The Accounting Podcast

Attention: This is a machine-generated transcript. As such, there may be spelling, grammar, and accuracy errors throughout. Thank you for your understanding!

Matt Foreman: [00:00:04] You know what I always say is the job of a lawyer is to worry about everything going wrong. I was taught to draft documents a lot, and this is how I think lawyers draft documents is if in three weeks after signing the documents, every single one of the partners hate each other, hate each other, and so you have to figure out a way out. And that's what the operating agreement is. It's your roadmap for doing it.

David Leary: [00:00:28] Coming to you weekly from the NPR recording studio. This is the Cloud Accounting podcast.

Blake Oliver: [00:00:37] Hello and welcome to the Cloud Accounting Podcast. I'm Blake Oliver.

David Leary: [00:00:40] And I'm David Leary.

Blake Oliver: [00:00:41] And we are live with Matt Forman. Welcome to the show, Matt.

Matt Foreman: [00:00:45] Hello. I'm glad to be here.

Blake Oliver: [00:00:47] Matt I'm so excited to have you here because it's the week of the Silicon Valley Bank collapse. I know you've got to have opinions on that because you have so many opinions about everything. And I want to hear what you think about that. I haven't really been able to prepare. It's been a crazy week for us. And so I know you'll you'll help us fill all the time with everything, everything you want to talk about. And I'm glad you speak up and you speak your mind. It is March Madness. You got a you got a team in this bracket?

Matt Foreman: [00:01:15] Yes and no. You know, I went to Penn State for law school. So I guess the answer is Penn State. Suny Albany didn't make it. You know, they had a good run maybe ten years ago where they made it a couple times and they made it to about they were down by 2 or 3 to a number one or number two seeded UConn. When I was a first year in law school, I think it was first year law school. And then UConn realized what was happening and kind of blew them out. So, no, not really. Not that strong. So.

Blake Oliver: [00:01:43] All right. Well, you're still watching it, though. That's what you were doing right before we got on. I see. Michael is in the audience. Michael, thanks for joining us. He says, I think we're seeing each other too often, guys. Smiley face. No, we can't see each other too often, Michael. Like David said, we're becoming professional twitch streamers. We haven't yet put The Cloud Accounting Podcast.

David Leary: [00:02:02] Two hours today, though. That was last week. Two hours is a lot.

Blake Oliver: [00:02:05] It is a lot. That was on Monday, David, wasn't it or. No, that was last week. You're right.

David Leary: [00:02:09] Oh, and then we did Monday again. I forgot. Yeah. We did another stream on Monday. Yeah.

Blake Oliver: [00:02:13] Well Matt, it's great to, you know, see you on the YouTube stream here. Is that the Empire State Building right behind you?

Matt Foreman: [00:02:21] That is the Empire State Building. Wow. The big building you see right here. I'm kind of turned around a bit. That's the Times Square Hilton, which is much less exciting and much less notable If you if you were to look out the window that way, which you have to walk up here and look over, you can see 30 Rock. I see a building with a Thomson Reuters logo on it, which I know everyone's super, super loves them these days. So that's that's fun. Hopefully they don't sponsor it or anything like that.

Blake Oliver: [00:02:46] No, I think in order to sponsor the Cloud Accounting podcast, you actually have to have like a real cloud product. Is that a requirement, David, or will we take anyone's money.

David Leary: [00:02:56] At this point? We'll take anybody's money. Depends on what bank it's coming from, but we'll take it if it makes it here.

Blake Oliver: [00:03:02] We've got another viewer here at Cordis Tax and Advisory says Do not show the building. I would have to move.

Matt Foreman: [00:03:09] I'd have to move my camera too much. But yeah.

Blake Oliver: [00:03:12] Christopher says, Beautiful day in.

Matt Foreman: [00:03:14] Nyc. It's actually in the mid 50 seconds today so it's probably it's probably 55 or so out, which you know, Blake lives in Arizona so he's he's not that impressed by mid 50 seconds but it's a wet 50 so it feels much warmer as opposed to a dry 50. Oh yeah but you know spring and fall in New York, there's nothing better.

Blake Oliver: [00:03:30] My brother is a public school teacher in Manhattan, and so I try and go up and visit him at least once a year. And I just love being in the city. I would I would live in New York. I would be a New Yorker if I could. I say that I know a lot of people move there and then they realize they can't hack it and they leave. But I feel like I feel like I would enjoy it a lot.

Matt Foreman: [00:03:49] It's a it's a speed that's tough at times. It's an intensity that's often times that I think are tough. It's also I mean, it's expensive to live here, which is another issue. But I love the speed of things. I love having everything around and I love Central Park. I love museums.

Blake Oliver: [00:04:03] So it is expensive. But Matt, you are a tax attorney and so I imagine that is a pretty decent living and allows you to enjoy the city. I would love actually to learn from you. And on behalf of our listeners, what is it what is it exactly that a tax attorney does? David was asking me before we got on, he said, Is Matt a CPA? I said, No, he's not right. He's a lawyer, right? That's right. Correct. Okay. And so, like, how did you get into tax then? Like, because, you know, a lot of people get into tax through the accounting side of things, but you got into it through law.

Matt Foreman: [00:04:35] Yeah. So I was finance undergrad. I like most, 18, 19, 20 year olds had no idea what I want to do with my life. I'm still not you know, I joke that I don't know what I want to do when I grow up, but I didn't know what to do and sort of made an offhand comment once. This is an awful thing to admit to my mom that I was thinking about going to law school and she's like, Oh, we'll pay for like a LSAT prep course. And so I was like, This is great. It'll get get my parents off my back for a couple of months about a job after graduation. So I took the LSAT prep course, I took the LSATs on my 21st birthday, which I don't recommend doing. It really was not was not fun. I mean, the night was fun, the day was not. And went to law school and my, my law school at the time required everyone to take tax your your first semester fall semester of second year. And so I took tax took basic federal income tax which is more or less a. And 40 class and I enjoyed it. I thought it was interesting. It was the first class I took that I thought was actually trying to solve a problem.

Matt Foreman: [00:05:34] And the laws, the rules made any sense whatsoever. A lot of one first year you learn about I mean, in torts, the first will get to this in a second, but the some of the big cases are from the 20 seconds or the 17th century. And they just they don't apply today. Tax is very now it's very rational, even though it's sort of does things wrong. And I enjoyed it. And one of my really good friends who who was very highly ranked in our class was complaining one day we're know having lunch. Bunch of people were on a table and he was just complaining how much he hated this class. And in my head I'm like, What is he talking about? This is the first class that's ever made any sense whatsoever. So I thought like, well, one, I clearly enjoy it more than most people because everyone else is agreeing with him, not me. Two there there are jobs in tax, which is good. And three, you know, I grew up in upstate New York. I mostly lived in the Albany area. I always wanted to move to New York City. And I knew not only were there jobs in New York, but there were jobs in New York City. That's the epicenter for for tax law, for for a lot of financial services and legal professions.

Matt Foreman: [00:06:35] So I was like, you know, this this might work. So I just kept taking tax classes is basically the crux of it. So I came in very differently. Being a finance major, I took a lot of accounting. So for whatever reason, you know, it's been helpful. Now I do a lot of work in Subchapter K, but Partnership Tax was probably the class that made the most sense to me in entirety, which people always look at me very strange, but a lot of areas of partnership tax just kind of click for whatever reason and how they're structured. So I, you know, I graduated, took the bar most states there is no you know, you can't call yourself a tax lawyer or tax attorney. There's no requirement. Right? You can theoretically, once you're licensed, you're a tax attorney. Couple states have, you know, you can certify yourself in tax law. I don't know if that's necessary. What the bulk of the lawyers have in most larger markets is an LLM, which is a master's of tax law, which I have. It's diplomas right there on my wall because my wife told me to get it out of the house. So I brought it into the office.

Blake Oliver: [00:07:36] So that's on top of law school?

Matt Foreman: [00:07:37] Yeah. So, so, so. Undergrad, four years, law school, three years. And then LLM is a fourth year. A lot of people do it part time, so it'll take you three years, usually 3 or 4 years to get through basically one, 2 or 3 credit class at a time. I took a year off and did it full time at NYU, which which has a great program for it. And really, you know, it allowed me to reset my career. I spent my time in Big Four Big Four predominantly, and since then I went on my own for about four and a half years. And now I'm in a firm CSG law that's about 180 attorneys based out of A USB, West Orange. Now it's Roseland, New Jersey, with obviously a New York City office. I'm resident here in New York. I don't really go to New Jersey very much. Their tax rates are just way too high. So, you know, trying to stay out of New Jersey. But, you know, that's it. And and you know, the long winded story of, you know, I fell into tax. I don't think I'm atypical in that regard. I don't think a lot of people wake up when they're 50 and go, boy, I really want to work in tax. But, you know, it's a good job. It's perpetually interesting and it's ever changing. And the role of a tax lawyer is really you know, I think it's interesting, You know what my day to day is very I don't have a I don't have a consistent day. If you were to ask me what I do over the course of a two week period, it's pretty consistent. But every day is different challenges, different clients, different issues.

David Leary: [00:08:55] So so let's get just a little specific on that. So I come in to hire you. I'm a client. What are you doing for me? Like, what problems of mine that I have, Me being a typical client. Are you solving for me?

Matt Foreman: [00:09:08] Yeah, that's a that's a good question. So, you know, I break my my work into sort of three areas. There's always the fourth of like, there's just really random stuff that pops up that's sort of hard to categorize. But the bulk of it is, is what's called tax planning. A lot of what, you know, I don't do estate and gift work trust and estates, estate and gift, same thing. So a lot of what I'm doing is business structuring. It's bordering into estate planning type work, but it's one entity selection, how you know, an operating agreement for an LLC or a partnership comes together. Issues that come along with corporate or, you know, just kind of legal research, should I be charging sales tax? Ever since, you know, Wayfair was decided five, almost five, maybe six years. Now it gets five years now, you know, those kinds of core questions that come up. That's what a lot of tax that's what I do. A lot of it, a lot of it state and local. And it's, you know, how to allocate income between a business that sells into 32 states and sells into countries and has 14 employees in 11 different states. And how do you deal with the fact that you have income in a variety of different places, which is really always interesting.

Blake Oliver: [00:10:17] I was just on a call this morning with a guy from Avalara who runs their transfer pricing tool and. Talking about how they've like processed sized the transfer pricing. And, you know, you can buy this as a firm and, you know, basically create the deliverable for your client with that kind of software or is that what we're talking about?

Matt Foreman: [00:10:38] To an extent. I don't do the economic research because because transfer pricing at its core is very economic. What I do is help people sort of first off, sometimes people say like, you know, I just want to make sure that I'm getting it right, that I'm not missing anything. And that's part of the conversation. Some people come because they're like, you know, jeez, I'm you know, I've hired 14 people and all these states or I'm taking out all these investors and I just don't know what, you know, what are the tax consequences? Do I have to pay tax because I'm selling part of my LLC? Do I have to do this? And how is that worth it? And, you know, making sure a big part of what I do are, you know, non pro rata distribution allocation distributions within LLCs. So someone has a preferred return, someone gets a kicker at the end and things like that, and just making sure the operating agreement works properly. And you know, over the past eight years have been a lot of changes to a lot of areas of tax law, you know, from like the partnership representative to just just, you know, 199 A right. How compensation and how you split between wages versus other things can just change how the tax works and making sure it's done right. You know, a big part of it and it's a secondary I kind of get into is M&A is from the buyer side is looking at where the seller has gone wrong. And that's not to dig on anyone, but I don't think it's possible to get everything right. I just don't. We're human, right? We're going to make mistakes. No one thinks that things the same way. Go ahead.

Blake Oliver: [00:12:01] So speaking of that, what is the biggest mistake that you see businesses make that come across your desk? What's that hundred percent sales tax? Sales tax?

Matt Foreman: [00:12:09] Sales tax, whether it's taxable, where they need and where they need to collect sales tax. It is you know, I'm not trying to dig on avalara or any of those, but I don't think it's possible to develop a software application that can both encompass all of the areas that are taxed and do it accurately and do it in a way that's somewhat helpful and easy to use. Right? Because as if you run a business, you want to have 30 categories, right? But states do things so differently, right? They do things in very different ways. My favorite one of my favorite examples is that, you know, in New York State, right, Pilates and yoga are taxed differently for sales tax purposes. Right? One of them's taxable. One of them is not. I would tell you which one, but I at the moment I'm blanking. I'm pretty sure that yoga is taxable and Pilates or not. Someone if you want to correct me, go ahead. That's fine. But there's a pronouncement on that. There's a pronouncement on whether a hot dog is a sandwich because a sandwich is taxable for New York state purposes because the bread prepared sandwich. So whether a hot dog is sandwich, actually something the New York State Department of Taxation and Finance has felt it was necessary to issue guidance on right and that's that's New York and those are things we think about and then you think about like a product where it's part service, part product, right? Part. They're selling some data, there's some consulting in it, but you can't you can't pull them apart. It's one thing. It's all part and parcel. How do you deal with that? States deal with it differently and I just don't. They don't get it right and sometimes they sort of choose not to comply. When I imagine.

Blake Oliver: [00:13:43] When a business is smaller, like the cost of compliance with sales tax to do it 100% is impossible. Right? So you're basically in a regulatory regime where you have to simply pick and choose, right. How well you comply. That's what I've heard from firm owners anyway, who advise their clients on this. They'll say, look, you you may have nexus in a liability in all these states, but filing might cost you more than the actual sales tax you're collecting and the and the fines you might experience. And so but then it becomes an issue when they get big, right? So I imagine that a lot of times these issues come across your desk as cases or matters when it's a lot of money at stake at this point.

Matt Foreman: [00:14:18] Correct. And there's a lot of. Yes, absolutely. The issue is right. So let's say if you're doing $1 million in sales, a rough approximation, you know, about 7% is the normal sales tax rate. It varies. King County, Seattle is over ten. You know, there's a couple states that are in the fours. So so the rate can vary pretty significantly. But if you think about a 7% rate, $1 million is about $75,000. What the business has to do is they have to determine whether it's taxable, right? They have to determine whether it's taxable in that state, whether they have nexus in the state. Then they have to figure out where the right tax rate. A lot of states, like, for example, some states have flat tax rates. This is the rate for the whole state. If you take like a New York state, which is pretty typical, is there's a state rate which is, I believe four and a quarter, four and a half. There's a county rate and then there's a locality rate, city, city, whatever. So you have all these rates. You know, New York City is 8.8, seven, 5%. It's not even an actual penny. It's to the 10th of a penny. So if you sell something for a dollar like is that worth, you know, there's a point. And then you have to you have to account for it. You have to put it in your bank account. I recommend a separate account so you don't spend it or whatever. Then you have to file a return, which is which is if your sales hit a certain point is monthly. So you're doing monthly returns in 30 states like and then and then an annual report at the end of the year, you're remitting, you know, you could spend $50,000 on that for $75,000 worth of tax.

Matt Foreman: [00:15:45] Is that you know, there's a practicality that I thought the court really the dissent in Wayfair tried to bring that up. The majority said, no, no, no, technology will take care of it. And we're five years later with a whole lot of money at stake. And, you know, it just it hasn't gotten there. And I don't think it will I don't think small ones will ever want to. So I deal with that both on companies looking to sell themselves or take on investment. They need to clean it up. And when they come in, a lot of times there's, you know, money withheld in escrow and we do it. And then we talk about, you know, with M&A work, indemnification representations, warranties, saying we're doing everything right. If we're not if something comes up, if there's an, you know, audits happen right, then that's done, right? So a lot of that in that area I do drafting for tax, you know, purchase agreements and things like that. And then the last area I do is is litigation and controversy, which goes into, you know, my love for funding the IRS, which is a big frustration, I think, with every practitioner who does it at all, is that they're underfunded government agencies. And so the auditors working on too much and they don't have people who can be that technical expert. A lot of times the way I think about myself is right. I don't I don't say I don't know how to do return. That's not totally true. But is the IRS underfunded? Yes, it is. It is. Anyone who says it's not is is lying to you or just beyond uninformed. But.

Blake Oliver: [00:17:05] Well, now with this $80 billion. Right, there's the possibility that they won't be. But so far, they've like delayed. Now, again, the upgrade of their computer systems. And that's what I was hoping they would spend some of the money on is upgrading that like mainframe that so.

Matt Foreman: [00:17:22] Yeah well first off, the fact that you still use COBOL which has been a dead language, I learned COBOL in high school and COBOL was a dead language when I took it in high school and I'm not just out of high school, so you know, that's an issue. What what I tell people is if the Government were properly funded, audits would be a lot easier. You wouldn't need to hire experts as much. And what they need is both more auditors who have a lighter caseload because think they're just overloaded for it and more technical expertise. They need people who come in and do what I do for my clients, which is I'm the technical expert. I'm the one who says you have this long to respond. Here's how the issue works. Here's the memo on the issue based on the specific facts, because the government. Right, the IRS and states are so underfunded. They have they have the auditor doing that with limited technical with with limited time to really do the research because they have to move audits along. And so what happens and this is something I've had conversations with with some fairly high level people at the IRS and New York State, which is my frustration that I feel like the auditors don't have the time to properly look at things and analyze it. They're just trying to move it along. And so they'll just take a position that may or may not be correct and say, you litigate it, you appeal it. I don't care. It has to get off my desk within this amount of time. I don't have enough time. And that's not. That's not good for anyone. It's not a good use of government resources and it's not a good use for, you know, taxpayers to, you know, pay like, I get it, they're paying fees. And that's, you know, how law firms and accounting firms make money. But at the end of the day, that's that's not an efficient way to do it. I'd rather spend my time doing deal work, doing planning, then doing, you know, audit support and things like that. Just yeah. So what you're saying.

David Leary: [00:18:59] Matt, is because the government's understaffed instead of actually getting their ducks in order and making a proper decision about a small business violation or whatever it might be, there's like a it might not be correct. Let's just file the paperwork and let them defend it and the conclusion will come out correct or incorrect then, because really, for them, there's no loss. Right. Nobody's going to be criticized if like, oh, I brought up 12 cases and I lost every one of them and the citizens won. Right. They're just going to move on. Right. That's not like they're getting reviewed for that.

Matt Foreman: [00:19:29] I think there is some level of review for that, that if you're taking positions and you're consistently getting smoked, that that there is pause. There is a very recent case in New York State. If anyone's ever dealt with New York state residency audits, it's a unique one for New York because of how they do it and how they view it. But there was a very large case called Obus, which dealt with Obus, which dealt with, you know, an domiciliary of New Jersey, worked in New York City. And he he had a house up north of Saratoga, which, if you're not familiar with New York, takes, you know, it's about 180 to 200 miles north, straight up straight up the New York State Thruway. And he had a house that he was there about two weeks. And according to how New York State interpreted the law, that made him a resident of New York State, which meant all of his income was taxed in New York, not just the New York source income And the the attorney who litigated it, I know very well. And it was a very significant victory. A because the money the money was large, but also what it did was it carved out what New York State was trying to do. And I suspect that when there are larger cases or more important cases, I know there are they internally review, how do we audit? Where did we go wrong? Do we need guidance? Do our procedures need to be updated? But the bulk of the cases are just like, you know, do they have sufficient substantiation to show the value of the assets that they sold as part of an asset purchase agreement? Right.

Matt Foreman: [00:20:57] And that is that's a good that's a good question. I'll get to that in a second. Um, that is a good question. Um, so and that's where I think they do, there is evaluation, there is review, but the bulk of them are smaller issues or they're so fact specific that it's hard to create a global problem. And I think just having a better funded agency would, would accomplish a lot of that because I think they'd be more willing to a guide pro se taxpayers who don't have representation, which is I think very important and be they'd be more willing to work with you and get to reasonable things whereas they they, they don't want to spend they don't have the 30 hours to dig through the data like you did to review it. So a lot of times in appeals I clear things up. What do you want to. Yeah.

David Leary: [00:21:37] What you want to jump on on this question? And then I have a I want to talk about funding. But yeah.

Blake Oliver: [00:21:42] Okay. So we got a question from specialty bookkeepers. At what point are clients meeting with Matt at Startup Quarterly annually upon notice? Essentially, how frequently should they budget to meet with their tax attorney to ensure they're compliant?

Matt Foreman: [00:21:56] Every day? Every single day?

David Leary: [00:21:57] How much can they afford? Yeah.

Matt Foreman: [00:22:00] Well, you know, no, I think at formation it's really important and I think it's this really important for the same reason that I tell people to get a lawyer to, to put your documents. I've read far too many operating agreements that are talk about Delaware and New Jersey when the business is in New York. Right? It's not in New Jersey. It's not in another state. It's not that. And so you need documents that make sense. And look, if you're a solo person, you know, you don't need super exhaustive documents. But if you have three partners. Right. You know, what I always say is, is the job of a lawyer is to worry about everything going wrong. Right. And the way we I was taught to draft documents a lot. And this is how I think lawyers draft documents is if the the in three weeks after signing the documents, every single one of the partners hate each other, hate each other. And so you have to figure out a way out. And that's what the operating agreement is. It's your roadmap for doing it. You know, people talk about how a DAO is computer. It's, you know, it's code, right? So it does it an operating agreement and A and it's really a computer code. What issue are you looking for? Go to this page.

Matt Foreman: [00:23:08] Read what it says that helps you make the decision. How do you vote? Who makes decisions? So the way say is, you know, I think it formation is really important. I think anytime your your sales start really going above a point, right. You know, you're doing 100 to 200,000. It's fairly consistent. You're not seeing huge growth. I'm not that worried about that business because it's not changing. You're starting to see hockey stick growth. You know, you're taking on investors. You're giving equity to to people who work in the company. Let's have that conversation. And the conversation may be half an hour and say there's really nothing. These are what you watch out for. This is fine. Or the conversation may be, you know, you need a new operating agreement. We need to change some things. We need to change how you operate. So, you know, I'm the lawyer saying it depends. But the answer is, you know, at formation and anytime there's a significant change and what is significant mean, I think that depends on the business. And that's something you have to talk to, whether, you know, with a bookkeeper or accountant, whoever your advisor is, that that's really where I look at it.

David Leary: [00:24:02] So just to jump over on the IRS funding because you feel strongly about it, Blake and I have talked about this on the podcast before, but there's $80 billion. Like how how is everybody anybody going to agree to spend that $80 billion if people are fighting over? So part of the Inflation Reduction Act. They squeezed in that little $15 million blurb for the IRS to fund an independent study right. About setting up their own E file system. You know, the Fed file Fed Free would compete with TurboTax and H&R Block and all that. And apparently they're already arguing the GOP is arguing that this the study called New America is is stacked with people that are already biased in favor of the free tax system. So both sides are arguing about how to spend $15 Billion. How is this 80 billion ever going to get spent properly?

Matt Foreman: [00:24:52] Well, you know, since it's going to be all new government agents with guns, I think that'll go pretty quickly, right? Um, yes, I would say yes. Irs agents have some have guns. It is like less than a percent. And they're the same ones who whenever you hear about financial crimes happening and they raid someone's office and take their computers, the IRS goes along with the gun because that's that's who executes search warrants. Right. The answer is the bulk of the money is not for things like that. First off, I think the government should be doing a free file function. They already largely have it. If you make less than $74,000 a year, I think that's the amount for 22. It's at least 68. You can go to the IRS and through their website you can file federal and state for free. You go through a tool, it gives you the ones you can use and you can use it. So the notion that the IRS, you know, isn't already doing that, it kind of is. And it's all the same tax preparers that that there are. And so I think the IRS should try to do it. First off, I think it should be done concomitantly with the general upgrade of the IRS systems, because the vast majority of taxpayers, especially in the lower income ones, are ones who all of their income is either W-2 or 1099 already.

Matt Foreman: [00:26:06] Right. Whether it's a retirement payment, pension, you know, Social Security or just wage from an income. Right. I get a W-2 every year. Right? So it's information they have, but the systems are so old that they can't process those documents in enough time to make processing even plausible. Right. And so there's no way you know, there's talk about they should move back to deadlines and I'm not going to get I think they should, but I'm not going to get into why. But I think. Yeah, there you go. Um, look, fund the IRS, right? It's I just I, I've always been of the opinion that you want a well-funded adversary because for people who are not playing games, that will absolutely do it right. Professor Book, he's talking about, you know, the fight. I don't understand this fight. I think it's just a fight to to to they don't like the fact that the IRS is getting funded. But the bulk of the money, the vast majority of that $87 million is two things. One, a lot of IRS agents are retiring. So there's a lot of senior ones who have a lot expertise. They want to hire replacements before people leave. And that costs money because you're double hiring for that period. Two, it's technology upgrades.

Matt Foreman: [00:27:12] The IRS, you know, as I said, it runs a system on a dead language. It should not be doing that. It should be on a modern system. And anyone who's ever been involved with a large distributed company developing software, it costs a gigantic amount of money to do. And it's going to there's going to be cost overruns. And you could say, Oh, it should run like private business. I've done a lot of R&D credits and a lot of large financial institutions. They all overran on every single project, no matter what. That's that's just you have to accept it. You say, Oh, it's the government. You just don't hear it when private companies do it. So I'm a firm believer. I think that IRS free file should become an IRS thing because I don't think that companies should be going after that segment because I think it's too ripe for these are people who a lot of times don't have advisors and they can't say, well, should I have paid $50? To me, that's something our tax money should fund because we're already largely doing it. And then, you know, is that really is it really helpful, You know, what's the what's the long play here? So I don't know. That's my opinion on it. I've been beating the fund, the IRS drum, for a non-trivial amount of time.

David Leary: [00:28:15] And it's just everything's so political. And even this week, the politics got into the whole Silicon Valley bank crash because now they're going after, well, it's the accounting firms. It's KPMG who did not.

Blake Oliver: [00:28:28] I'm glad you brought that up, David, because.

David Leary: [00:28:30] This correctly and that's gotten political. Now, right.

Blake Oliver: [00:28:32] Now we can pivot into the Silicon Valley Bank discussion. Before we talk about KPMG, I just wanted to talk about the apps that have really benefited actually from the Silicon Valley Bank collapse. And that is I want to take a guess. It's the digital banks. We're talking about Relay. We're talking about Brex. We're talking about Mercury. Those are the top three that I heard are getting millions, if not billions in transfers from Silicon Valley bank depositors. And I was shocked.

David Leary: [00:29:07] To see this really, actually, because they're all those all those apps are partnered with a smaller regional bank. Right. So isn't that going to cause the exact same upside?

Blake Oliver: [00:29:18] Downness Well, so my theory is that these banks make it so easy to set up an account. You can literally do it in ten minutes if everything goes smoothly, like with Relay, for example. Right? And you and I know this, David, because we bank our earmarked media, our podcast, it's really it's a built on relay, right? We use relay for that you can So what was happening is last week we're recording on Thursday March 16th right now so we're one week out from the bank run. Last week on Thursday, startup founders were setting up accounts at Brex Mercury, Mercury and Relay within ten minutes and transferring millions, if not, well, millions of dollars out of their accounts. Tens of millions.

David Leary: [00:29:58] 60, 70, 80, 90. Yeah.

Blake Oliver: [00:30:00] In aggregate. Hundreds of trillions.

Matt Foreman: [00:30:01] Hundreds of trillions.

Blake Oliver: [00:30:04] You know, it was a lot of money moving out. And that's why this has been called the very first smartphone bank run, because it was a bank run with people on their phones moving money on their phones. Right. You're not tying up the phones or faxes calling into your bank to wire money out. You're just doing it with a tap of a finger. And that's why it was so easy and it happened so fast.

David Leary: [00:30:25] What this really is, it's not so much like, oh, we made this analysis and this is the better bank or this is the reason it's safer. They're like, this is the fastest way to get new ACH numbers and transfer funds. Yeah, basically. And do a.

Blake Oliver: [00:30:37] Wire on your phone. Right?

David Leary: [00:30:38] Because if you were to walk, walked into a branch of chase, maybe you taken three days.

Blake Oliver: [00:30:42] And so these banks, you know, their their whole model of making it really easy to sign up worked very well. And so they've benefited a lot. And they've also jumped on the idea of offering expanded FDIC insurance. So over the weekend, all three of them spun up sweep programs where you can now participate in this interbank network that will distribute your funds across multiple regional banks. And they're each offering up to $2 million, 2 or $3 million of FDIC insurance now, which is pretty cool. So if you're a startup, you can just have one bank as your interface and have up to $3 million in FDIC insurance on your funds, which, you know, it's what we should have all been doing to begin with. But nobody was really thinking about the risk of a bank run because we haven't had a big one since the financial crisis. So I thought that was a bit of positivity, right? We are this is I really want to know how many accounts were created in the last week at these digital banks. It's probably going to end up being a huge win for them and for their investors and for their employees.

Matt Foreman: [00:31:49] If these are I mean, if these are public companies, you'll find out in about a month because when they release their oh, yeah, their quarterly reports, I'm sure they'll tell you we have 16 quadrillion more, more accounts, you know, or whatever they'll they'll let you know actually.

Blake Oliver: [00:32:02] So we can't find out. The apps themselves are not public companies but like David said, the banks that they are built on top of do issue reports. So like Thread bank for instance, is what relay is built on. So we could look to that to see how many new accounts they got potentially. I don't know if they report that.

David Leary: [00:32:17] But when I was building the little database of apps and the ones tied to Silicon Valley and you start digging into people's footnotes on their websites, a lot of these apps especially are tied to banks. It's like so-and-so operating this bank in Utah. So and so part of this bank in Nebraska. It so I think the dependencies, I think people are really going to have to step back and start looking at that and understanding when you have a relationship with an app or a company, what the underlying relationships are.

Blake Oliver: [00:32:47] Ariel says. David hit it on the nose. We're conflating having accounts in many banks with mitigating risk by diversifying which industry and size of the banks. You hit it on the nose. David Nicely done. So continuing on with SVB, I want to talk about the auditors getting blamed because we all knew it was coming, right? So The Wall Street Journal led the charge. They didn't really blame the auditors, but they certainly implicated them in the collapse. With this headline, KPMG gave SVB Signature Bank Clean Bill of Health weeks Before Collapse. And I think that they bring up a fair point, which is in the mind of the public who are not accountants. It just seems crazy that a bank could have a clean bill of health, that they could, you know, pass their audit, as we like to say, and then collapse not that long after.

Matt Foreman: [00:33:40] But here's here's the thing. And I think this is where I think where the public's understanding of what an auditor does, financial auditor. Right. Not a tax auditor does. And what. They really do is people think that they take it and then they write this whole thing about like, will this be a good investment over the next five years? That's what they're saying. And what they're really saying is that this company has, you know, whatever it is, sufficient liquid resources and a viable business for its immediate short term needs. Right. And what happened with a big part of what happened with them is they tried to raise capital and because they they sold stuff below its fair market, what they thought or how it was booked on their value. They basically had to book down a whole bunch of asset mark to market accounting is is it beats both ways, right? People don't like it because they're like, oh, they should mark to market, you know, assets for a wealth tax, which I think wealth taxes are stupid and on administrable. But also it will make, you know, a lot of financial things look way more valuable or way less valuable due to bubbles or relatively quick depressions. You know, you think about how much money FTX had ostensibly was because of a bubble, right? It was worth more. And then when sort of the the the smoke cleared, it wasn't there, the assets weren't there. So I think the answer is that auditor people, the the public needs to know what auditors do a lot more. And I think that's a failing of Big Four especially. I think that's part of their job. I think the AICPA and I know I'm calling them out again for the time, but part of their job is to understand what accountants do and what accountants don't do.

David Leary: [00:35:07] I mean, is the problem more like we live in this emotional society, right? And we've talked about this with GAAP. Nobody uses GAAP financials to make investments. If you did, you wouldn't invest in Tesla, you wouldn't invest in Netflix, you wouldn't you wouldn't invest in Amazon if you used GAAP financials to do this. So if nobody's using the financials, it's kind of the opposite with the audit they're auditing. And on paper, I think Silicon Valley Bank was okay on paper, but the real risk that they missed was, oh, it's this incestuous set of people only using the bank and they're all hanging out in this chat room over here. And what happens when they get a fire up their butt to we.

Matt Foreman: [00:35:42] Say we say Mark, we say market concentration. Market concentration, not incestuous in that one day they they liked that but it's no, but it's funny because you see the number of people who had money. There were the same VCs and all 87 of their investments went through Silicon Valley Bank. And that's you know, it's and it's hard for them to tell because how do you know how much there are? But also when bankers loan money, they don't they don't know if they should invest in the business. They know that they should loan to someone who wants to invest in the business. Right. And so they're not making as much of a detailed decision. So every time there's another step in it, should you be doing it? And sometimes, you know, I always say this markets move in weird ways and things track the same way. I don't know what auditors are supposed to do. Yeah, sitting in plain sight don't.

Blake Oliver: [00:36:29] Always so so here's my can I give you my hot take on this map so I don't I don't think the auditors are to blame because the public might expect this. But the way we've set things up, auditors, external auditors are not really there to to protect investors. We have set up a system where they get paid by the company and they effectively work for management. In reality, even though they report to an audit committee and they're not going to take down a bank by issuing some sort of adverse opinion unless it's like completely obvious. Right. They're not going to they're not going to go out there on a limb and protect investors. They're always going to side with management whenever they can. And then we've got a situation where management. Can really manipulate their earnings very easily because of the accounting standards we have that allow them to say we're going to hold this to maturity or we're going to make this available for sale. And I don't have to recognize losses on investments that I plan to hold to maturity. So I can basically hide that in plain sight in the statement of comprehensive income. But it's not going to hit my earnings. And so very few investors ever look at anything other than the bottom line or the earnings, right. If it doesn't hit earnings, there's so many adjustments, all that stuff, they're not looking at the complicated footnotes. And so that's why Accounting Today. Publish this headline. Sbs's balance sheet Time Bomb was sitting in plain sight.

Blake Oliver: [00:38:00] And yes, if you go in, you dig into the footnotes, you look at the statement of comprehensive income or what do we call it, other comprehensive income. You can see that they had all these, you know, bonds that had lost a ton of value because of rising interest rates. And there were a few investors who spotted this back in January and were tweeting about it. But it was like very few raging capital Ventures did a tweet thread on SBS's earnings and dug into all of this stuff. Right. But it didn't hit mainstream consciousness. I hope these guys made a lot of money shorting SVB stock, right, because they saw it. But it's complicated and it's not easy to figure out. So I guess what I'm trying to say is that I feel like our accounting standards have gotten complicated and it's very difficult for investors to understand. Even accountants weren't really aware of this until the collapse happened. And so maybe we need to simplify, right? Just like like with the tax code, we need to simplify. Perhaps we need to simplify GAAP so that you can't play these games. I mean, the balance sheet of a bank ought to show whether or not it's solvent. Like isn't that the whole point of the balance sheet of a bank is like assets minus liabilities, right? You don't want your liabilities to be bigger than your assets when you're investing, when you're putting your money in a bank. But it didn't look like that.

David Leary: [00:39:23] But maybe the way we do audits or we pay for the audits is firms that are doing audits are allowed to short sell stocks. Right. That will force them to dig in. Right. To get the real numbers. And then they could we're allowing them to do short sales and that will actually protect the public.

Blake Oliver: [00:39:39] Right.

David Leary: [00:39:40] Like go in and dig into those numbers and come up with a way and then you're going to make your money on the short sell. Like then they would dig in the same way the short sellers dig in. Oh man.

Blake Oliver: [00:39:49] Can you imagine that? If the auditors were allowed to trade on their information.

David Leary: [00:39:54] Only the short sell side, not not the upside.

Blake Oliver: [00:39:56] They were allowed to short their own clients.

Matt Foreman: [00:39:58] So they'll let they'll let the fraud go for a couple of years.

David Leary: [00:40:01] Oh, that's actually true.

Matt Foreman: [00:40:03] And then. And then no. And then no. The short sell these huge positions.

Blake Oliver: [00:40:07] Well, we don't have to worry about them not telling us about fraud because only 4% of frauds are detected by the external auditors.

Matt Foreman: [00:40:14] I want to know who the 4% who get caught are, right?

Blake Oliver: [00:40:16] Like really, really dumb fraudsters, right? It's pretty hard to get caught by, like, a second year audit associate, right? You have to be really stupid. We were just.

Matt Foreman: [00:40:26] I found the fraud. It's a dollar off. Yeah.

Blake Oliver: [00:40:29] We were just talking with Paul Barnhurst, the host of the Today podcast last week. And he was he was talking with us about this as Silicon Valley Bank was collapsing. He was saying that he witnessed auditors being gaslit in his career, you know, like and not being able to understand what was being handed to them and just being very easy to to trick an auditor.

Matt Foreman: [00:40:51] Also, like I've dealt with auditors where, you know, the auditor come to me and I represent the company. Got audit insurance. I don't know about that. Um, I'll have thoughts on that too. But they would come to me and say, okay, like, you know, there's a there's we know there's a tax audit going on. Could you give us this? Yeah. And so I have to tell them about an audit that relates to like sales tax on the sale of an asset or an R&D credit audit or a billion other things. And they're saying, okay, thank you. And then I don't hear back. And like, I don't mean to sound rude, but like I you know, I have more than a decade doing this and you have the six minutes I just gave you, you know, how much can you dig in? But you know what? The part of the problem is that audits are the amount for public companies. The audit the fee is public. And so if it's too high, there's an incentive for someone else to come in and undercut them by $100,000. Yeah. So they're basically at the lowest margin they can be. To make a profit. They have to move every ten years. People have to rotate every so often. Often. So you just don't you have a combination where sometimes you just don't have expertise on it that you need and they're forced to low margin it. So it's hard to get people to stay. Audit has mean tax is a turnover problem, but audit has a much bigger one because also you go from an auditor to becoming a comptroller at a at a fund right. Better pay better hours, better job, better, you know looks looks better on your LinkedIn profile. Um, audit insurance.

Blake Oliver: [00:42:25] So so Keith here has commented Ron Baker says that insurance companies should sell audit insurance to companies and be the ones that hire the auditors. So the idea here and I've heard Ron speak about this and I think this is a really intriguing idea, is that every public company is required to purchase audit insurance or financial statement insurance. And this is insurance that, you know, backstops the accuracy of the financial statements. And then the insurance companies would go out and hire the auditors to ensure compliance to, you know, to insure that these companies are actually reporting accurate numbers. I like that because it creates an incentive for the auditors to find what's wrong because they're working for these insurance companies and the insurance companies are incentivized if they're issuing financial statement insurance to have the numbers be accurate because the investors will sue if they are not. I think this is certainly a better alignment of interests than the current situation, which is auditors are hired by the companies they audit and so they like. In the case of SVB, the auditors are never going to issue a going concern warning against a bank because it will kill the bank and then they lose their client.

Matt Foreman: [00:43:39] Right. By the time they issue a going concern, warning the FDIC has already taken them over. Yeah. So I'll tell you what. I'll tell you what the risk is that so in deals, there's what's called rep and warranty insurance. So there's insurance that everything is correct. And if it's not, the company doesn't pay, the seller doesn't pay, you buy insurance on it. So same idea. And what happens is it becomes commoditized and so it gets priced and that's it. I think you would get people who would really look, they'd really want to find. But then it's like a tax audit again. But in financial and it's the problem is it's generally accepted accounting practices. There's no rule book. There's no it has to be this. It's there's mush in it, which is fine. There should be it shouldn't be the same. It's too that I just worry that's going to create overaggressive and you're going to get people whose job it is to go after them and they're going to really be tough. And then who is to make the decision, right? Conceptually, do I just wanted to swing the pendulum too, too far? And audits will become significantly more expensive because the insurance will be much more expensive.

Blake Oliver: [00:44:36] Yeah, well, right now the price is rock bottom, right? It's basically as cheap as it can be because it's a commodity. Every audit opinion is the same as every other audit opinion, at least among the big four. And then all the, you know, regional firms. Right? They're all the same.

Matt Foreman: [00:44:52] They hire the same partners, the same senior managers. Right.

Blake Oliver: [00:44:55] And that ultimately, when we talk about like the problem of low salaries for accounting grads, when they go into auditing jobs. Right. And two thirds of graduates go into audit, the reason the salaries are so low is because of what we just talked about, that audits, commoditized, the prices are driven down to rock bottom as low as they can be where the audit partner still makes. Enough money for that, Whatever that is, it's a business.

Matt Foreman: [00:45:24] It should make.

Blake Oliver: [00:45:24] Money. Yeah, of course. But. But. And the only way for the audit partner to make more money is to keep the salaries as low as possible. Right. Do the minimum amount of work to get through a PCAOB inspection and pay your auditors as little as possible. So you're hiring the least experienced people who know the least about how to actually audit and you're doing the minimum amount to check all the boxes to satisfy your professional liability insurance. And meet PCB inspections. So this is why audits have very low value because they don't really catch that much.

David Leary: [00:46:01] It might get lower because. Did you see this? They just launched paid high school accounting internships.

Blake Oliver: [00:46:07] Paid high school accounting internships. So I can have a high school kid auditing the headline.

David Leary: [00:46:11] The headline makes it seem something that it's not. Okay. Basically, they partnered with future business leaders of America, and it looks like if you read it, they're not actually doing any internship work. They're going to do client service simulations, social media development, like they're going to make presentations and compete in competitions. So it's like, what are you paying them to actually do? Like they're not paying them to actually do work to where they actually get some experience. Like it would be great. Like, Hey, you're going to shadow somebody that's going to in the cash practice for two and a half months and reconcile QuickBooks. It doesn't feel like it's that. It's basically, well, you want them to have options.

Blake Oliver: [00:46:47] You want them to have a really great internship experience so that then they take the job, right? The bait and switch. Is that what this is?

David Leary: [00:46:56] It might.

Blake Oliver: [00:46:56] Be. No, I'm being overly harsh, I'm sure. I hope if anyone from CLA is listening, I apologize. That's just my hot take. Not accurate. We're not real journalists here, right, David?

David Leary: [00:47:09] Not this week.

Blake Oliver: [00:47:10] Not this week. Okay. Got it.

David Leary: [00:47:12] Did you want to jump into the app news before we wrap up or.

Blake Oliver: [00:47:14] Yeah, yeah. What do you what do you got?

David Leary: [00:47:17] So one of these things, it's short. We have something from Zoho. So Zoho had a blog post of their ten most installed Zoho CRM extensions of 2022. And why it caught my eye is because you've been a big kick on this as far as like you should communicate with your clients the way they want. If they want to use SMS text back and forth with your clients. Five of the top ten apps installed to Zoho CRM. Are you ready? Sms Magic WhatsApp for the web SMS for Zoho CRM by message media web. Next is WhatsApp chat for Zoho CRM and click Send SMS. Five of the ten top add ons to Zoho CRM are ways to do instant messaging with your clients.

Blake Oliver: [00:47:58] Amazing. And that's across all Zoho.

David Leary: [00:48:01] All of Zoho.

Blake Oliver: [00:48:01] Customers. So so so so businesses on Zoho are really using those kind of apps to connect with their CRM that's.

David Leary: [00:48:09] Into chat with their customers because the customers obviously want to be interacting that way.

Blake Oliver: [00:48:13] That's what they want. They want the convenience of being able to text. They don't want to do email. Yeah, but that's it's hard, right? Because if you're not tech savvy, if you don't have a firm that's hooked up this way, then your only option is to give your clients your cell phone number, which is a total. Do not ever do that, right? I made that mistake ten years ago and I'm still paying for it. So. So these apps are really cool because you can give your clients a phone number and then they can text with you and it doesn't go to your personal phone. It goes to your desktop computer. So you can only answer them, you know, when you're when you're actually working. I don't know.

David Leary: [00:48:50] Matt Do you text with your clients? Matt, Do you have.

Matt Foreman: [00:48:52] No, it's the problem is attorneys have to keep a lot of documentation for a while and having them in multiple places. The answer is email only for me. I mean, you can call me, obviously, but really email is the best. Plus, most of my clients, the answers are more significant than a quick text would really work, so.

David Leary: [00:49:11] It's just not. And the email takes the full eight minutes for you to bill. But a text reply isn't long enough for you to to to document and bill.

Matt Foreman: [00:49:18] You bill in a 10th of an hour which is six minutes. Six minutes.

David Leary: [00:49:21] Okay. Yeah. And text is a little bit faster than that. I get it. Okay.

Matt Foreman: [00:49:24] Well, obviously I probably type faster than I text the text just using your thumbs. This one I got I got I got all these digits, you know?

Blake Oliver: [00:49:30] So, Matt, what's your charge code for this episode?

Matt Foreman: [00:49:34] This is going to probably be a marketing non-client specific marketing.

Blake Oliver: [00:49:39] Got it. So speaking of the accounting talent shortage, did we talk about that yet? This episode? I feel like it's a requirement. Here's a story I saw on accounting today. Lack of accountants puts Citi's credit ratings at risk. So there's a real impact happening here. Municipalities across the US are at risk of having their credit ratings downgraded or withdrawn by S&P global ratings because staffing shortages have delayed financial disclosure documents. S&p has placed 149 long term underlying and program ratings on a negative credit watch this year because the ratings company hasn't received the 2021 financial statements from the issuers. That's the most since at least 2018 and materially higher than the prior five year average of 95 such moves, according to S&P. David Davis S&P data, not David. So this is why getting more CPAs into the pipeline is critical. There's not a lot of urgency from our leaders in the accounting profession, but if we don't do something now to make up that 17% that quit over the last few years. We're going to have real economic consequences. And in this case, it's for cities.

David Leary: [00:50:48] And this goes back to A two weeks ago when we had Dr. Josh on from Troy State, right. Josh McGowan And he had that hypothetical like, okay, I'm Mr. State Representative and you come crying to me about changing the 150 hour rule, 120 hour rule, like why I should do it because it truly impacts you. This is why.

Blake Oliver: [00:51:08] Like this is why this, I think is why is is because the problem is so urgent that we need to get more people into the profession that, yeah, that'll actually make it happen.

David Leary: [00:51:19] Because they're dealing with the pain of that. Yeah, yeah.

Blake Oliver: [00:51:22] I don't know. Matt There's a shortage of, is there a shortage of attorneys or did they produce like enough of you guys?

Matt Foreman: [00:51:27] There's not. They're probably I mean tax has always has has a need. Certain areas are much more flashy I guess might be the word or not as technically complex that that sounds arrogant and I know I apologize for that. But it's the truth. Tax, you know, requires a certain you have to want. I always tell people who think about taxes you have to want to do tax. If you don't enjoy it, it's going to burn you out very hard and fast. So it's tough and a lot of people start in tax and make it a year and then don't want to do it anymore. So but the people who stay, stay. So are there shortages are also you know, there's 100 and 180 or so attorneys, law schools out there that are producing anywhere from about 150 to 700 or 800 attorneys a year. Right. The vast majority of people pass the bar. They work in jobs that don't require it. So and it's there don't need to be as many attorneys as accountants. And I think there's just more jobs that accountants filled and lawyers. So I think that that really makes it harder. I think the 150 hours is tough. That extra 30 hours of it's not like you need to go to school for accounting for 30 hours. You can take whatever that doesn't. It never made sense to me.

Blake Oliver: [00:52:39] Yeah, law school has a specific like objective and value. You get that law degree at the end, but the 150 doesn't necessarily. And it was interesting, David, I was really listening to our interview with Ken Bishop of Nasba, the President of Nasba, that we just dropped into the feed yesterday or the day before, and I highly recommend everyone go listen to that. I've been thinking about that a lot, that the defense of the 150 always seems to revolve around the value of the masters of accountancy, and that is one way to satisfy the 150 requirement is to go get that one year master's. And I'm sure there are many people who benefit greatly from that and they get great jobs at the Big Four. That's where they tend to go and they have fantastic careers, but that's only like 20,000 people a year that do that. And we need way more accountants than that. And those counts who don't go to those master's programs are the ones having to hassle for those extra 30 hours that they really don't need to go be an accountant at a city government. You know, like you don't need the master's degree to do that. Like it's just way overkill. And I think that's what I heard you say, Matt, is we need a lot more accountants than we need lawyers. And so, you know, by trying to make accounting into, you know, competitive, I mean, I still think it's kind of pathetic. It's like only add a year if you want to like be like lawyers, right? But to try and like compare it to that is not it's not the same.

Matt Foreman: [00:54:07] I think that focus needs to be on what actually makes accountants better. And I think it's the same thing that I say that makes lawyers better. I don't know if the best lawyers are the ones who went to necessarily want the best law school or whatever. What makes you a good at really any profession is that you put in effort, you try, you focus on it and you pick up concepts and you improve over time. And I think that is more important than getting an extra 30 hours. And maybe the answer is you more formalize the requirements to become a CPA in terms of experience, right? Yeah, maybe it becomes the CPA splits into something more similar to like the for tax and something for audit. Right? That that's that split that has to happen because I think there are fewer and fewer jobs that are generalists anymore. And I think that that's what makes it hard, is that I think accounting still wants to be a generalist and a specialist at the same time and don't. I mean to dig on it, but I don't know how you do that. You know, doctors aren't generalists anymore. They're very few. They're specialists. And every profession becomes more and more specialized. Just how the world's working as a complexity.

Blake Oliver: [00:55:09] What's strange about accounting is how we all start out. Like two thirds of the accounting profession starts out in audit, but then within like 2 or 3 years, none of them are like very few of them are doing it anymore. And now they go off and they do other things. It's a very, very different setup that we've got just by the nature of how these bigger firms work and how the whole pipeline works from college into the firms and then out into industry.

Matt Foreman: [00:55:31] I also think the first two years of any job out of college is kind of awful. You know, you're beyond the low person on the totem pole, and I think that's really a challenge. And I think they look at the next the next step and they're like, Boy, do I really want to be a senior? Do I really want to be a manager? Does that look any better? And the answer is maybe not. And that's why that's why a lot of people leave. And I think they have to focus on what the job is, what you're trying to accomplish, and create a pipeline that gets people to the next step. More than how it is.

Blake Oliver: [00:55:59] Matt, we're coming up at the top of the hour. Thank you so much for spending this time with us. I've really enjoyed it. David, Where can our listeners catch you online?

David Leary: [00:56:08] I'm on all the socials, just @DavidLeary.

Blake Oliver: [00:56:10] And am @BlakeTOliver. Thank you, everyone who has joined us live. You can follow us on YouTube. Subscribe to our channel. You'll get notified when we are live and you can interact with us, chat with us. Let us know what you think. We are here at randomly different times every week it seems. So you just have to subscribe and hope you catch us. We are cloudaccountingpodcast.com and you can email us The Cloud Accounting Podcast at earmark CPE. All right, Matt, great chatting with you. Hope to see you around here soon.

Matt Foreman: [00:56:42] Thank you. Take care.