver: [00:07:51] Yeah. In the meantime, I'm going to go ahead and read another message that we got from a listener. This is from Brittany. Hey, guys. I had to laugh at the newest episode where you said A.I. and robots are going to take over. All the jobs for the youngest generation, and influencers will be the only career available. I hate to break it to you, but robots are already taking over there too. Check out Lil, Michaela, Lil, Michaela, Lil Michaela on Instagram. Not the only robot influencer, but one of the most popular with 3 million followers. Thanks for making accounting news enjoyable to listen to.
David Leary: [00:08:28] So I have a news article this week that I saw that we only go into all the details, but essentially it's talking about how robots are making your French fries at restaurants and the fast food industry is going to implement X amount of robots to do all this stuff. And it could impact 3 million entry level fast food jobs. And I was thinking we now have the labor pool to solve the accountants labor pool jobs we have. There's now 3 million people that are going to be in the labor pool that could all become accountants, bookkeepers, IRS agents. Right. The numbers are.
Blake Oliver: [00:08:57] There now, but we got to train them. So I was just thinking about this this morning. How do we solve the account accounting talent crisis? The universities are not going to do it. They're too slow. You're not going to get people to go back to school, pay all this money. It's ridiculous. They're expensive. We need to start accounting boot camps, just like the software people did a decade or more ago, where they said, We don't have enough developers, we don't have enough user interface designers, we don't have enough product managers. We're going to create our own boot camps. And you saw this pop up, the coding boot camps. And I have a friend who actually did one. He was a teacher in New York teaching in public schools for ten years, moved to L.A., did a boot camp and got a job as a user interface designer and is working for like a health care company making really good money. Now, we could do the same thing for accounting.
David Leary: [00:09:46] I mean, these things exist. I see the ads on Facebook all the time, like drive a taxi, being a bookkeeper, and they show me how I can make $153,000 a year like these classes exist. Now I have to come up with six or seven grand to take the class.
Blake Oliver: [00:09:59] Maybe not a scam like that, right? Maybe. Maybe something that's supported by firms that need accounting grads that they're not getting enough good accounting grads from the universities, They could support this. I don't know.
David Leary: [00:10:10] I want to start an industry. The tech companies.
Blake Oliver: [00:10:12] Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. And then they could pay. Like if you get a job at one of these firms or one of these private employers in accounting or finance, then they would pay for your education.
David Leary: [00:10:22] But why would any firms do this? Because I think we were on the Intuit Account Trends podcast, and I think that came out this week and I listened to it and you said it very, very well. If you're a partner at a firm possibly making 400, $500,000 a year, what do you care about the upcoming talent crisis?
Blake Oliver: [00:10:37] Well, when it starts to, like, really impact you, right, that's when you're going to.
David Leary: [00:10:41] You're going to be gone. Like you don't.
Blake Oliver: [00:10:42] Care.
David Leary: [00:10:42] That's the. So who's going to spend the money to develop this pool, these boot camps?
Blake Oliver: [00:10:47] Because what's going to happen is in the next ten years, the problem is going to get worse and worse and worse until it reaches a breaking point. And that's when they will invest because they will have no other choice.
David Leary: [00:10:55] Will they have any money to invest per point or is it too late?
Blake Oliver: [00:10:57] I don't know. Maybe it'll just be.
David Leary: [00:10:59] The new accountants will get their bailout. Finally, accounting firms will get the government bailout. That'll be it. Just hold out. Accounting firms just hold out. This episode of The Cloud Accounting Podcast is sponsored by. You collect. Are you still paying 1% for ACA to receive money from your customers? With you collect, you can pay as little as $0.30 per transaction. You collect as a two way sink to both zero and QuickBooks Online and gives you the features that the accounting systems lack, like installment plans, secure automatic payment, set up invitations, automatic receipts, and allows access to other credit card merchant providers beyond the ones that come with the accounting system, giving you more control over the service and fees that you pay. Sure, you collect may be new to me and to you. The Cloud Accounting Podcast listener. But Blake used you collect to automatically collect payments from his clients years ago when he had his own firm. For more information and a free 30 day trial, head over to Cloudaccountingpodcast.com promo slash you collect that is Cloudaccountingpodcast.com promo forward slash u. C. O. L. L. E. C. T.
Blake Oliver: [00:12:11] All right. Kyle is calling in. Let's take this call from Kyle. Kyle, welcome to the show.
Kyle: [00:12:18] Hey, first time caller.
Blake Oliver: [00:12:20] How are you doing? Thanks for listening. Thanks for calling in. So let's talk about R&D tax credits. What's the deal?
Kyle: [00:12:27] Well, a couple of episodes ago, you guys had a thoughtful discussion around the rise of R&D tax credits. And I think David even mentioned he had seen some TV ads for R&D tax credits. Yeah. And, you know, as a as a someone working for a CPA firm that produces a lot of business tax returns, we've definitely noticed clients asking questions around R&D tax credits. And I have to say, whenever you hear the term free government money being thrown around, there's a chance for some catchiness to be to happen. And I think I think we're kind of seeing that like we are starting to jokingly refer to some of the R&D shops, not all of them, but some of them as tax fraud, as a service.
Blake Oliver: [00:13:10] Tax fraud, as a.
Kyle: [00:13:11] Service.
David Leary: [00:13:12] Yeah, that's our episode there.
Kyle: [00:13:16] I would say that if you're the CPA, you know, think about who is signing the return, right? It's not a third party shop that's producing a piece of paper that says the government owes your client $100,000. It's your firm and your client are signing the return. Not that that other person, not that other group. Right. You don't you don't have a relationship with that other group. Probably you're not indemnified by them. Right. Who's going to who's going to take it on the chin if there's a problem with that.
Blake Oliver: [00:13:45] And so what is like fraudulent about these schemes or potentially fraudulent, I should say.
Kyle: [00:13:53] You know, just like even dial it down a little bit from the fraud term, just the government has some pretty strict requirements in terms of what constitutes legitimate R&D. And how you're supposed to document it. And it seems unlikely to me that a quick API pull from your Gusto payroll will give you all of the documentation that you need to defend yourself during an IRS audit. So that that's the. Generous view of work being done quickly, supposedly automatically, without the perhaps the level of diligence that a CPA who knows what they're doing would do.
Blake Oliver: [00:14:29] Right. Right. And they can do this because they aren't ultimately taking responsibility for the filing and they're taking a cut. Like a lot of these shops are taking a percentage of the fee.
Kyle: [00:14:41] Take some of them take 20%.
Blake Oliver: [00:14:43] Wow. And what is the average R&D or are we talking We're talking R&D tax credits here.
Kyle: [00:14:49] Mm hmm. It's not well published, but it's probably around 50,000.
Blake Oliver: [00:14:52] Okay. So each one of these for a shop that's taken 20% is a $10,000 bill.
Kyle: [00:15:00] With really limited risk because they're not signing the return.
David Leary: [00:15:03] Right. But even bigger. A lot of these startups, you know, if they're doing all they've hired so far as engineers, you have ten engineers, you have $1,000,000 payroll, somebody pulling out $110,000 to provide the service to you. So it sell as many as possible, because as soon as you get any win, it's highly, highly profitable. There's so much revenue if you're taking a piece of the action.
Blake Oliver: [00:15:21] So, Kyle, you're at a CPA firm and do you do you guys do R&D?
Kyle: [00:15:25] So we do R&D tax credits where it's one of our lines of business and we do not accept outside R&D tax credits. And it's a first of all, because it would be competitive with the line of service we can do. Secondly, we feel confident that we are following the rules and regulations here. And third, because we don't want to take on that. We do not want to take on the liability of one of these things being wrong. I mean, we have seen some. Pretty egregious quotes from R&D puppy mills saying things like puppy mills. We had a we had a client that had I'm going to extrapolate this a little bit to make it anonymous, but $15,000 in total expenses in their first year. And the R&D shop was saying that that whole thing can be counted as qualified R&D, even though it included stuff like CEO salary and overseas labor and things that like no chance in hell should be included as qualified R&D. So we see some we see some things that are pretty aggressive. And again, I think CPAs who are doing tax returns for businesses need to be wary of someone who brings them, a client who brings up a piece of paper from some third party that you'd never heard of that says, all of a sudden the IRS owes them a bunch of money.
Blake Oliver: [00:16:38] And Ray, who's in the stream in the chat, said, Then the scammer is closed shop and can't be found, or they put all the indemnification in their engagement letter agreements.
Kyle: [00:16:49] Yeah, I mean, so I think the worst case scenario is I don't remember when he talked about it, but a while ago this guy talked about the client subpoena issue. Did you talked.
Blake Oliver: [00:16:59] About that Alliant group got raided by the IRS? Yes.
Kyle: [00:17:01] Right. And that's kind of worst case scenario where you're a CPA firm preparing tax returns and some of your clients have given you a, you know, 67, 65 from a client and all of a sudden now you're getting subpoenaed because of it. Like, that's crazy. Yeah, that would be nuts. And so just imagine like a you know, Eiris might be understaffed, but they're not stupid. So as soon as a smart IRS agent discovers a couple of sketchy looking studies from a particular firm, they're probably going to go and do the same thing. They're probably going to go out and, you know, try to subpoena all the poor CPAs who produced returns using those things, you know.
David Leary: [00:17:44] Yeah, that means they're probably finding all these companies already right at this point. Now, are you also seeing, Kyle, an influx of employee retention credit people? Because I've seen a lot of commercials for that as well. Like, oh, it's so easy, you can just get this money. Are you starting to see? Because basically, I think these ads are reaching small business owners before you have discussions with your clients about it. Is that a correct assumption?
Kyle: [00:18:04] We do see people asking about that. And, you know, we believe we're able to guide them to an appropriate number for those that are qualified. Right. We put the work into to do it right. But it's there's definitely interest there. I mean, I would say a thing that we've noticed that's changed is that folks are now aware of the term tax credits. Right. It's they're actually searching for those terms online and they'll bring them up in discussions. Whereas five years ago, it wasn't something people really thought about.
Blake Oliver: [00:18:36] And for those who haven't heard one of these pitches or gotten one of these phone calls, we actually got one on our The Cloud Accounting Podcast listener voicemail line. So I want to play this for you. This is what your small business clients might be getting.
Voicemail Spam: [00:18:50] Hi, this is Kristen Stewart today, September 7th. I'm not sure if you've spoken to you find agent yet regarding your available employee retention credits under the CARES Act. But I do say your pre-qualification is up to $26,000 per employee with no repayment necessary for. I'm just going to go ahead and keep this company started for you. If you have about 5 minutes for me today, give me a call back and then go with the details with you as well as the benefit. My number is eight, six, six.
Blake Oliver: [00:19:23] I'm not going to.
David Leary: [00:19:24] Play the.
Blake Oliver: [00:19:24] Whole.
David Leary: [00:19:25] You want it to slide.
Blake Oliver: [00:19:26] So, David, $26,000 per employee. I mean.
David Leary: [00:19:29] That's W-2 employees on the.
Blake Oliver: [00:19:31] Payroll. There we go.
Kyle: [00:19:33] But you qualify. When did you start? What did you start? The business.
Blake Oliver: [00:19:37] Where do we start?
David Leary: [00:19:38] The Cloud Accounting Podcast 17.
Blake Oliver: [00:19:40] Yeah, but.
David Leary: [00:19:41] My.
Kyle: [00:19:42] Fun in federal prison, I guess. I don't know.
Blake Oliver: [00:19:45] Well, Kyle, thanks for that. Anything else you want to share with us?
Kyle: [00:19:48] No, You're doing a great job, guys.
David Leary: [00:19:49] Thank you. All right. Thanks. Thanks for calling.
Blake Oliver: [00:19:51] In. Have a good one. Well, that's great. And Ray said in the chat, like all tech stuff, there are complex rules that must be followed. R&D credits, PPP, Irctc, ITC, etc.. It's been this way for decades and always will be. And unfortunately, it's kind of easy these days to skip out on following those complex rules. It's the golden age of fraud. As our friends over on the Oh My Fraud podcast like to say, because we've got so many opportunities to commit it and not a lot of enforcement, right under resourced teams that just can't investigate all of this fraud. I got a story about fraud for this episode. There's an update on pandemic fraud. I know we all love hearing about just how much.
David Leary: [00:20:38] Money is this big arrest, because I think I heard this early in the week on NPR, there was this huge fraud. And then I was like, Oh, it'll be in my news articles. And I didn't see it come through because I think it's not directly PPP, but it's pandemic related fraud. Is this the one you're talking about?
Blake Oliver: [00:20:53] 45.6 billion.
David Leary: [00:20:55] This is the one. Okay, cool. Thank you. Fill me in now.
Blake Oliver: [00:20:58] Well, so this is not one single fraud. This is just in aggregate. The estimate is that 45.6 billion was stolen from US unemployment insurance programs during the pandemic, and it was intended to help people laid off during the COVID 19 pandemic. But fraudsters use Social Security numbers of people who were dead or in prison and filed for unemployment in multiple states. This is from the Labor Department's inspector general. More than 1000 people have been charged with crimes involving unemployment insurance fraud since March 2020. But are they going to catch them all? I think slim chance to none, right?
David Leary: [00:21:34] I found the article I was talking about.
Blake Oliver: [00:21:37] Different one.
David Leary: [00:21:38] So the U.S. attorney general announces federal charges against 47 defendants in a $250 Million Feeding our Future Fraud Scheme. So there's a nonprofit called Feeding Our Future. Plus, they had about 200 other quote unquote, meal sites in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and they basically perpetrated the largest COVID 19 fraud in the nation. So 47 people have charges against them. Well, across six separate indictments in three criminal informations with charges of conspiracy, wire fraud, money laundering and bribery. So I'll get this in the show notes for everybody.
Blake Oliver: [00:22:13] Yeah, I got more fraud stories. Let's just go through them real quick. Crypto king has luxury cars seized after 35 million vanishes. This is apparently the crypto king of Canada. Five luxury cars, including two BMW, SE, two Mclarens and a Lamborghini, have been seized from 23 year old Aiden fled Turkey, the self-described crypto king of Canada, during bankruptcy proceedings, according to a new report from the CBC. So apparently he took $35 million and it's not even clear if he ever actually invested the money. It was just a total scam. And he paid news publications to print articles about him like sponsored content kind of articles that then like, led people to want to invest with him. Yeah. The SEC has charged a technology company with revenue manipulation. So now we're going from, you know, to stealing money to manipulating earnings. This caught my attention because it was a company that I have purchased products from VMware. You know, VMware.
David Leary: [00:23:16] Very familiar with VMware, used it. Yeah, Yeah. In the old desktop QuickBooks Quality Assurance days of testing. It was great.
Blake Oliver: [00:23:23] Loved it. Yeah, because you can virtualize software in the cloud on.
David Leary: [00:23:28] Your snapshots of it. So if you're doing testing, it was good. You could snapshot a computer exactly what you needed it and then rewind it basically if you need to.
Blake Oliver: [00:23:36] Well, they have been charged by the SEC and they have settled, according to the SEC, starting in 2019, they would delay the delivery of license keys on some sales orders until just after the quarter end, which allowed the company to recognize revenue from those sales in the following quarter. The company did this enough times that tens of millions of dollars worth of revenue was shifted into future quarters, which provided a buffer in periods that they had less revenue in, and it obscured the company's actual performance for a given fiscal quarter. Their business was slowing in 2020 due to macroeconomic factors and also their switch to subscription based license sales that was hidden by the scheme. And basically once the shit hit the fan. The company's stock price fell by 37% after, you know, like they delayed the problem. You can only when you push revenue into future quarters, you can only delay something if that's part of a bigger trend. Right. So then they had a big cliff and then it fell by 37%. Now the problem is the real like the impact is that their reported license revenue was increased by 11% in the first quarter of 2020 due to this. So that's a material very material amount. And they also continued to sell stock the whole time. So they were selling stock at an inflated value based on fake earnings or.
David Leary: [00:25:03] Stephen more public company still. Again, I know they've went private. I remember.
Blake Oliver: [00:25:07] If the SEC is charging them of this, then yeah.
David Leary: [00:25:09] So they've had to have somebody audit these financial reports and sign off on them.
Blake Oliver: [00:25:15] Where were the auditors? Right. You always wonder about that. So here's the thing is they didn't admit or deny the findings. They didn't admit wrongdoing. They got a cease and desist order that they consented to and they have to pay an $8 million penalty. So that's it, Just $8 million penalty. And just like you wonder, why does this keep happening? Why do CFOs and CEOs do these schemes? Because they don't personally ever like. Rarely do they pay the price for it.
David Leary: [00:25:45] Yeah. So I've a fraud story.
Blake Oliver: [00:25:48] All right, let's do it.
David Leary: [00:25:48] So it's. I have homework for everybody. Pause the podcast if you'd like. Right now, you can pause. Go to Netflix and you're going to find a new documentary on Netflix called Scandal. Scandal, which maybe that's a German spelling, I'm assuming bringing down Wirecard. So we talked about Wirecard in the past. Wirecard essentially was the big tech darling of Germany. They were kind of like a PayPal slash square type company square app. They really heavy in the prepaid gift cards. They had point of sale terminals. They're moving money around. They were really the Facebook or the Google of Germany because Germany always had like old industrial, but they really wanted to have that tech company. And so everybody in the country was just so behind Wirecard no matter what and to where they had blinders on to it being a fraud. And so this documentary, it touches on everything essentially. In the end, they were laundering money for Russians and the Russians. It didn't, you know, there's political ties and everybody had like everybody had wire cards. All the politicians, like everybody was just getting money put on these wire cards. Where it's coming from, they're spending it. It's not trackable, it's not traceable.
David Leary: [00:26:59] You know, they faked the books. Right? And this reporter traced out started this in 2014, calling out that they were a scam. And it took until late 2019 for it to all come crumbling down. And during this time, it got to the point where this money was being used to stop immigration or block immigration to get certain people elected to German positions in government. It created instability. So when I watch this, I'm stepping back in like, remember, you-I failed to audit this correctly because they just use fake bank statements and all that. And I'm like, Here we go. The failure of a good audit, a reliable audit, is now causing political instability in countries and possibly the rest of the EU like it caused political instability. Now that one founder is still on the run, nobody's caught that guy. But watch this documentary. It's got like people threatening, people spying. It's got it's got all the it should be actually great for it to be just a dramatized movie one day to right like it'll you could see it already being built as a movie like that but watch this documentary It's amazing.
Blake Oliver: [00:28:04] Scandal bringing down Wirecard. I'm going to add it to my Netflix list.
David Leary: [00:28:09] Rea made a comment and I thought about this myself. Our journalists, the new auditors. And I'm like, Yeah, how did this one guy figure all this out? One journalist for the Financial Times.
Blake Oliver: [00:28:19] When the auditors don't even bother to do bank confirmations.
David Leary: [00:28:23] Properly? What I suspect is the auditors probably had Wirecard’s that were getting they juiced up, they'd spend on it. It's not traceable.
Blake Oliver: [00:28:30] So where was the money coming from?
David Leary: [00:28:32] Russian mobs in Russian.
Blake Oliver: [00:28:34] So they were like giving a.
David Leary: [00:28:35] Company, whatever. Yeah.
Blake Oliver: [00:28:36] Yeah.
David Leary: [00:28:37] Well and then what really set off the, the go that things were not adding up correctly in this company. Apparently Wirecard grew really fast because the US used to let people do online gambling and then they created that law and they banned that. So companies can't move money in online gambling and that was probably 50% of the revenue. So when that went away, the very next year, they still grew and they grew the next year and they grew the next year, even though in theory all the revenue was gone. But you're sort of cooking the books. They're just cooking the books year after year after year. And it's just crazy that. It almost like that mindset of like there are too big to fail, Like everybody wanted them to be successful, so they just let it go. Well, nobody cared. This episode of The Cloud Accounting Podcast is sponsored by Life Flow. Think about this If you have approximately 60 clients and create five reports a month for each of them, that's over 3500 reports a year. And let's say you're really fast and only takes you one minute per report. That's almost 2.5 days a year you spend creating reports.
David Leary: [00:29:40] Here are a few of the ways LiveFlow saves time for so many accounts and bookkeepers. Once you create the perfect suite of reports for a client, you can just copy the Google sheet. Use LiveFlow to connect it to a different client's QuickBooks Online company and you're all done. The new reports will pull in the data for the second client automatically. You can easily drill down on the details of each number on a LiveFlow report, including drilling down to the transaction level to navigate directly to the transaction inside of QuickBooks Online. No more opening QuickBooks Online to search for specific transactions. Live on Google sheets are in the cloud so you don't have to waste time emailing files between your team and your clients. And you can give your clients access to a suite of reports that they can access any time, eliminating one off request for you and your staff. So learn more about using LiveFlow and how you can save 20% off your first three months here. Cloudaccountingpodcast.com slash LiveFlow that is cloudaccountingpodcast.com promo forward slash live e flow w stop manually updating your spreadsheets with LiveFlow.
Blake Oliver: [00:30:41] I want to get back to listener mail because we've got to clear that backlog.
David Leary: [00:30:45] And we should delete all this Wirecard stuff because I don't want the Russians coming after me after watching this documentary.
Blake Oliver: [00:30:49] Now they're too busy. They're too busy.
David Leary: [00:30:51] Too busy.
Blake Oliver: [00:30:51] Yeah. Let's take a listen to this.
Joe: [00:30:54] Blake, this is Joe Rothman. I just had to leave you a voicemail, so I'm in my fifties, you know, 30 year corporate accounting as a reporting person. And I just became aware of the Bach and Cloud Accounting podcast and that fraud podcast in the last couple of weeks just can't get enough of them. It's so entertaining. So, so and then you have great guests, so even more learning than just the boilerplate stuff you hear on the Big Four podcast, podcasts or webcasts. Not that they're bad, but this is really good in addition to those and much more entertaining. And so I just spent the night in my and started and really enjoy the content.
Blake Oliver: [00:31:47] Joe Hartman Thank you so much Joe, for that and thanks for subscribing to earmark. By the way, if you're listening, you can get free CPE for listening to The Cloud Accounting Podcast on the earmark CPE app. Download it on the App Store today. So I keep going.
David Leary: [00:32:03] You got another listener feedback or we jump into other stuff. Now where are we going?
Blake Oliver: [00:32:07] This is more listener mail, more listener.
David Leary: [00:32:08] Keep going.
Blake Oliver: [00:32:09] Keep it keeps going. We've got lots of listeners. This is from John Pierce. Thanks, Blake and David for your outstanding podcast. I only discovered it about a month ago. The new UK Prime Minister was an accountant before she entered into politics. Just thought you might use that as content for helping us accountants not to underestimate ourselves when it comes to leadership and management. And that is from John Pierce, CPA in Sydney, Australia.
David Leary: [00:32:34] That's good. We need we need more political leaders that are accountants or understand technology like one of the two. And if you understand both, like, Great, please, I'll vote for you.
Blake Oliver: [00:32:44] What was her career before? Let's see.
David Leary: [00:32:49] She worked her LinkedIn page, Connect with her.
Blake Oliver: [00:32:51] I'm on. I'm on her. I'm on her LinkedIn or know her Wikipedia page. If you're important. David, you have a Wikipedia page.
David Leary: [00:32:59] Do we have one?
Blake Oliver: [00:33:01] No, we probably do. Maybe we should.
David Leary: [00:33:02] Any listeners want to spin up an official Wikipedia page for David and Blake? It would be great.
Blake Oliver: [00:33:08] So from 1996 to 2000, Liz Truss, the new UK Prime minister, worked for Shell, during which time she qualified as a chartered management accountant, ACMA in 1999. In 2000, Truss was employed by Cable and Wireless and rose to economic director before leaving in 2005. So a chartered management accountant. Well, hopefully she'll figure out how to get the UK in order when it comes to their budget, their economy. All that good stuff. More listener mail. This is from Jeff Golden to David and Blake. I am 51 years old and on my last year of school for my bachelor's degree in accounting. 51. Last year, school for bachelor's degree. When I started college at 48 in 2019, I decided to listen to every podcast I could about accounting. And when I found yours, I just had to go back and listen to every episode since I started listening in 2019. I haven't missed a single episode and I thank you for your take on the accounting world. Most of the other podcasts I've found are all about growing a firm that you own and really aren't geared towards students.
Blake Oliver: [00:34:14] Even though your podcast isn't either. It really covers a broad range of topics and provides a lot of great information about the accounting world. I'm glad you started the Accounting Twins podcast because of its perspective toward people just starting their accounting careers. It's great that we'll be able to listen to their take on the public and private accounting world, Although I know it's geared for 20 somethings coming out of college, I think it will have a helpful experience for those of us changing careers later in life too. I have many questions I'd like to ask, but two main questions I have are in regards to starting a career in accounting. First, because there are so many apps out there that are used in the accounting world. What do you think are some of the main ones that someone who is getting ready to start their accounting career should try and get experience with? David I'll let you answer that one. That's the first question. Then I'll get to the second one. So, so many apps out there, what should they start with?
David Leary: [00:35:02] You have to start. I mean, are you with QuickBooks? It's you're going to come across that the most in most situations. But fundamentally, if you can learn QuickBooks, you can easily use Xero. It's not a big deal and you can move into the other ones instinctively. You can start navigating between them and then learn an app that scans receipts and bills and you can use one, you kind of use the other ones and then you kind of expand out from there. But in general, there's only so many ways these apps can skin a cat. So if you if you or the other option is you go really niche and only learn the things for an industry that you go learn the toast point of sale and how to configure that and hook it all up. Right? Because that's going to be a lot different than doing a construction app, right? But in general, start with QuickBooks for sure.
Blake Oliver: [00:35:43] Quickbooks and I would add the Granddaddy Excel. Take one of those. There's lots.
David Leary: [00:35:49] Of given. It's always like the given.
Blake Oliver: [00:35:50] Well, but not always right. I feel like a lot of accounting professors don't teach Excel like they never even spoke the word when I was in school, you know, like, so take one of those Excel boot camps and those do exist. You can get really, really good pay for it, pay for a high quality one. And if you are just like slightly better than everybody else in your office, they'll think you are a God, right? If you know, if you know stuff beyond like intermediate stuff, like what? X look up and I don't know. VLOOKUP And you know like that's like that's most people is like Max they max out at that like pivot tables and stuff. If you can go beyond that, you will be very in-demand. And then I would also say if you want to get into like what's the future of accounting, learn some of these no code tools. And by that I mean like automation tools like Zapier, Integra, Matt, which is not called make. If you can plug that in to QuickBooks and figure out how to build automations and automate your own work that you are doing as a entry level person, if you have to start there, you'll also be in very high demand because as we've talked about on this show many times, there aren't enough accountants, we aren't producing enough. The only solution is going to be technology.
David Leary: [00:37:06] And that's where I think if you think about where we're at, if I go back a decade ago. So Blake, when you were the young person getting into this space and you were one of the early cloud of cloud accounting adopters a decade ago, 12 years ago. Yeah. I feel like that excitement and that personality type if that makes any sense. It's happening with the no code. Like no code is the next generation of cloud accountants. Yeah, in a way.
Blake Oliver: [00:37:30] And you can go way beyond accounting with no code because you can automate all sorts of processes in a business. And yes, that does have downstream impact on the accounting and you need to have the accounting there. But you can get into like automating marketing, automating operations, you can become that CFO slash SEO kind of person in a business if you understand it all. Like so that I would actually say if you want to have a real impact on a business, learn QuickBooks, but also learn HubSpot or Salesforce, learn the system that's being used to manage sales as well. Because a lot of times the people that know that don't know the accounting and they can't figure out how to get things working right. So like the financial reports don't line up with whatever the sales reports and marketing reports are. A lot of marketing is just data. Now it's funnels and conversion rates and it's funny like gross profit and marketing funnel. It's the same concept in a lot of cases. So his second question is he had a second question. Continuing back to the email from Jeff. My second question is regarding the CPA Starting an accounting so late in life, is it really worth? Sitting for the CPA. I know it depends on what you want to do in accounting, but does the benefit outweigh the time, commitment and the cost? Thank you for such a great podcast.
Blake Oliver: [00:38:49] Keep up the great work. Well, that second question is a big loaded one. Is it worth the time, commitment and the cost? Does the benefit outweigh it? And I guess I'll have to take that one, David, since I'm the CPA. Right. I would say that for me it outweighed it. The benefit has definitely outweighed it because having CPA at the end of my name opens up a ton of doors, builds a lot of credibility given what I do, which is talk about accounting. It really helps to have that have done that. And if you're going to be working with CPAs and CMS and EA's and anyone who has a license, they're going to give you more credibility. You're going to have more credibility with them if you have a designation or a license yourself. So that just is. I would say it's worth it. It was time consuming. It was expensive. But I think you can mitigate that. For instance, I didn't go get my fifth year of education at a master's program. I looked at how much that would cost and how long it would take, and I said, That is not worth it. I can learn this stuff myself. So I got community college credits and I did it at Santa Monica College online. I did some of the cheapest stuff I could just to get it done with. I invested them.
David Leary: [00:40:08] I played the game. You're like, I'll just get 150 hours by study guides. Pass the test.
Blake Oliver: [00:40:12] Yeah. You know, underwater.
David Leary: [00:40:13] You didn't really like. I'm going to get my master's in accounting now.
Blake Oliver: [00:40:16] And now nobody.
David Leary: [00:40:17] Cares.
Blake Oliver: [00:40:17] Go down. No, but I've never had anybody care that I don't have a masters in accounting or that I have. Like, nobody even cared that I didn't have, like, an undergrad in accounting. The accounting degree is irrelevant once you have the CPA exam.
David Leary: [00:40:31] So in theory.
Blake Oliver: [00:40:32] And the CPA.
David Leary: [00:40:33] Like. If it's really that's the value is the letters and the test. Like shouldn't we allow people without a degree to take the test? If you can prove knowledge, if the test is so great, you should be able to become a CPA.
Blake Oliver: [00:40:46] Yeah, I've always thought that, like if you can pass the exam without taking the accounting courses that does that not demonstrate you have the knowledge. So should we not allow people to do that? It seems like making them sit in a classroom if they already have the knowledge is a waste of time.
David Leary: [00:41:05] And usually those are super smart people that learn really quick and then they'll never come in our industry because we turn them off, making them sit through school.
Blake Oliver: [00:41:12] Right. We want those people. We want the really smart people who don't need to sit in a classroom and can learn from a book.
David Leary: [00:41:18] So those people can go start a startup and create $1,000,000,000 company and billions and billions of value. Right. But well, that's our profession, though.
Blake Oliver: [00:41:28] Right. And so for people who are very skilled and have a lot of choices, that's what's turning them away from accounting, is they go to college and they're majoring in some sort of business thing, or maybe they start majoring in accounting and then they realize, oh, I have to do five years for this instead of four. Well, that seems silly. Why would I spend 20% more time to make the same amount of money or less money than I'm going to make doing this other business degree. And that's what we're up against. That's what we're competing against, and we're losing people for that reason. So I say get rid of the fifth year, let people sit for the CPA exam without having all this credits that they have to earn. If they can pass the exam, make the exam harder. If you're worried about people not being qualified, you know, like so I don't get it. To me, it's just a way for universities to guarantee enrollment into their programs, right? It's like it's a barrier to entry and it just it helps them.
David Leary: [00:42:24] They're scratching each other's back. Right? The universities filled the big four, the big four scratches. They're like.
Blake Oliver: [00:42:31] Yeah, exactly.
David Leary: [00:42:32] It's what do you call it? The industrial. The industrial.
Blake Oliver: [00:42:36] Complex. Educational and accounting. Industrial complex. Yeah. I mean, that's basically what it is. You're guaranteeing employment for these professors. But then because they've been so secure, they haven't advanced the curriculum. And so the curriculum hasn't changed in decades and decades. And it's not what you need to know to be successful in accounting. They're trying to do it with the CPA Evolution Project, which is, you know, add some tech into the exam. But I've heard about this for a while now. It doesn't seem like the curriculum is going to majorly change. Like, what are they going to add one class that's not going to make the difference that needs to happen. So but anyway, like my point is still it's funny, I can be critical of the way the CPA is managed, but I still think it's worth it. But also, I don't think the CPA is the only path like you might want to look at CMA or being an enrolled agent.
David Leary: [00:43:29] Well, there was what we covered that with. So you go there's like ten or 12 different letters you can.
Kyle: [00:43:34] Get, right? Yeah.
Blake Oliver: [00:43:35] In the industry, there's lots of options now and. Unfortunately, most accounting programs just steer people toward one path, which is CPA. Big accounting firms, lots and lots of hours, you know, And that is no longer the only path it used to be. It no longer is now, especially if you can learn, if you can teach yourself stuff like if you can learn those spreadsheet skills and you can learn those app skills, it's way more important to be able to demonstrate ability and knowledge like skills are more important than they ever were.
David Leary: [00:44:06] And now we have an experiment. We have the Accounting Twins podcast. You can follow along on this journey, and we're going to finally find out if getting the CPA is worth it versus not worth it because you have identical DNA, identical people taking two different paths, like we have the experiment. We're going to finally have the answer to this question. You can just go to accounting twins dot com and follow along.
Blake Oliver: [00:44:25] That's great. Separated at Graduation.
David Leary: [00:44:32] This episode of the Cloud Accounting Podcast is sponsored by Lucio Stephen Brewer and company CPAs has a blog post on their site titled Why Don't We Email and Text Clients? Here's the TLDR Email is one of the least secure methods of electronic communication. Text messages can be intercepted, emails and text messages can spread viruses, malware, etc.. Need to protect personal info, name, address, date of birth, social security numbers, bank account numbers, etc. You're probably wondering how Stephen and his team communicate with clients they use. Lucio. Lucio allows you to have secure real time communications with your clients via a mobile app that includes reminders, task management, e-signatures, document scanning and exchange and uploading and unlimited storage. If you are ready to significantly improve your staff's focus, collaboration and relationships with clients, head over to Cloudaccountingpodcast.com Promo slash Lucio. That is Cloudaccountingpodcast.com Promo for Elyse CIO.
Blake Oliver: [00:45:33] One more one more email here. This is from Sara, work CPA. Hey guys, I know how much you love cryptocurrency, so I wanted to share with you this little clip from a spot I had on the news last night. Colorado seems to be dialing into the virtual currency crowd with a move to start accepting crypto via PayPal. Enjoy. So I'm going to I'm going to play this clip, David, because it's kind of cool that one of our listeners was on the news in a story that.
David Leary: [00:46:05] You call out on the news.
Blake Oliver: [00:46:07] Shout out to The Cloud Accounting Podcast. No, no, unfortunately, no, none of that. But let's see if I can get this over here.
KREX News Clip: [00:46:16] Earlier this month, Colorado became the first state to allow cryptocurrency to be a valid way to pay your state taxes.
KREX News Clip: [00:46:23] Most consider crypto a gamble. So Kerouac's mark, but went to find out how this plan will work and how it will affect Colorado taxpayers. Value is in the eye of the beholder. Tax manager Sarah worked with local accounting firm Stranger. Tallman and Loucks specializes in cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin or Ethereum. They've grown massively popular since they first appeared more than a decade ago. But even with that growth, it's still a minority of people who participate in the crypto market. They may think that this is exactly what they've been waiting for and they're really excited that the state is on board with allowing them to use digital currencies to pay their tax bills. However, I don't think for the majority of people, the mainstream, I don't think that this is going to have any effect from them. Cryptocurrency critics worry that the digital currencies market volatility could endanger our state's treasury. Sarah tells me there's no danger of that with the current plan, which requires you to basically cash out so you're not technically paying more taxes with cryptocurrency. You're selling your cryptocurrency using the PayPal app and then paying immediately with the dollars receipt.
KREX News Clip: [00:47:30] This may make the new payment method safe for the state, but Sarah is worried that anyone who takes advantage of the crypto payment plan may face unexpected costs. You may be paying taxes with cryptocurrency, but you're also incurring a tax. Actually, if you have capital gains on the basically the sale of that cryptocurrency in order to pay your taxes. You are creating basically a registered gain on the sale of your cryptocurrency if, if in fact you do have a gain. So Governor Polis has bragged about the move proclaiming Colorado as tech forward. And even though the change is revolutionary for now, it comes at a cost for anyone hoping to use it on top of the taxes and possible capital gains taxes, you'll pay the Department of Revenue an additional $1 charge, plus 1.83% of the total amount needed to cover taxes and fees. Sarah has one last piece of advice for anyone interested in crypto. I caution everyone who's interested in cryptocurrency. Please invest with care and only invest what you can afford to lose. This gambling first on the western slope mark but cracks five news.
Blake Oliver: [00:48:42] So there's two things there that are ridiculous about this whole thing. Number one. You're not actually paying your taxes with crypto. It's B.S..
David Leary: [00:48:56] No, this is a headline grabber announcement.
Blake Oliver: [00:49:00] Yeah, because you're just going on PayPal and you're converting your crypto into US dollars and then paying the state. They're just automating that conversion and they're taking a crazy fee. They're taking one point something percent, like closer to 2%. To facilitate the transaction.
David Leary: [00:49:22] Yeah. Every time you move money into bitcoin and out of crypto, like ten people get a piece of the action.
Blake Oliver: [00:49:28] It's very expensive.
David Leary: [00:49:29] It really it really trickles down quickly.
Blake Oliver: [00:49:31] And this is the problem with crypto. Like this is the problem is like it's not actually fulfilling any promise to make payments easier for most people. It's very expensive to pay in crypto because of these costs to convert.
David Leary: [00:49:45] I guess the assumption is this like you have a big you're one of these crypto pros. You've got a huge tax bill. You know, you have no excuse not to pay it. You're just like, Right. Like, I think. Is it kind of like that? Like now you can't say like, well, I couldn't pay it because all my money was in crypto.
Blake Oliver: [00:50:03] Yeah, but the problem is, as Kyle points out in the chat, it's actually really smart. You probably will owe capital gains taxes when you sell your crypto so the state gets even more taxes. And then when you sell your crypto to pay those taxes, they get taxes.
David Leary: [00:50:16] This is genius.
Blake Oliver: [00:50:17] Move, genius. You need some sort of Excel function to figure out what your actual tax bill will be after you finish paying all of the taxes this way. Ah ...
David Leary: [00:50:25] It's great. I have a quick review if you want to get to that. Now that we're done with all our.
Blake Oliver: [00:50:30] Might.
David Leary: [00:50:30] As well listener feedback. This review is Five Stars was on Apple Podcasts. This is from Walt Underscore W.V., not VW, W.V. It's a five star review, educational and entertaining Get to number one. Fantastic content, thoroughly enjoy the range of topics and depth of conversation. Blake and David's knowledge of the industry and honest options about where we are and where we could go. Keep me coming back week after week. Really, we love a podcast shirt to XL, please. So well, you have to track me down at some event we're at and we'll definitely get your shirt. If not, just shoot me an email. David earmarked em.
Blake Oliver: [00:51:08] Well, David, do we do app news or do we save it for next time because we've got 10 minutes?
David Leary: [00:51:12] Is any app news like there's not anything in app news that I would fight my life over, but I do think we should touch on the two Trump things.
Blake Oliver: [00:51:20] Okay, let's do that instead.
David Leary: [00:51:23] So, because in my opinion it feels like there's two non articles here, but we should take this knowledge that this happened. So one of the things is Mazars Trump's old accounting firm that separated themselves from him are apparently working with Congress and they're handing over some documents.
Blake Oliver: [00:51:40] Yes, but they reached a settlement to finally provide the Trump documents for certain years. Yeah, that they prefer.
David Leary: [00:51:49] But they want this. They just said Mazars is being very cooperative. They won't say what the documents are. Yeah, it's kind of a non headline article again, right?
Blake Oliver: [00:51:58] Yeah. Yeah. Well, and so the whole the whole thing about this thing is, is like the question is and this is what I think Letitia James same thing that she's sitting on.
David Leary: [00:52:06] Yes.
Blake Oliver: [00:52:06] Organization for is so the attorney general of New York, Letitia James, is suing the Trump Organization in civil court for fraud. And essentially it comes down to is it fraud? If the Trump organization inflated the value of assets to obtain bank loans and then deflated the value of assets to pay taxes? And allegedly, it's a lot something like going from a $75 million valuation of Mar a Lago to $750 million when it came time to get money from the bank. And like I wonder if that spread is going to be a problem.
David Leary: [00:52:47] This is where I feel like I was really confused. Like, why is it a civil suit? She's attorney general. Like, why is it not criminal charges?
Blake Oliver: [00:52:53] Well, and that's.
David Leary: [00:52:54] Maybe what looked at difference that basically it's this. If you don't have the burden of proof, you don't file criminal charges.
Blake Oliver: [00:53:03] I mean, if you don't have the evidence.
David Leary: [00:53:04] A lot less burden of proof. So, again, I feel like. Is this just constant chasing of Trump is like nothing ever going to stick. Is there anything really there or is it just going to this constant.
Blake Oliver: [00:53:17] Right.
David Leary: [00:53:18] You know, there's 220 page lawsuit and there's nothing in all this stuff to have a criminal charge. And this goes back to the reporter with Wirecard. All these people are digging in to Trump. Across the board, there's reporters. There's all these organizations. There's no criminal charges. So it's like I'm trying to feel like this reinforces, you know, the right side, that this is a witch hunt. This is if there's real something here, make a criminal charge like stop wasting money in these because this is just going to get tied up and the payout to be a settlement, nobody's going to serve time.
Blake Oliver: [00:53:52] Right. And the.
David Leary: [00:53:52] Headline.
Blake Oliver: [00:53:53] Thing that's related to the criticism, this is political. It's not a good use of resources. And we'll see. We'll see what happens. But I'm not hopeful that, you know, I mean, I'm not hopeful. It's like I'm not wishing for this to, you know, for like a guilty verdict or something. But like, I.
David Leary: [00:54:10] Just don't care because then does it stop? Let's just stop. Please, just file the find the criminal complaint and filed the criminal charge. Like, just figure it out. I don't know. It just goes on and on and on. And, you know, we'll be. We'll be gone and dead, and I'll still be doing this investigation.
Blake Oliver: [00:54:26] Well, David, that's it for me for this week. How about you?
David Leary: [00:54:31] That's it.
Blake Oliver: [00:54:32] All right. Where can people find you online?
David Leary: [00:54:34] I'll be driving my wife's car and I'll be fully connected. The electric vehicle. But I'm @DavidLeary.
Blake Oliver: [00:54:40] I'm at Blake T Oliver. You can also send us a voicemail. Blake at Blake. Oliver. Send me a voicemail or call in. Join The Cloud Accounting Podcast live. We stream now, and the way to get notified of that is follow us on LinkedIn. Search Cloudaccountingpodcast.com LinkedIn. Follow our company page and you'll get updates when we create live stream events. We're also on YouTube, Facebook. We're going to play around with a few different ways to stream this show, and we'd love to hear your thoughts on that. It's great interacting with you. Thank you so much to everybody who joined us today live and offered their feedback.
David Leary: [00:55:23] And one day we'll stream it live right inside the earmark account. An earmark?
Blake Oliver: [00:55:28] Yeah. Oh, yeah, that's right.
David Leary: [00:55:29] And let's do it there.
Blake Oliver: [00:55:31] Get your CPE download Earmark CPE. Each week we release one episode of the Cloud Accounting Podcast is a free CPE course. It's usually for the prior week. So if you watch this, you listen to this next week or the week after this originally released, go on the earmark app, find The Cloud Accounting Podcast channel, take your quiz and get your free CPE certificate.
David Leary: [00:55:54] And what's the latest numbers on this? I think I saw a tweet go out earlier this week that you have 3000 members. Yeah, 3000 people have used earmark to get credit. How many hours are you at now?
Blake Oliver: [00:56:04] So 3000 people have downloaded and signed up for the app. We call them members. If they've done that, we have delivered 10,000 CPE certificates, so 10,000 course completions since we launched the app. So that's a lot of hours. I'm glad we could save you the trouble of having to go get those in person or attend yet another webinar. Thanks to everybody who's given.
David Leary: [00:56:32] A call them ears. Here's Mimi Beer. I don't know, something we're trying, but I think that's probably wrapping it up. We're going to get cut off here and got three more seconds, Right.
Blake Oliver: [00:56:41] All right. Talk to you next week, David. I'll see you, everybody. I'll see you in Sweet. We're at Sweet World.
David Leary: [00:56:46] We'll be recording all day.
Blake Oliver: [00:56:47] Sweet world, Oracle Sweet world Talking net sweet talking to the founder, Evan Goldberg. And we'll have some special episodes coming out soon from that. Hi, everyone.
David Leary: [00:56:57] Bye.
David Leary: [00:57:00] Time for the classifieds.
Blake Oliver: [00:57:03] Hey, podcast listeners, it's Blake, and I wanted to let you know about a new show I'm working on with CPA slash comedian Greg Kite and blogger slash former CPA Caleb Norquist. It's called Oh My Fraud. And it's a podcast all about financial crimes. That's right. A true crime podcast for accountants by accountants. Caleb and Greg are going to come together every couple of weeks to unpack their favorite frauds and explore the circumstances, psychology and interpersonal dynamics involved. They also fully indulge in victim blaming the defrauded widows, orphans, infirm and feeble minded. Because who can resist? If you fancy yourself a trusted advisor or prefer your true crime with spreadsheets instead of corpses? Listen to this show to learn what to watch out for and to keep your clients, your firm, and even yourself safe. To subscribe, go to Oh My Fraud or Search Oh My Fraud on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.
David Leary: [00:58:00] Want to get the word out about your newsletter, webinar party, Facebook group, podcast, e-book, job posting, or that fancy Excel macro you just created. Why not let the listeners The Cloud Accounting Podcast know by running a classified ad at the show notes for the link to get more info?
