The Accounting Podcast

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Blake Oliver: [00:00:04] Let's just put this in perspective. They have never been audited and their market cap of tether us TT the stablecoin is over 1.100 and $9.5 billion, $109 billion never audited. And people are trading this tether saying it's backed 1 to 1 by US dollars and they've never been audited.

David Leary: [00:00:28] Coming to you weekly from the OnPay Recording Studio.

Blake Oliver: [00:00:33] Hello and welcome back to the show. I'm Blake Oliver.

David Leary: [00:00:36] And I'm David Leary. Blake, we need one of those, like beep beep beep beep beep. Breaking news, like sound effects or something, right? Like the cable news. We had news come out and us covered on the show so quickly as we will this morning. Breaking less than an hour ago, the SEC released a press release. They are charging Trump's truth. Is it truth? Social trumps media company.

Blake Oliver: [00:01:00] Whatever the company is now, whatever the.

David Leary: [00:01:02] Trump's company, Trump media company, social.

Blake Oliver: [00:01:04] Media company.

David Leary: [00:01:05] The auditor. Remember we talked about the auditor two episodes ago, BF Borgers and yes, the partner, the only partner, Ben Borges. They, uh, charged him in his firm with audit failures, not.

Blake Oliver: [00:01:19] Just audit failures like massive, massive fraud.

David Leary: [00:01:22] And they used words deliberate and systematic to describe it. Yeah, and essentially pretty much more than 1500 SEC filings from January 2021 to June 2023.

Blake Oliver: [00:01:35] That's crazy. 1500 audits and BF Borgers made up audit work papers. They updated dates on previous work papers, just rolled them forward, just took the old ones, change the dates they documented non-existent planning meetings and reviews. The fraudulent practices affected 75%, at least 75% of the 369 public company clients of BF Borgers, leading to a significant number of non-compliant audits and reviews being incorporated into SEC filings. So we're talking about hundreds of public company audits that were fraudulent. And this went on for years.

David Leary: [00:02:19] Staff to do this. So he directed staff to do this. He didn't go to the sign off. I have not worked an audit, but I guess they sign off or engagement partner has to review things, figure out the risks, then sign off. They just fabricated that. That meeting even happened based on he's probably golfing. Who knows what he was doing, right? He just told them to have a meeting and document it.

Blake Oliver: [00:02:38] It's incredible. Um, now, should we talk about the penalty? Yeah. What is going to happen to the firm? Bf Borgers, CPA, PC and its owner, Benjamin F Borgers. To settle these charges, BF Borgers agreed to pay a 12 million civil penalty. $12 million paid by the firm, and Benjamin Borgers agreed to pay a $2 million civil penalty. Both respondents also agreed to permanent suspensions from appearing and practicing before the commission as accountants, effective immediately. So $14 million in fines across the firm and its owner. And really, that's just going to be its owner, I guess, right, because.

David Leary: [00:03:22] It's just a sole partner, right? He's the sole.

Blake Oliver: [00:03:23] Partner and banned forever from public company audits. But there's no jail time. Bf borgers I'm or Ben Borgers is going to walk away after this. A free man.

David Leary: [00:03:42] This was a civil penalty. Settlement. So he settled and then did not admit or deny the SEC charges. Of course. Right. Just pay it and don't admit it or deny.

Blake Oliver: [00:03:53] So in our coverage of this in previous episodes, we referred to a video that Chris Vanover made from CPA club detailing this, and Chris estimated that BF Borgers made millions of dollars from these audits. So I'm wondering, you know, let's say let's say Ben Borgers ends up paying $2 million. I mean, he could have easily made $2 million personally. And if the firm itself. Is charged with paying $12 million. Does that flow through to him personally? I doubt it. Otherwise, why would they have a separate personal fine? So the firm like the way I see this is the firm's just going to go under. Borgers is going to disgorge the profits that he made. And and so he's back where he started, which to me doesn't sound like much of a penalty.

David Leary: [00:04:47] And it sounds like based on these fines, that there's way more money he was making than even Chris estimated before. Like, I'm guessing he's done pretty well. Um, it's funny what they referred to him, um, in the quote. So this is the quote from the director of the SEC's Division of Enforcement. Uh, Gruber, S Grewal, Ben Borgers and his audit firm, Bf Borgers, were responsible for one of the largest wholesale failures by gatekeepers in our financial markets. Dot dot dot. Thanks to the painstaking work of the SEC staff, Borgers and his sham audit mill have been permanently shut down. They called it a sham audit mill.

Blake Oliver: [00:05:26] Well, that's what it was. So let's try to just imagine how much money this guy made. So it's 1500 SEC filings for a period of 2 or 3 years. Let's say that each audit made I mean, I don't I don't know what's the average audit fee. What if he charged $10,000 for an audit? Right? Times 1500. Okay, that's $15 million. So it's hard to imagine anyone charging less than $10,000 for an audit. I don't know, I'm not an auditor, but it just seems like that would be kind of the minimum. Uh, anyone listening who knows better, and I know, but but like, that's 15 million. So the fine is less than the minimum he could have made. That's my problem with this. Like, I think it's great that, you know, there is an actual fine and a penalty happening. Our criticism before was that he got fined. What up to this point, like $65,000.

David Leary: [00:06:34] Let's talk about Trump though on this okay.

Blake Oliver: [00:06:36] Right. That's and that's the that's why this is getting major news coverage is because BF Borgers audited Trump's Spac.

David Leary: [00:06:42] Yeah. So I'm kind of just questions in my head. Right. So did Trump's folks know that this guy was a audit mill scam. And there's some website. They did some Google searches and found him and then went to him because of that. Is there connections already? Um, did or should Trump be pissed because he didn't know? And now Trump kind of got ripped off. He hired a guy that was a scam. He didn't know it. Um, or is it like, does Donald Trump just the most unlucky guy ever? He's always does things and he gets involved in with questionable people all the time.

Blake Oliver: [00:07:15] I don't know, David. I feel like if you just wanted to get your audit done quick and dirty, this was the firm to do it right.

David Leary: [00:07:21] So it and this goes back to what you talked about. I forgot the the audit where they had like $400 million in the bank, but the bank statement only had like $50 in the bank. Uh, the Tingo audit.

Blake Oliver: [00:07:33] Yeah, the Tingo audit.

David Leary: [00:07:34] And that was a it didn't pass the smell test. You went to the website, you saw it was a one partner firm. You're like, this doesn't pass the smell test. As soon as I brought up this guy's firm before we put it together. Right. The story I was like, this doesn't pass the smell test. It's a one person firm that did this audit.

Blake Oliver: [00:07:50] It's amazing.

David Leary: [00:07:51] Nothing against people with one person firms. It's just you.

Blake Oliver: [00:07:54] Shouldn't be auditing multibillion dollar deals. Right. So this is this is progress. But I would like to see Borgias go to jail for this for years. Like this is this is a massive fraud. There should be penalties for the partners that do this kind of stuff. Chris Donnelly says should his CPA license status be reviewed? I would hope so. I can't believe this guy gets to continue to practice as a CPA. You know.

David Leary: [00:08:25] Well, that was the agreement, right? The agreement was he can't do things for the SEC.

Blake Oliver: [00:08:29] It's just the SEC.

David Leary: [00:08:31] Yeah. He can still practice the CPA right now.

Blake Oliver: [00:08:33] Yeah this is a good point Chris. That's that's so that's our call to action for the the Colorado Board of Accountancy is revoke this guy's license. Right. Keep him out of the profession. All right. Moving on. Big news in I anthropic, the maker of clod has launched teams clod for teams. And so this is like ChatGPT for teams. You can create a team you can add. Your employees, your coworkers. You have to buy at least five licenses. They are $30 per month, but you get priority access to the models, and so you will be less likely to get rate limited, which is what happens to me even on the Cloud Pro plan as an individual. And. They're planning to do all sorts of amazing things, like integrate it with CRM systems in the near future. If you haven't tried out any of these AI tools yet, this is the time. Cloud AI. Go sign up for a team plan for your firm, and give access to your people so they can start using it. Uh, because it's just incredible. Cloud three is amazing. It's a game changer. And there's also now a cloud iOS app. So you can download the app and you can use it on the go. You can upload photos, you can upload files, PDFs, you can query them. It is really incredible. I yeah, David, have you tried it yet?

David Leary: [00:10:03] One bill. So I don't have to wonder why in QuickBooks we have 8 or 9 different charges constantly for anthropic or OpenAI. We can start getting one bill for these services now.

Blake Oliver: [00:10:13] Correct. And I'm really excited. Because like. We are going to start using this in our company. I mean, we're already using it copy paste, but I cannot wait until cloud three is available via Zapier in order to automate a lot of tasks in our firm. It is so smart, and I've got some proof for you that it is smart. Uh, a new study. Tested whether these llms can pass the CPA exam. We've seen this before, but it's good to see, like the newer models being tested. This was a study. You can find it on Ssrn.com papers at ssrn.com. Uh, it was done at Case Western Reserve University in the Computer and Data science department, and they tested Google Gemini ChatGPT for Claude Michel and Lama on multiple choice questions from the CPA test preparation tools. So they took practice exam questions and provided the AI models with unmodified multiple choice questions. And then their responses were compared against human CPA exam pass rates. Both ChatGPT T4 and Claude Opus, which is also Claude three Claude three opus, is their most sophisticated intelligent model. Um, that you get if you pay for Claude. Both GPT four and Claude Opus passed the CPA exam. Chat GPT four performed best on financial accounting and reporting and regulation. Claude Opus performed exceptionally well on auditing and attestation, and both GPT four and opus outperformed their human counterparts on the audit and FA sections. So Claude. Chat GPT and Claude did better than humans on audit and FA. Human test takers likely outperform all the current LMS on the regulation section, but that's going to change pretty fast if if these AI models keep advancing at the pace they have. That's going to change really fast. Um, the other ones did not do as well. And if you want to see like how good these are at answering accounting questions, just take a CPA practice exam question and copy and paste it into klod and you will be blown away.

David Leary: [00:12:31] So like I have a question on you and I use I a lot. We're using a lot of these tools. And sometimes if you put too much data in. It can't handle it. So are they are they basically for each section of the test uploading, they almost treat it like a separate instance. So it's not they're not uploading all sections of the test and all knowledge into one. If you want to call it person an I to to take the test or is it like bracket it out like okay, we're going to train this section. Here's the questions for that section. And then no.

Blake Oliver: [00:13:01] They're not even training the model. This is just this is.

David Leary: [00:13:03] Just putting a.

Blake Oliver: [00:13:04] Question into the model.

David Leary: [00:13:05] You're not you're not putting anything in it just out of the box out of the box. So it's it's based on public information that's on the internet basically. Yeah.

Blake Oliver: [00:13:11] So so these models have gone out and ingested. They've been trained, they don't ingest, they've been trained on all the publicly available information on the internet. Right. We don't know exactly what. But let's say like all YouTube videos in existence. Right. All the transcripts of those, uh, or like all the web pages out there, uh, and they create the model and then these models can answer the questions correctly. Got it. And it's shocking. You should everyone should try it. If you haven't tried it, go do it. Um, uh, you'll be amazed. And, um. The context window on these models is now huge, right? So I can upload the entire transcript of one of our episodes. David and I can ask questions about the episode. I can turn it into a social media post, or I can write an article or I can help it can help me turn it into a CPE course. There's like so much that you can do now with these models. Our entire company is going to be AI pretty soon. We've got some commentary here in the live stream about Borgias. Thanks everyone who has joined us live today. If you're listening on the podcast feed, don't forget you can subscribe to us on YouTube. Get notified when we go live and join us. You can heckle us. You can encourage us. We just like to see it here. Uh, Edgar says, I wonder if this would have been investigated. If it was not associated with Trump.

Blake Oliver: [00:14:26] I would not be surprised if there were more examples like this out there. And that is a great point, Edgar. Um, I do think that association with Trump seems to get you targeted, so I would not be surprised if there are more audit firms out there doing shoddy audits, making up work papers, and and getting away with it and making millions and millions and millions of dollars. Because think about it. Why? If you're unethical and if you lack integrity, why wouldn't you do it? It seems too easy. David and I were joking in the last episode. Like we could just spin up a CPA firm, use my license and do shoddy audits for years, make millions of dollars and leave the country, use I before I before we get caught. You know it took it took three years for anything to happen with Borger's guaranteed the SEC would not be investigating borders if they hadn't done the Trump audit, Cody said why did their body approve borders as their firm in the first place? They couldn't afford Big Four lol. I think the problem is that like, people just don't care anymore about who does. The audit firms have realized. Companies have realized that all you need is an audit. It doesn't matter who does it and the markets don't care. None of the people buying Trump social stock care DJT stock care about who did the audit. Same thing with all these crypto companies.

Blake Oliver: [00:15:44] That's why they can get away with not having audits or having audits by tiny little firms that nobody's ever heard of. People just don't care anymore. Chris says Chris Vanover hey, welcome Chris. Chris is the one who got us on to this whole thing in the first place. Chris says. Borgias failed peer review and was terminated from the AICPA Peer Review Program back in December 2023, so he can't issue audit or other assurance reports for either private companies and now public companies, too. He's done, yes. But does he still have a CPA license? Can he still hold himself out as a CPA? Doesn't seem right to me, Christopher says. Big Four also doesn't guarantee that it'll be a proper audit as well, unfortunately. Yeah, and I think that's why we have this problem in our profession. Deloitte in Israel did the audit of Tingo. And they didn't confirm that the cash existed. $450 million did not exist. Basic, basic audit failure right there. So then you ask like, why does anyone care who does the audit? Okay. Going back to I. Sam Altman said that helpful agents are poised to become AI's killer function. This was in MIT Technology Review, and I agree with him. In an interview, Sam Altman said that he imagines these chat bots turning into highly capable agents that integrate deeply into our lives, performing tasks and managing information without needing to act as extensions of ourselves.

David Leary: [00:17:13] When you say agents like, like, I'm just going to have this super buddy that does everything for me, or am I going to have lots of super buddies that I, the person that's really good at my calendar and some another buddy I thing that's good at something else, and another AI tool that's good at something else. Like is that what he means by the word agents like siloed specialties.

Blake Oliver: [00:17:31] So. Agent means that it can act autonomously. Right now, these chat bots cannot. Act autonomously. If you sign up for ChatGPT or Clod, you have to prompt it for everything and you're doing copy paste between whatever's in your life and whatever's in the bot. If you turn it into an agent, that means you give it the ability to act on its own, and that'll take different forms. At the start, it'll be very limited, and these agents will be doing very, very defined specific tasks. That's right. As we go into the future, these agents will gain more skills. We'll be able to do more and more. So, for instance, think about being able to give one of these agents access to your calendar and then giving it a general instruction set that says, every morning, check my calendar and make sure I don't have any conflicts and point out any conflicts that I have. To me, that's something you can actually do. Right now, Zapier has built a tool called Zapier Central. Where you can actually build your own AI agents and they can act autonomously through triggers. And I've been experimenting with this, David. And I'd love to show you what I made. So I'm going to put this up on the screen now. This is called Email Assistant. And I've given it access to my Gmail account. Through Zapier. And this is why I think Zapier actually has a huge advantage in building these agents is because they already can connect to all of the apps. That you use via the API. Zapier has API access to Claude, to ChatGPT, to your email, to Google Sheets, to your CRM, all of this stuff.

David Leary: [00:19:17] Hundreds and hundreds connect chat to the thousands of apps on your Zapier account than it is to go to a chat program and connect all your apps to there from scratch, right? Exactly.

Blake Oliver: [00:19:25] It's huge. And like even OpenAI would struggle to build connections to all the hundreds or thousands of apps that use decades.

David Leary: [00:19:33] Right?

Blake Oliver: [00:19:34] And then maintaining them. Right. So, so Zapier sits in the middle of all these apps, and up till now, you've only been able to create rules based logic for zaps. You can say if this, if this, do that. And and so you were limited in what you could do. But with AI agents giving them access to different apps and giving them a generalized instruction set, you can do some pretty incredible things. And I have just scratched the surface of this. Um, and so what I've done is to experiment with this is I've created a tool called Email Assistant. And I've created a behavior called. Auto reply, the accounting podcast contact form. We get a lot of people emailing us through our contact form five.

David Leary: [00:20:20] Listeners five times a day. Yeah.

Blake Oliver: [00:20:22] And, and so, um, I personally read and respond to every single one of those, and a few things are annoying about it. The way that the form sends me an email is it comes from the contact form email address, not from the sender's email address. So I have to find the email address of the person sending the message. I have to copy and paste it into the two field of my reply. Um, I have to then cc you David, because I want you to be involved in it. And then there's a lot of stuff that I just normally always include in the response, which is I say thanks for listening. Right. Thanks for writing in. Um, and I sign off in a certain way. And so what I've done with this AI agent is I've said in the instruction set, when I receive a new email from tap contact form, which is the name of the sender of our contact form, do the following. Create a draft reply in the same conversation thread. Find the submitters email in the body and add it to the two field of the reply. Draft a reply in the voice of Blake Oliver. Start by thanking the center for listening and writing.

Blake Oliver: [00:21:23] Sign off with Best and Blake only draft replies to emails from the Tap contact form. Ignore emails not related to this? Then please create a new database item in notion because I save all of our listener mail into my database in notion, so that I can remember to read it on the air at some point. I have to do this manually right now, but this automation is going to do it for me. I say for the name field, create a name for the item that represents the topic of the message. Briefly summarize the listener's question or comment in the notes field, and then put the listener's name, email, and message in the body of the page. So this thing only triggers when I get a new email, and with a label that I've created in Gmail for the contact form. And then it has the ability through actions that I've configured to create draft replies and create database items in notions. Those are the only two things it can do, so it can't send the email for me, it can only draft the reply, and it can create the database item in notion.

David Leary: [00:22:23] And you have a folder with drafts, and then you just run through and double check it and hit send send send send send. Right.

Blake Oliver: [00:22:29] So somebody sends me an email overnight I wake up and I have a draft to their email already set up. And then I just edit and send. Got it. And so I'm showing you right now on the screen, if you're watching on YouTube you can see me testing the behavior. So. It says it's actually walking me through how it's testing it, right? It says I'm about to begin a test run based on the workflow. And so, um, it's finding an email that I recently recently received from a Jenny Cruz, and it drafts the email. So it's showing me the email.

David Leary: [00:23:02] And the beauty of this, for those who can't see this, when it drafts the email, it color codes it slightly differently. It's a different font. So it looks like a separate drafted thing. It's very obvious in the UI what's happening versus just a bunch of text. Right.

Blake Oliver: [00:23:15] So the draft is hi Jenny, thanks so much for listening and for your kind words. I'm thrilled to hear you enjoyed the show and had a good laugh. It's always great to know our efforts to keep things light and engaging and resonating with our audience. Now, that's not exactly me. I might change that, but it gives me a starting point. And then it actually responds to our comment on boomer leaders and it says, that's an interesting point. Definitely worth discussing more. Maybe we can delve into this topic in one of our upcoming episodes. Thanks again for reaching out and being part of our community. Best, Blake. Now it's creating a draft reply in Gmail and it shows me that it's cc'd our email address The Accounting Podcast that earmarked me that way. You get the reply to David. It says it's from me, right? And it puts it in the body and it puts the email in the two field, the one that I specified. And then I can say, yes, please create that draft reply. It's only making me do that now because I'm testing and it's going to create the draft reply in my email address, and then it will proceed to creating the notion item. This is a tedious thing that yes, maybe it takes me a couple of minutes per message, but it adds up.

Blake Oliver: [00:24:20] And so I'm thinking about how could you use this in an accounting firm? Well, let's say that you're tired of responding to requests from clients for information on how their tax return is going. What's the status of my return? So you could create an automation that says, every time I get an email asking about the status of a tax return, do the following. Now you could just say tell them that it's in the progress and then I'll get to it soon. Or you could do something more sophisticated, which is you could connect a data source. So Zapier lets you connect data sources, which could be Airtable, could be Google Sheets, could be Google Docs, notion or tables. So to do this, very simply, imagine if you had a Google sheet where you tracked every tax return and the status of that return not started in progress, expected delivery date. Any issues? Just a spreadsheet. You could then connect that data source to this AI agent and direct it to when a client asks about the status of their return. Respond with the information from the database. So tell them, oh, the status you return is that it's in progress and blah blah blah blah from our team is working on it. And here are the things that we are still waiting on from you.

David Leary: [00:25:43] So so really what you're doing is you have like a hyper customized experience now. So instead of having a bunch of stored, I'm lack of a better word auto replies. Like I have a bunch of messages I have ready to go that I just oh, it's this kind of email I'm going to reply with this template, this template, this one template really it's going to you have a template, but it's dynamically going to customize it based on and personalize it. Yes.

Blake Oliver: [00:26:07] And I can choose do I want that email to send automatically. Do I want that to just draft as a reply. So then I can see it and send it. So many possibilities. And it doesn't have to be email. I mean, it could be any way that you want to communicate with people. Any zap, anything you can trigger with a zap you can do, an AI agent can access that. So think about in corporate accounting. Your accounts payable department. How many times do they get the same email inquiries from vendors or from customers? Let's say a vendor is asking about the status of the payment that they are due. You could connect a data source to this agent and tell it that when a vendor emails and is on the list and asks about the status of an invoice, you know if you can go find it in the spreadsheet, go ahead and draft a reply to them automatically letting them know when they're going to get paid. If you could connect your ERP system or your QuickBooks, it could even go in and look for those, right? So automating all that tedious communication. Another example, let's say a customer emails and asks for your w-9 form. You could just say reply with the attachment and the information.

David Leary: [00:27:18] Gosh, that's a time.

Blake Oliver: [00:27:19] Yeah, right. Think about all that.

David Leary: [00:27:21] Even when you know you've given it to them, they still come back and ask for it. Some accounting department, they it never made it up the ladder. They didn't store it. Yeah. Just that alone would be a lifesaver.

Blake Oliver: [00:27:31] Or let's say you've got a public accounting firm, or you're in a public accounting firm and you get prospect inquiries. You could say, if this if an email comes in that looks like an inquiry from a prospect, respond with this information, right. Ask to set up the meeting. People are using these AI agent capabilities now to like create sales reps that handle the inbound outbound emails and automate that. That's the um, that's what I'm seeing the most in terms of like specific products developed on this kind of technology, but you could build that yourself with Zapier. Zapier central.

David Leary: [00:28:06] Yeah, it's I wouldn't say being exploited, but the technology is kind of being exploited in a spammy way right now to do high volume, salesy things on LinkedIn and your inbox, etc. but you can take this technology stack and do good things with it. You really can. And ferm it doesn't have to be just used for sales stuff, but I think that's always the game because it's a high volume game and there's a lot of bang for the buck if you automate something a million times, but for a lot of the firms, you're not going to do that. But even still, for your own personal productivity and sanity, these things do stack up and add they they add up.

Blake Oliver: [00:28:39] And one thing that's really interesting about this is that there is a scheduling feature, so you can make the trigger on these behaviors that you create a schedule. So like every day or every hour, every month or every week, you could ask it to do a behavior. So maybe that behavior is like ask for a status update from your team on a particular project. Like if I haven't received an update in so long, email them and ask for an update. Stuff like that. I'm thinking about ways I could I might be able to automate my entire job as the CEO, David.

David Leary: [00:29:13] And then I'm going to create a bot that looks at all the my emails and just summarizes what I've been doing and sends you a report.

Blake Oliver: [00:29:21] You're gonna. So my bot is going to be asking you for the status update, and then your bot is going to reply with the status update. Yeah, that's.

David Leary: [00:29:27] Going to be met with just three people our entire calendar.

Blake Oliver: [00:29:30] Well, our we will turn into AI agents and then you and I can just go, uh, relax at the pool.

David Leary: [00:29:36] Yeah. Nobody's nobody's reading anything. Yeah, I have an AI story that I think people should check out. Um, this was on the Sage blog. The title of the post is the 28 best AI Prompts for Small Businesses. But it's really not 28. It's really 84. So I did math correctly, right? It's, uh, 28 times three because what they did for each one of these prompts, and they had all these small businesses and a use case in these businesses, but they have basically a good prompt, a better prompt, and a best prompt. So you can utilize these. Um, for example, one of these examples is staffing efficiency via hospitality. Right. And so a good prompt is just flat out calculate the average number of hours worked by employees along with the average number of overtime hours per employee. But the best prompt would be compare the current number of staff to existing workloads, and determine if there are enough employees to complete the work without requiring overtime. If the answer is no, suggest ways other than hiring new staff that were that resource intensive processes can be streamlined. Now, a lot of the best ones I've noticed in here kind of feel like you might need back end tools, back end data connected in, but I think this is a good starting point. If you look at this, this blog post of ways to have conversations with your clients on little ways they could use AI to solve a business problem in their own firm. So it's 20. It's in the show. Notes 28 best AI prompts for Small Business.

Blake Oliver: [00:31:01] My favorite. Which I think I've talked about on the show but bears repeating is summarizing meeting transcripts, making meeting notes. So every time you and I have a meeting now, David, I can just drop the transcript of that meeting into clod. Clod three does the best opus is what they call their most advanced model. And I can say create detailed meeting notes from this meeting. Transcript. It's fantastic. It gets the action items. We used it to create documentation for our developers for the earmark app. You and I just sat and talked about a feature that we wanted to build for 30 minutes, and all the little nitty gritty details of how it should look and function, and what fields we need, and the new table in the back end. And it made the spec.

David Leary: [00:31:45] Yeah, it's moving beyond just taking notes or transcribing a meeting to creating an output that's useful for whatever the desired output is. Right. Used it before I think, to do like a time off policy at the company and organized it that way.

Blake Oliver: [00:32:00] That reminds me, I actually got a message from a listener on LinkedIn, um, who is using this in in audit. So. A government auditor. Internal auditor used it to take the testimony. Of an auditor working on the case and then create detailed notes. So like if you have if you're an audit and you do interviews. On internal controls, right? You have to spend a lot of time talking to people and documenting what you learn from them as part of your audit. So you could record that, transcribe it, and use Clodd to generate all of the notes from that discussion for your audit file.

David Leary: [00:32:45] Well, not just that one. You would take all the conversations and then you could run a comparison. Like what? What is aligned between all these conversations and what does not add up or is not aligned with these conversations. Right.

Blake Oliver: [00:32:56] And identify help me identify any internal controls deficiencies. So interview let's say there's five people involved in a process. And like accounts to payable department. You could interview all five, upload all five transcripts to Clodd and say find the holes in this process. How could somebody exploit the current workflow to commit fraud? I would love to try that. That would be fascinating. I bet I could do it. Turbotax was in the news in accounting today. An Oregon senator, Ron Wyden. I've heard that name before. He seems to get in the news a lot. Ron Wyden. He's from Oregon, and he is calling on Intuit, the creators of TurboTax, to issue refunds to users who were incorrectly advised by a software glitch to take the standard deduction set of itemizing, which led to them paying more taxes than necessary. Apparently, this impacted approximately 12,000 Oregonians, primarily those using the desktop version of TurboTax. Now, I read that, and I thought there's still a desktop version of TurboTax.

David Leary: [00:34:01] Is that I assume there is. And until last year, until I stopped doing mine, I only used the online one once. I always liked the desktop one. It was faster to navigate. You just jammed through it.

Blake Oliver: [00:34:13] And Intuit spokesperson acknowledged the problem and stated that the company is committed to correcting the affected tax returns under their tax return lifetime guarantee. Oh, I wouldn't want to be on the team that's responsible for that. But, uh, Ron Wyden is not happy with Intuit because apparently Intuit knew about this problem. Or is he saying that Intuit knew about this problem, like in in way before the deadline and didn't do anything about it?

David Leary: [00:34:41] I think he also runs with Elizabeth Warren. They're like anti big tax write anti. Little of that. I have a question though. So what if it was a firm. Right. So let's take TurboTax out of it. Big bad big tax. It's just a firm. You're a CPA like you're doing people's taxes and you advise them to do A over B. Would you get sued? I mean, you're you're practicing accounting, right?

Blake Oliver: [00:35:05] Yeah. Yeah, I could get sued. That's why you carry liability insurance. Professional liability insurance. Yeah. So I'm sure Intuit will figure this out and fix it and untangle it all. Um, if they don't, they're going to hear from Ron Widen.

David Leary: [00:35:21] Do you want to jump into app news or do you have some other big stories or.

Blake Oliver: [00:35:26] Well. I've got a follow up story that we got to cover, and I want to make sure we don't run out of time. Okay. So we've talked about the, uh, potential regional banking crisis here on the show related to commercial real estate. We're big fans of remote work here on the pod. You and I do this podcast remotely. Our company earmark is completely remote. No offices. And the firms that we love to hang out with, most of them are completely remote as well. That seems to be where everyone's headed with accounting, right? And and the happiest accountants are the ones who get to work remotely, or at least in a in a hybrid role. Well, problem with that is office occupancy rates are way down because all these professionals are not coming into the office anymore. Even the companies that are trying to bring people back are really struggling with this. A research group called Kleros did a study of small and regional banks in the US and says that out of 4000 US banks, 282 are at risk due to their exposure to commercial real estate loans and the impact of rising interest rates predominantly affecting banks with assets under $10 billion. So we're talking about hundreds of banks now, and they didn't name them because they said we don't want to start a bank run, but hundreds of banks out of the thousands in the US could be in trouble. Now. Like how much trouble are they in, is the question.

David Leary: [00:36:53] So that's like 3 or 4 banks per state. Like like three banks in your state might go under.

Blake Oliver: [00:37:00] Yeah. I don't know, like what's the concentration of banks. But they're all spread out right all over the place, these smaller towns and cities. Um, and there's some details about like how bad this could be. So these 265 banks have $363 billion in total assets. And there's 16 banks then that have 412 billion in total assets. And then there's one bank that has 116 billion in total assets, which I think was the New York bank that had to get, you know, a lifeline. Um, so this study is based on regulatory filings known as call reports. And they were screened for two factors. Banks were commercial real estate loans made up over 300% of capital, and firms were unrealized. Losses on bonds and loans pushed capital levels below 4%. So you've got commercial real estate loans that are three times your capital reserves, and then you've got unrealized losses not showing up in the balance sheet, not recognized yet because these banks have decided not to recognize those losses because they can due to that's just a footnote.

David Leary: [00:38:08] That's just a footnote somewhere.

Blake Oliver: [00:38:09] Footnote, um, that has pushed capital levels below 4%. So that's, you know, that is where the recession will happen. If there's a recession, it's going to be a bunch of banks collapsing. And the problem is, when you've got hundreds of banks with this problem, you know, the fed can't just go in and take them over. It's too many, right? So the fed doesn't want this to become a problem because there literally is not they don't have the resources to solve it. So that's why nobody's saying who these banks are. Because you would have a bank run and these banks would fail, and hundreds of banks failing all at the same time would be a big problem. And there's something I just don't like about that. That. The transparency that we're supposed to have in the markets. It doesn't exist because people don't want to acknowledge the problem, and they just like they're just hoping that it goes away. But interest rates are holding steady, right? Like the fed is holding interest rates steady. It's possible they won't drop them any time soon. And so a lot of these real estate loans are going to go bad. And I'm not sure that like just trying to hold steady is going to solve this problem.

David Leary: [00:39:21] I imagine you think somebody could figure out the math and figure out which banks are in trouble, because I think every time buildings need building permits, these construction projects, there's documentation somewhere with the county, right? Building, building permits, who's financing, who has the lean on it. The data is out there. They could easily figure out. And then if that building has now available, you know, for rent, it's probably sitting empty. That's that's trouble.

Blake Oliver: [00:39:47] Some smart investors are probably doing that kind of research. Right. Yeah. Like the same people who went to Florida during the before the mortgage crisis and saw the ridiculous stuff that was going on there, who actually went and got boots on the ground and figured it out. People could do that today. So here's a sign of mounting stress among smaller banks. In 2023, 67 lenders had low levels of liquidity. That's up from nine institutions in 2021. So we went from 9 to 67. So. I'm worried about that. Uh, Edgar in the chat says we may need a lot of band remote work to save the economy from a commercial loan crisis. Maybe Biden and Trump can work together on this one.

David Leary: [00:40:30] Aicpa is probably proposing that right now in Congress. Now, I don't.

Blake Oliver: [00:40:34] Know if Edgar is serious about that. Uh, but, uh, Hazardous Items says that's an awful idea. Let the markets dictate what should happen to commercial real estate. Pressure makes diamonds. Yeah, I suppose like, okay, let's let's just think about this. If this happens and there's a commercial real estate crisis, you know, or whatever, all these loans go bad. Um, what would I be doing if I had a bunch of money? If I started a fund? I'd be. I'd be hoarding cash so that I can sweep in and buy up all these distressed properties when they crater, just like smart people did during the housing crisis. Right? Yeah. I have some friends that bought houses at the very bottom with cash.

David Leary: [00:41:12] And regardless of remote work, you still need to have a house. Like, I don't know if that's true for commercial properties. Like, who's true? Like, what are you going to do with this building?

Blake Oliver: [00:41:21] Well, and you know, I think actually the the law that would help is make it easier to retrofit offices into something else. And the problem right now is that the building regulations are so strict that it's it's just not it doesn't make financial sense in the vast majority of cases to turn an office building into housing. But people could totally live there. We know that because people who work for KPMG and EY and PwC and Deloitte live there during busy season. Right. So.

David Leary: [00:41:54] Well played.

Blake Oliver: [00:41:55] Right? So just loosen up the requirements and they could become housing and that could actually like solve the problem. Yeah sure the windows don't open but you don't need you don't need windows that open to survive.

David Leary: [00:42:06] But it's also physically hard because a lot of office buildings are set up to have basically one bathroom for an entire floor. The plumbing is not there. The infrastructure of the buildings themselves are just not set up to have multiple tenants.

Blake Oliver: [00:42:18] I don't believe that if people, people are there like 12 hours a day or more, a lot of these offices, you know, there's people working there at all hours, right? People could live there.

David Leary: [00:42:28] Yeah. But there's one central kitchen for. Yeah, 10,000ft². Right.

Blake Oliver: [00:42:33] Somebody would be happy to like, share a kitchen or just possible not have a kitchen. Right.

David Leary: [00:42:38] Communal living. That's a Blake wants to go. Yeah.

Blake Oliver: [00:42:41] Why not let WeWork turn them into those. Um, what was we were going to do the we Live thing.

David Leary: [00:42:45] Oh, yes.

Blake Oliver: [00:42:46] Look, seriously, like people would. Maybe it would be discounted housing, right? But, like, we have a housing crisis in this country. I'm sure there are plenty of people who would love to live in the downtown core, where it's easy to get to work and wouldn't mind living in a retrofitted office building. So there's your solution, and that would stabilize the prices. Anthony says. They could add sewer lines and extra branches of water lines. Yeah, they could just add them to the outside of the building if they had to. Like, it would look really cool actually. Like super steampunk. Imagine all those like lines going up the side, like through the windows. I mean, why not? Like, let's be creative people.

David Leary: [00:43:22] Possible.

Blake Oliver: [00:43:23] Uh, okay, David, I'll let you take the next one.

David Leary: [00:43:26] Um, the corporate Transparency act, everybody's favorite thing this year. You know, the, uh, beneficial ownership requirements, the FinCEN stuff. Yes. To prevent illegal money movement. Well, apparently there's a chance that it's going to be repealed.

David Leary: [00:43:41] Really.

David Leary: [00:43:42] So, you know, everybody's voiced their concerns about this. And people on our show, the AICPA, the NEA, um, but one of the co-hosts of the federal Tax Updates podcast, Roger Harris, you actually went on that show and talked about the Corporate Transparency Act, I think, and at that time, wasn't there a ruling in court or something? Yeah.

Blake Oliver: [00:44:00] So a court ruled it unconstitutional, but it only applies to a limited set of people. And so then the question is, well, is it eventually going to be ruled unconstitutional for everyone?

David Leary: [00:44:13] Got it. Well, in the spirit of kicking off Small Business Week, which apparently is going on this week, um, Congress had a hearing about the Corporate Transparency Act, and Roger Harris went and testified. So he's the president of Paget Business Solutions. He really always brings that small business owner point of view on our behalf of all the small businesses. And we don't have to go into all the details and the points of view. You can go listen to the episode of the Federal Tax Updates podcast. But the end of the article Accounting Today they had a quote from Roger, and I'll read this out loud. As I left, someone had me a text of a bill introduced this morning to repeal the CTA. It's uncertain how far it will go, but it's an indication that the attitude towards the CTA is changing. So I went to the Congress.gov and once you know it, there's a new bill in the title of the bill is to repeal the Corporate Transparency Act. No text is on the website yet, but it's there. So a bill has been introduced.

Blake Oliver: [00:45:08] We have to make this happen. This act is so stupid. The the beneficial ownership information reporting requirement is awful. And talking to Roger like made me more and more convinced of it. What a waste of what a waste of time and money for all the small businesses in this country. It's the last thing that they need to be doing, and it's the last thing that accountants need to be worrying about for our clients.

David Leary: [00:45:31] In the meantime, you have the the Binance guy like. So he got fined because Binance was basically being used to move money unlawfully. Exactly the things they want. The Corporate Transparency Act to prevent Binance. Binance was being used for that. Oh yeah. Yeah.

Blake Oliver: [00:45:45] So this is ridiculous right. So FinCEN is doing this whole reporting thing on small businesses. Meanwhile, the entire cryptocurrency industry is basically built on fraud and money laundering. Like most of the money movement in crypto is not for anything lawful.

David Leary: [00:46:01] And it's it's happening between Americans and individuals in sanctioned jurisdictions. So so they're enabling people to send money to these countries. You're not supposed to be sending money, which is the whole goal of the transparency. Act like they're going after the wrong person. And so they did buy, uh, Binance did pay $4.3 billion in fees, and he agreed to pay a $50 million fine. Now, he went to jail for just four months. I find it interesting that like the Sam, the FTX, Sam Bankman-Fried, he went, what, 25 years? And FTX is also being used for this stuff, including making giving money to politicians. It's interesting how like the the takedown and who they go after and who they don't go after is interesting. And the penalties.

Blake Oliver: [00:46:42] Listener Gator NYC says it took all of five minutes for me to fill out the boy. It's not that much of a burden to small businesses. Well. David. He sounds like.

David Leary: [00:46:53] I was going to say yes until they go get a new driver's license or they move or, um, they add a new dependent, or they add a business partner. Every time that happens every 30 days. Right. You got to file a new report.

David Leary: [00:47:05] Yes.

David Leary: [00:47:06] And so that's the burden.

Blake Oliver: [00:47:07] What business owner is going to remember to do that. And guess what. If you forget to do that. Theoretically, right? I mean, it's not it's in the bill. The penalty is like. Uh, jail time. You go to jail for it. And I've heard from people who say, oh, that's not going to happen, right? That's just there to ensure compliance. When the federal government is involved, they don't joke around man like they'll and I wouldn't I don't think the feds should have that kind of power over small businesses for a filing error, you know, for forgetting to file a document that's that's like third world country, you know, dictatorship kind of, uh, enforcement. And it could it could be used against Trump. If you're a Trump supporter, it could be used against Trump to put him in jail. A forgot to file his board of information or what, uh, beneficial ownership information report.

David Leary: [00:47:59] And the crazy thing about this is the people that are committing the frauds aren't going to file these reports anyways. Like, why would you? So so this is just not well thought out. It needs to go away.

Blake Oliver: [00:48:10] It's dumb. Um, you mentioned Binance, so I'll bring up tether. Tether is the top stablecoin in the world, so supposedly linked 1 to 1 to the US dollar, although they've never gone through an audit. And tether CEO Paolo Ardoino has expressed that none of the big four accounting firms are willing to audit the company due to potential reputational risks. I wonder why, despite this, securing an audit from one of these firms remains a top priority for tether. Tether has been saying for years that they want to do an audit, but they can't get one. Isn't that hilarious?

David Leary: [00:48:48] That's crazy because there's guys like beef burgers that are out there. Like, you could find one of these audit firm mills and get it done.

Blake Oliver: [00:48:55] And they don't even get like an audit, like a real audit from one of these mills. They get these attestation reports which are even less than an audit, you know, like that don't really mean anything because it's just somebody looking at a screenshot. We don't even know what it is, but it could just be like me looking at a screenshot of something that they mocked up and then saying, oh yeah, that looks good. Um. This. Let's just put this in perspective. They have never been audited. And. Their market cap of tether US Pte. The stablecoin is over 1.100 and $9.5 billion, $109 billion never audited. And people are trading this tether saying it's backed 1 to 1 by US dollars and they've never been audited. And who? Who do you want to bet, David? Do you want to? I loved I man, I wish I was a betting person because, like, I just can't I can't imagine I got to believe that like that, that 109 billion in US dollars is not there to back up tether like could it. We're just trusting the.

David Leary: [00:49:56] Next one going down.

Blake Oliver: [00:49:57] Right I don't know. Yeah. The last time that they got a report, they get these quarterly attestations which are just agreed upon procedures, engagements done by BDO Italia, which don't mean anything because liabilities are not presented. Oh, and by the way, you know, tether is technically not backed 1 to 1 by the US dollar because they lend out tether. So as soon as you lend out tether. You're a bank.

David Leary: [00:50:26] Yeah. You know and.

Blake Oliver: [00:50:28] Banks are not 1 to 1 backed. So basically the world's largest crypto bank has never been audited. What else? What else? How much time we have left. It's 52.

David Leary: [00:50:43] Minutes.

Blake Oliver: [00:50:43] All right, let's go to the app. News. Um, can I talk about Mercury?

David Leary: [00:50:48] Do you have that in your list?

David Leary: [00:50:49] I have a little Mercury news too. Let me talk about mine first. Then you can supplement it. Okay, so, uh, the fintech. So it's a neobank that focuses on small businesses and startups. It's a it's a business bank essentially. They started in 2017. And now they want to chase consumers but not all consumers. So they don't want to be like the chime or Dave or those types of banks. They just want to chase, you know, banking power users. So you're thinking startup founders, VCs, high net worth individuals, people that really need to like, move big, lots of money around. It's not just, oh, I don't have a bank, I need a debit card.

Blake Oliver: [00:51:21] I missed the name of this mercury bank. Oh, you're talking about Mercury. Mercury.

David Leary: [00:51:25] Yes. Yes. Okay. Sorry. Yeah. So so Mercury is moving from being a business bank into consumers now. Right now personal banking is a different beast. And so I'm hopefully because I've heard from people that Mercury is a decent bank. I've talked to startup founders. We've met people in the community they like. They're happy with the product they're getting from Mercury. But I do think, like once you start going after personal banking, the ratios are different and your attention span is different and the customer service is different to where are the business clients going to get neglected and put on a second tier shelf. Right. So it's hopefully not I mean, if you're a mercury user, but you said you have news about Mercury too.

Blake Oliver: [00:52:00] Yeah. So apparently the feds are going after Mercury. The FDIC has raised concerns about Mercury's partnership with Choice Financial Group, citing issues such as opening accounts in high risk countries, facilitating suspicious wire transfers, and allowing overseas customers to open accounts using questionable methods to prove US presence. They're not following the know your customer rules. This is according to a report in the information that was passed on to me. Um. Mercury's practices have also raised eyebrows with another banking partner, evolve Bank and trust, which I think many of our listeners will know because evolve is used for many of the apps in the space, I think they've powered a lot of the bill pay in a lot.

David Leary: [00:52:45] Of apps like the other banking apps. Yeah. They're everywhere. Yeah.

Blake Oliver: [00:52:48] So a lot of people don't realize, like these, these neobanks, these accounts payable services, they don't actually provide any of the banking. They just layer on top as apps on top of a bank that they then access via an API, essentially arguably.

David Leary: [00:53:03] A regional bank that's in the Midwest.

David Leary: [00:53:05] Right? Yep.

Blake Oliver: [00:53:06] And so former Mercury employees, according to this report in The Information, have alleged that the company prioritized growth over compliance with banking laws, which has led to internal tensions and departures of key compliance personnel. The FDIC hit Choice Financial Group with a consent order and limited the fintechs ability to open new accounts. So basically, the FDIC regulates the banks that are partnering with Mercury. And so Mercury has pressured these banks to loosen up their compliance in order to open up new accounts more quickly in order to do things more quickly. Right. And now the FTC is cracking down on these banks, and that's causing problems potentially across the whole fintech world, because there aren't that many banks and they're all using the same banks. If that makes sense.

David Leary: [00:53:50] Yeah. And the spirit of it is you want you want your small business clients to quickly spin up a business bank account. But if they remove too many barriers to entry. Then that's where you get into your fraud starts going through. Right? And illegal money movement and all the whole dance.

Blake Oliver: [00:54:07] Now, the reason Mercury is such a big deal is that after SVB collapsed in 2023, Mercury became the refuge. So all that money, like during the whole collapse, remember how people.

David Leary: [00:54:19] Were.

David Leary: [00:54:19] Massive winners of that?

Blake Oliver: [00:54:20] They were transferring their money to Mercury, so they got $2 billion in deposits in over five days. And so they became a behemoth. And now suddenly they can call the shots, right? Here's an example. Of one of these problems that has been caused in mid 2023. And this is according to that report in the information, Patriot Bank alerted Mercury to a suspicious customer transaction accessed through an ATM in Cuba. And then after an internal debate, Mercury decided not to report it to the OFAC. So. That's what's going down.

David Leary: [00:54:53] And that's I mean, that's the biggest part of the whole know your customer stuff, because if there's anything that smells like it's an illegal money transfer to these banned countries, it's your responsibility to think as an operator. You're supposed to report that like, yeah, they're going to get in trouble for that. Like, you can't not report these things when they happen.

David Leary: [00:55:11] Here's another.

Blake Oliver: [00:55:11] Example. Many foreign Mercury customers use services like um LLC, University and first base to establish US LLCs and addresses to open accounts. Over 5000 Mercury customers were found sharing addresses.

David Leary: [00:55:24] Oh, boy.

Blake Oliver: [00:55:25] Right. So you're foreign. You open up a mercury account, you kind of skip past this, know your customer stuff, you successfully open a US account, and Mercury doesn't really know who you are. Then you can do a lot.

David Leary: [00:55:39] So it's. And it sounds a very similar to how with a lot of the PGP fraud, people would just spin up a quick bank account on square or, you know, Kabbage or any of these places that let you spin up in a bank account for free really quickly get the money in and out and they're gone. It sounds like maybe people are exploiting, possibly exploiting Mercury.

Blake Oliver: [00:55:57] I would not be surprised.

David Leary: [00:55:58] Yeah.

David Leary: [00:55:59] Speaking of square. So square. Well, the parent company block is now going to get this block. They're going to let you convert your daily sales. So you know you have your merchant service. And every day you get your daily sales deposit in your bank account, they're going to let you funnel 1 to 10% of that of your merchant service from square to Bitcoin. So think about you're an accountant. You're already trying to reconcile that deposit every day from square. Now you've got to worry about some percentage that's going off to some Bitcoin purchase.

David Leary: [00:56:30] I'm out, I'm out.

David Leary: [00:56:31] And it's not clear if it's going to a personal their square personal cash app first then being the purchase. But they're automating this whole thing. Now what's interesting square takes 1% cut of this. So if think about square they're already taking what 3% of your sales merchant service. Right. If they can convince you to do this they're getting another 1%. They're off of this money. Right. It's just another way to, you know, innovations being created to get people to convert cash to Bitcoin. That's how they're buoying up. The price of Bitcoin is by constantly giving people easier ways to get their money into bitcoin. Not very easy to get out, but very easy to get in. But I would say get it here to your clients on this because you're going to lose your mind trying to reconcile these deposits. If this money you're seeing this percentage, maybe technically it's probably an owner's draw. It's not really clear, but who wants to deal with that?

Blake Oliver: [00:57:21] Well, on that note, David, always a pleasure talking to you about the latest in accounting and technology and whatever seems to be anything these days audit failures, fraud. Thanks everyone who joined us live. A reminder to our podcast listeners. You too can join us live. See our shining faces here on YouTube. Find our channel, the Accounting Podcast. Hit subscribe and notify. Also, you can earn free continuing professional education credit for listening to this episode. All of our episodes, well, except some of the bonus ones. They're too short. Go to earmarked app, create a free account and search for the accounting podcast. You can earn one CPE for free per week, and if you like the app, please do subscribe and support our work to revolutionize the future of continuing professional education. And if you happen to be an IRS enrolled agent and you're listening, you can also get see for a smaller selection of our courses that focus on federal tax. You just look for the IRS C logo or search for that in our filters.

David Leary: [00:58:28] Even if you don't need CPE, you could still use the earmark app as a waste place to discover other great accounting content that's out there. There's a lot of podcasts that are in there. There's webinars, there's just a lot of content, and now you can just browse it.

Blake Oliver: [00:58:41] Yeah, right. And if you have a podcast for accountants or tax professionals or audit professionals and you want to offer CP for it, reach out, let us know. Email us The Accounting Podcast at earmarked me and we can get you on the app as well. I'm just looking through at the latest new courses and we've got a few from gusto. The Gusto Nomics podcast. You can earn CPE for learning about economics in a really informative and cool format. We've got a new course from unaccountable. We've got the Abundant Accountant, the ambitious bookkeeper. Fintech Flow podcast from Floqast. Federal Tax updates has a new one. Financial modelers corner the abundant accountant. The unique CPA tax chats for today. Oh my fraud the fast evolution from growth lab. So many great ones. The young CPA show uh, like over a thousand courses now on the app. We added 50 last week.

David Leary: [00:59:43] It's easy to find. It's just earmarked app if you find it there. That's it.

Blake Oliver: [00:59:47] Thanks for joining us and we'll see you around next week. Bye everyone. Thanks, everyone.