The Accounting Podcast

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Blake Oliver: [00:00:05] Currently. Believe it or not, there is zero minimum standards for paid tax preparers in the US. Millions of Americans use tax preparers to file their taxes because they don't know how to do it themselves. But there's nothing that requires those preparers to actually know what they're doing.

David Leary: [00:00:24] Coming to you weekly from the OnPay Recording Studio.

Blake Oliver: [00:00:30] Hello, and welcome back to the Accounting Podcast, your weekly roundup of news in the profession. I'm Blake Oliver.

David Leary: [00:00:36] I'm David Leary.

Blake Oliver: [00:00:37] We got a lot to cover this week. David.

David Leary: [00:00:39] There's so much. I don't even know where to start.

Blake Oliver: [00:00:42] The new Trump tariffs are illegal. Bases raised. Something like $100 billion at a unicorn billion dollar valuation. This is the startup that if you haven't heard about it, you're going to really soon. They they've created these AI agents. They claim an AI agent that can do a partnership tax return autonomously. We'll talk about that. Audit enforcement plummeted last year. There's a bill in the Senate to regulate tax preparers. Finally, the SEC is planning changes to audit and accounting rules, including the idea that Trump floated a while back to allow companies to report biannually instead of quarterly public companies. And you've got news about the Intuit earnings call. You've got a story about a tax expert who bet against Doge. And one big.

David Leary: [00:01:40] Bet he bet his life savings.

Blake Oliver: [00:01:41] Wow. That's ballsy. Uh, and how AI will make general ledgers even more important, not less. All that and more in this episode of the Accounting podcast. First, let's thank our sponsors.

David Leary: [00:01:54] Sponsors. This week we have Cloud Accountants Staffing on Paye and UNC Kenan-flagler Business School. Are you tired of the endless search for qualified accounting talent? You're not alone. Growing accounting firms are struggling to find available and affordable team members when they need them most. And cloud accounting staffing has just a solution with a revolutionary candidate portal. Unlike traditional staffing agencies that waste your time with sales calls, paperwork and deposits, the Cloud Accountant Staffing Candidate portal gives you instant access to highly vetted, qualified accounting professionals. While other firms make you wait weeks or months, Cloud Accountant Staffing delivers candidates in just weeks, and their boutique support ensures you are getting quality talent that's both available and affordable. No waiting, no hassle, just top talent. Right now. The cloud accounting staffing staffing candidate portal puts you in control. Browse live candidates, make selections on your timeline and build offshore team without traditional headaches to review to find, review and book interviews with potential team members, all in less than ten minutes. Head over to The Accounting Podcast. That is The Accounting Podcast promo code.

Blake Oliver: [00:03:00] Welcome to our live stream viewers! Great to see you boring accountant and Tate and Max. Five coffee emojis from boring accountant this morning I'm on my third. Let's talk about these Trump tariffs follow up from last episode. We covered the breaking news about the Supreme Court decision striking down Trump's tariffs. Trump then immediately announced new tariffs under a different law of 15% globally. He used the section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974, which permits temporary duties for up to 150 days in cases of large and serious balance of payments deficits and or imminent and significant depreciation of the dollar. And we also talked about how there's going to be a surge of lawsuits seeking refunds for the tariffs that were declared illegal. And here's the problem with these new tariffs. They're probably also illegal.

David Leary: [00:04:02] So sorry.

Blake Oliver: [00:04:05] So they might be in place for six months or longer because it takes the courts forever to get through these lawsuits and actually make decisions. But ultimately it's going to be the same situation where the companies paying them are going to get refunds. And that's because the section one, two, two tariffs rely on this idea of large and serious balance of payments deficits, which, according to this analysis that I read in the National Review, just don't exist. We have trade deficits, but we don't have balance of payments deficits. That law from 1970s, from the 1970s was designed to protect us. The dollar, when we were still on the gold standard and our economy was unstable and those conditions just don't exist anymore. So we're going to be back in the same situation. Who knows how long it'll take the Supreme Court to get to it. But there you go.

David Leary: [00:05:05] Did I hear correctly? You see so much news and stuff. Did he make a statement that, like some countries want the tariffs to still be there, like, like almost like they're choosing this because I'm going to do something worse if they don't. Is that was that the right vibe? Did he quote what country said please let us have the current tariffs.

Blake Oliver: [00:05:20] Well the under the previous tariffs a lot of the countries had negotiated down to 10%. And now he just slapped 15% global tariffs across the board. So now the tariffs.

David Leary: [00:05:31] Are.

Blake Oliver: [00:05:31] 50% higher on imports from countries that had worked with the administration to get lower tariffs in exchange for whatever the Trump administration demanded.

David Leary: [00:05:42] Yeah. So when you're a kid and you're like, your sibling would do something wrong, and then all the kids in the house would get in trouble. It's kind of the same. That's the same mindset he's using.

Blake Oliver: [00:05:49] Exactly. So I also want to talk about this fight, this race for refunds. 1800 companies have already filed refund lawsuits against the federal government, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis. Many of those suits were filed before the Supreme Court decision. Plaintiffs include Costco, Goodyear, and Barnes and Noble. Purchasing. More companies have filed since the ruling. That includes Fedex, and attorneys are predicting a wave of additional litigation.

David Leary: [00:06:21] You sound like well-funded companies that have probably have in-house counsel. Yes.

Blake Oliver: [00:06:26] Or willing to pay thousands of dollars an hour for.

David Leary: [00:06:29] Externals.

Blake Oliver: [00:06:30] To do this for them. Right. There's going to be a lot of these, especially the big the big companies are going to big. Importers are going to obviously want to get their money back. Customs and Border Protection said in a court filing that through December 10th, at least 301,000 importers were subject to the tariffs that were ultimately struck down. These cases are being funneled to the Court of International Trade, which is a specialized federal trade court based in New York City. And the seat has lots of experience with tariff disputes, but nothing on this volume or with a price tag this large. So you've got a federal court that's going to be just slammed with lawsuits, of course.

David Leary: [00:07:10] Is this like a real court, like it's part of the judicial branch, or is this a executive branch? Federal court?

Blake Oliver: [00:07:17] Federal? No, it's a it's a federal trade court. So court of international.

David Leary: [00:07:22] Report up to like. Like which branch?

Blake Oliver: [00:07:24] I don't know.

David Leary: [00:07:25] Because there's a big difference. That's, that's that's the big issue with all the immigration stuff. The immigration courts are they're not actually the judicial system. They're part of the executive branch.

Blake Oliver: [00:07:34] Well, however it works, I think that the administration is going to have a hard time fighting these cases because before the ruling, the administration's lawyers told lower courts that companies could be made whole through a refund, including interest, if the tariffs were ruled unlawful. That was their argument that the tariffs should be held in place and not struck down immediately. And so the tariffs were allowed to continue until it got to the Supreme Court. By that logic that companies could get refunds. But there's a rule in, in in the law there's like there's a rule estoppel which prevents the administration from changing its arguments in future cases related to this. So they said that these companies would be able to get refunds. And they were really adamant about that. So they're not going to be able to turn around or they're going to have a really hard time turning around and making the other argument.

David Leary: [00:08:23] So the piece of data I wish somebody could track down, right, aren't a lot of the the MAGA hats and Trump branded merchandise isn't a lot of it made overseas than imported in?

Blake Oliver: [00:08:40] Yes.

David Leary: [00:08:41] So I and this is well out of our skill set and resources to do. But I'd love to see politico or somebody research if any of the Trump organizations are asking for this refund on the tariffs now for the goods they've been importing in. That'd be great. I mean.

Blake Oliver: [00:08:56] Trump loves to sue his own government.

David Leary: [00:08:58] Yes. Yeah.

Blake Oliver: [00:09:00] Uh, all right, um, let's move on from that and go to apps. I want to talk about basis.

David Leary: [00:09:10] Okay.

Blake Oliver: [00:09:10] The big news is that this AI accounting startup called basis, founded in 2023, raised $100 million at a 1.15 billion valuation, which makes.

David Leary: [00:09:23] Up about 10% of the company.

Blake Oliver: [00:09:26] Makes it a unicorn. The round was led by a cell with participation from Google Ventures, former Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein and existing investor Khosla Ventures. Total capital raised to date is 138 million. What does basis do? Basis sells AI agent technology to accounting firms for work such as preparing financial statements, filing tax returns, and tracking expenses. The company is focused on what they call long horizon agents that can run complex accounting workflows for hours or days. They use OpenAI. Maker of ChatGPT. They use their models to handle these tasks. So basis is using OpenAI's LLM technology and then building agents that accounting firms can deploy to do work. And the really shocking claim in this fundraising announcement is that basis. They say that they have built an AI agent that can complete a partnership tax return autonomously, which.

David Leary: [00:10:33] So this is just an a PR this is a sentence in a PR release, right?

Blake Oliver: [00:10:37] Yes. So but you know, if they if they actually have done that, that's a big milestone because they are there are companies now that are doing ten 40s with AI and I could see how that would be doable. Because, David, when you use TurboTax and you fill out that survey or that form, you go through the the wizard, it's basically just taking your information and it's plugging that into the correct boxes on the forms and then doing some validation checks. Et cetera. Et cetera. Filing the return partnership returns are a lot more complex because your balance sheet has to tie out and you've got to do all these adjustments. And there's basis calculations. And it gets really complex, right. With the the partners different shares of ownership and whatnot. Right. So this would be like the next level of AI. And it's crazy to think that we are seeing this happen after just a few months. Ai capabilities are doubling every seven months. And so taking this and pairing it with that information, I believe that this is possible. And, you know, if basis actually has built an AI agent that can do this. I could see a ton of midsize large accounting firms buying. Their system buying, their SaaS in order to do those returns. And they're not going to be paying staff accountants to be prepping those partnership tax returns. They're going to be going straight to manager review and approval. And that's a huge cost savings.

David Leary: [00:12:05] I mean, two thoughts I kind of have, because I mean, basis has been on my radar for almost a full year now. Right. And ultimately until they just revamped their website yesterday or two days ago, there has not been any images or screenshots or videos of their AI, but they finally put that on. But really, the other thing I question about this. If you go to their blog page and this is just a get AI blog, all the blog posts are about the money they raise and the AI they built internally for their own software development. Like where is this great blog post showing this? How they're doing this return?

Blake Oliver: [00:12:41] Where's the video? I want to see the demo.

David Leary: [00:12:43] Yeah. Where? So that's my my issue with this is like, I feel like their whole website's optimized to raise money from investors. Like they have a great blog post about how they built an agent to resolve bugs in their own software, and has all the details on how it does it, how they built it. Like communicate like that about your accounting agents. Well, like if you're building these accounting agents, why are they so secretive?

Blake Oliver: [00:13:06] Like, maybe they don't really need a marketing website because they say they already have about 30% of the top 25 accounting firms using their software and 20% of the top 150 firms. So you don't you don't need a website.

David Leary: [00:13:22] We've been around a long time. I've been in the safe space. Using and using are not the same two words like like. I know for a fact when I remember being into it, a salesperson selling to the big accounting firms. A big accounting firm would buy 2500 seat licenses for QuickBooks. A year later, they rolled out two to clients. Right? Like using and using are two different things.

Blake Oliver: [00:13:43] Right? Okay, well, you know, I want to learn more. We're gonna keep on this story, and I really want to see if that. I want to see the AI agent do a partnership tax return. Let's set that up. Let's let's find that out basis. If you're listening, we want to see it. All right, David I'm going to let you continue on with avenues. You've got analysis of the Intuit earnings call.

David Leary: [00:14:02] Yeah. Let's stick with AI here.

Blake Oliver: [00:14:04] Um oh but before we do that let's go ahead and thank our next sponsor.

David Leary: [00:14:10] Oh, you do it.

Blake Oliver: [00:14:12] Thanks. On pay. Are you tired of payroll headaches getting in the way of the client experience. You want to deliver manual workflows, creating bottlenecks, compliance nightmares and endless support calls that go nowhere. There's a better way for your team and your clients on pay is the payroll partner that accountants and bookkeepers actually love. Why? Because it's easy to use, packed with value, and backed by support that actually supports you. Their team gets rave reviews for being fast, expert, and actually reachable when you need them on pay handles. The heavy lifting you get a dedicated onboarding coordinator who sets up worker profiles and transfers year to date data from previous providers, all at no extra cost. There's seamless QuickBooks and Xero integrations, eliminate manual journal entries, and they support any type of businesses you serve farms, restaurants, nonprofits, you name it. Onp can handle unique requirements without adding complexity. Onp keeps pricing simple to everything your clients expect from multi-state filing to off cycle pay runs. It's included no hidden fees, no surprises. To book a demo, head over to The Accounting Podcast The Accounting Podcast promo. So, David, let's talk about the Intuit earnings call.

David Leary: [00:15:27] I started to, but I was on mute. How unprofessional. So the Intuit's earnings call I want you to play a game here. How often do you think they mention the word AI during this earnings call?

Blake Oliver: [00:15:38] A lot.

David Leary: [00:15:39] Yeah. How about once every 30s approximately.

Blake Oliver: [00:15:43] Oh, no.

David Leary: [00:15:43] So if AI or artificial intelligence was mentioned, about 150 170 times, average conference call is about 70 minutes. So it's about one mention every 30s they said AI or artificial intelligence. So at a high level, the big vibe from CEO Suzanne Goodarzi is that Intuit is in a quote unquote category of one and a regulated high liability financial environment, arguing that generic AI alone can't replace the company's proprietary data. Domain specific models and expert network. Um, so just a couple of numbers that were interest that stuck out from the call. In just January alone, Intuit's AI categorized 237 million transactions just January last month. Right. Uh QuickBooks Live. Saw growth 50% growth in QuickBooks Live still again, um, but in the grand scheme, Intuit still thinks they have upside to grow because they look at the like as the total market addressable is a $300 billion market, and they think they still only have 6% of it, right. So Intuit just sees so much growth going up. Um, and then I really want to dig in more on their AI claims because go back three weeks ago, Intuit made an announcement that they're getting in bed with OpenAI, right, and making things available. Maybe even a little longer than maybe 4 or 5 weeks ago. But then just this last week, they announced that they're now getting in bed with Anthropic's Claude as well.

Blake Oliver: [00:17:12] I saw this story as well. They are going to do a multi-year partnership, and they are going to aim to embed custom AI agents into their Intuit Enterprise suite, and they're going to bring their financial capabilities into Anthropic's products.

David Leary: [00:17:30] Yeah. And so a lot of this the conference call was about these partnerships, right. And Intuit justifying them if that, if that's the right word. Right. Um, so, like you just said, Anthropic's Claude, agent builder, they'll bring personalized finance, accounting and marketing capabilities to the millions of cloud and cloud co-work users. And then there's going to say that that the reason companies like OpenAI and anthropic want to partner with Intuit is because at the end of the day, they see and understand this is a business that comes a lot of liability and Llms just can't create the platform overnight that Intuit spent 35, you know, 40 years building. Um, they also, um, he said that Llms are looking to work with them, not against us. And then they had some crazy claims. So they're claiming that their own internal agent accounting agent is saving customers 12 hours a month, and the finance agent is delivering automated panels and automated cash flow statements, saving customers 17 to 18 hours a week. I think those are just ridiculous. I just can't imagine any small business owner spending 18 hours a week building a PNL or a cash flow statement. Maybe one week a year. They do it if they do it at all.

Blake Oliver: [00:18:44] Yeah. I wonder I wonder how they're getting that calculation, how they're making that. I would love to hear from our listeners. What is your experience with these agents? Are they working for you? How much time are you saving? Let's get the real scoop from the accountants. Can I highlight, David, some of the examples about how agents could be used in their product because they they announced this when they when they announced the anthropic.

David Leary: [00:19:08] Because I have a question from an analyst that will pay you back off of that. Go ahead.

Blake Oliver: [00:19:13] Okay. So these are not real yet, but this is what Intuit is thinking. A restaurant group has 15 locations. A user prompts Intuit intelligence to orchestrate Claude and Intuit Enterprise Suite, combining third party sales and inventory data with Intuit data, their costs and their income and their payroll, and their hours and flags. Margin variances to identify underperforming locations. Here's another one. A a construction subcontractor uses an agent to connect project timelines, lien waivers, communications, and subcontractor payments to a cash flow forecast to flag billing gaps and track compliance deadlines. A solopreneur connects a spreadsheet of transactions to clod and uses Intuit invoicing slash payments tools to generate a pay enabled invoice and potentially adopt more Intuit services over time. Finally, a consumer connects data to clod to estimate their tax refund using Intuit's tools. Schedule time with an AI powered local TurboTax expert and get help addressing high interest debt. When is this stuff going to start rolling out? Intuit is saying spring of 2026. I mean, that's just a few months away.

David Leary: [00:20:32] I mean, if you go outside in Arizona right now, it's spring. It's beautiful. We should just stop recording and go outside.

Blake Oliver: [00:20:38] It's going to be 91 degrees today. Uh, so Intuit also said that it's using cloud code across its own engineering organization. It's going to be exciting times with Intuit Enterprise Suite. If they can do this, David, if they can actually deploy AI agents like this. I mean, this is why these investors are pouring so much money into bases, because the real productivity gains are going to come from inserting agents into the software.

David Leary: [00:21:07] So somebody asked him this question. This is an analyst right. Investor or something like that. Our anthropic and and the anthropic model is going to be able to get access to all your good proprietary data, access all your customers access to your workflows, and therefore be able to replicate your business. And here's how, Sasson replied. They are very interested in this partnership because they actually see and understand the regulatory environment and high stakes financial decisions that customers make, and how important accuracy and compliance and safety is. And the fact that customers actually demand a combination of technology and human expertise. And that's not easy to replicate. And then he goes on to say, frankly, in some ways, this addressable market is too small for them to even worry about. This is why they'll rely on us, which is an interesting point of view of like accounting. Ai is so teeny in the big AI business is talking trillions of dollars. They're just not going to chase it, which is kind of an interesting point of view. And then he goes on to talk about how the relationship is constructed, and the way our platform is constructed is that customers, when they engage, they are using our platform in a sense. In essence, it's through APIs and M.c.p.s. And it's in the contract. This is beyond how expertise, beyond this is beyond how the experience works, and that the data does not leave our four walls. The AI capabilities, which are domain specific that they have built, do not leave our four walls. So they're claiming that the data is not leaving into it at all. Um, and some of this is like I actually posted on top of Hassan's post on LinkedIn, like, what is Intuit doing? They're building their own AI. They're getting in bed with OpenAI, they're getting in bed with anthropic. And I kind of posted on the top of that that I think they're doing exactly what Microsoft did in the late 80s. So in the late 80s, when you were a little teeny kid, did you ever use dos?

Blake Oliver: [00:22:56] Yeah.

David Leary: [00:22:57] Okay. So dos dos was like an operating system, and a lot of operating systems were text based. Well, Microsoft was working on Microsoft Windows 3.1, 3.0, whatever. At the same time, they were in bed with Apple working on the Mac OS, and at the same time they were working with IBM on OS two. So because nobody knew which OS graphical user interface was going to win, and because of that, Microsoft was going to win no matter who won. Now, obviously windows won and Microsoft became Microsoft, but I think Intuit's doing the same thing and that's my theory. But then arguably he just addressed this in the call. So this is a further down the call from Sasson. I think the last thing I'll just end with that. Our fundamental goal is to be where the eyeballs are. We want all our capabilities to where customers are. It is yet to be determined whether or not customers actually will want to engage their finances with us through these apps. We believe the biggest opportunity is really new customer growth, but we actually need to determine whether or not customers are willing to engage with their finances through these apps, so they don't know if people are going to do their accounting and personal finances taxes through these LMS. But Intuit's hedging their bets just in case.

Blake Oliver: [00:24:08] And that's smart. And I think he's right, because when I connect to Google Workspace to ChatGPT, I started using it all the time because now ChatGPT can just go get the information to complete the task. It can gather the context itself. I don't have to load all these files in. I don't have to give it all that stuff. It just goes and gets it, searches for it. I may not even know it exists and it returns the result to me. So this is the right strategy. Don't try to build your own AI agent inside your product. Integrate with these general purpose AI chatbots that people are already using, and that have access to all the other contexts that Intuit doesn't.

David Leary: [00:24:49] Yeah, I mean, they're betting on themselves. They're hedging this. So no matter that's that's who's going to win will still be Intuit.

Blake Oliver: [00:24:55] And the reason that these AI systems aren't a threat to Intuit is because they have the data. They are the trusted database of accounting and financial and tax information. And that's not going to go away. You know, somebody could build a QuickBooks clone, but you're not going to get everyone to switch to it because the switching cost and the trust isn't there. So Intuit is going to win with this strategy in my humble opinion.

David Leary: [00:25:21] And one more sentence that caught my eye or quote, and it ties back to what you're talking about QuickBooks Enterprise Suite. Right. So cloud. Ford coworker. Yeah. Claude coworker is exactly. I'm going to start again. It's probably, I think some of his statements were written by AI, and that's why it doesn't flow very well. I don't know, Claude Cowork is where is okay. Claude Cowork is what we're actually very excited about, making the Claude core capabilities available in Intuit Enterprise Suite. And why? Because these things there's things that Claude Cowork does that we cannot do and don't want to go build. It's kind of reinforcing that point that you made. Well, sorry, that was a rough sentence.

Blake Oliver: [00:26:00] No, that's I'm glad you brought up Claude Cowork David, because that is the thing that I am obsessed with right now, and I wish I had more time to play with it. Claude Cowork is part of the Claude Desktop app. I have it on my Mac and it allows the chatbot. It allows Claude to work with files on my computer, and so I can say, here's a folder, go organize all my files and rename them. And I don't know, put the information from the files into some other system. And Claude can click around on my desktop and it can work in browser tabs too. We've been limited previously to just working in the chatbot interface. Then we got the ability with Gemini and with the Claude Chrome extension for it to work in tabs, but we were still not able to give it access to the files on our computer. And now you can. And they've built safeguards around it where you have to approve its actions. And you can decide, do I want to approve it just this one time or every time? Now the limitation was you could do a task like organize my files, but you had to redo it every time.

Blake Oliver: [00:27:09] And now Claude has scheduled recurring tasks. So you could say like organize my files. Or instead of that, you could say every time a new file is added to this folder, look at it and analyze it and figure out what to do with it. Right. Maybe I want you to plug those numbers into some practice management system. Maybe I want you to take that file and create an invoice in an accounting system, or enter it as a receipt somewhere. This can all be scheduled now. Some of the examples in the help documentation for this new feature are. Creating daily briefings from slack, email or calendar activity, weekly reports that pull from Google Drive spreadsheets or other connected tools. Recurring research to monitor competitors or industry news. File organization is a big one. Automatically go through all the files that have been dumped into this folder and put them in the correct client folder. Team updates such as stand up summaries from project management tools. I'm just thinking of all the different, like repeated repeating tasks that we do in accounting, bookkeeping, accounting, tax, audit that could be automated with this kind of tool.

David Leary: [00:28:21] Well, yeah. Good example. I try to do is we go to these meetings, you get the silly meeting notes emailed to you and you never read them really in general. But there's always a to do somewhere in those meeting notes that are for you. I just wanted to constantly read those and harvest my to dos out of those. What did I commit to? What did I say? David's going to do this. Yeah. Pull those out for me.

Blake Oliver: [00:28:41] Well, David, I built an AI agent in Zapier agents that does that for me. I'd be happy to set it up for you.

David Leary: [00:28:46] Please share it.

Blake Oliver: [00:28:46] Please share. Every time. The way it works is that every time Gemini takes meeting notes, it, um, you know, Gemini is is Google's AI and you can invite it to all your Google meets and it will create a Google doc with the meeting notes and the transcript, and it'll put them into a folder in your Google Drive called Meet Recordings. So I have a zap that monitors that folder on my Google Drive. And when a new Google doc is added, it extracts all the tasks from that document, and then it sends that task list to an AI agent that I've then taught how to enter tasks into Google tasks And put due dates on and assign. So everything that I commit to do in a meeting gets added to my task list with a link back to the meeting notes.

David Leary: [00:29:35] Right? So, so so you're using Google's AI to send things to a Google Doc to create task and Google tasks? Yep. Why is why is this not just the default functionality of this stuff? Why?

Blake Oliver: [00:29:46] Because somebody would have to build that and like to build the interface.

David Leary: [00:29:49] Exactly. Are they not using their own tools? Do they not have these problems that the rest of the world has?

Blake Oliver: [00:29:54] I'm sure they'll do it eventually. But the beauty is, I don't have to wait around for somebody to have that bright idea, right? I can just build it myself right now. So, like, imagine that, you know, I'm doing it with Google tasks. But if your practice management has a integration with Zapier, you could do this with your meeting notes, right? You could take those meeting notes and create tasks in whatever it is, you know, carbon or financial sense or, uh, any of the other, like two dozen practice management solutions out there. So anyway, Cloud co-work super cool recurring task. Keep an eye on that. Try it if you haven't, you will be blown away. Claude also has released a private plugin marketplace for Claude team accounts. You can think of it like an internal app store, but for AI agents across every department and it has templates for HR, design, engineering, operations, finance, investment banking, equity research, private equity, wealth management. They worked with practitioners in those fields to build these agents that you can then copy into your own private marketplace and people can use. This is the same thing. This is what this is what basis. This is what I suspect basis is building for accounting firms. It's just more specialized.

David Leary: [00:31:07] Yeah. I mean, that's always been the biggest flaw I always felt with, uh, Zapier. Right. You build something, and then you can't really share it with anybody, right? Not in the same way. You kind of have to just build it versus like this. You could all the things, All these cool things you've built for yourself, Blake. You could share with the rest of earmark, and we could just grab it and start using it like that. It's. It's just a really smart model. Regardless of it being an AI model of sharing knowledge in your org.

Blake Oliver: [00:31:33] It has access to Excel and PowerPoint. So here's an example of what you could do. You could have it run a financial analysis from a spreadsheet in Excel and then turn it into a PowerPoint presentation. Think about how often financial analysts have to do that kind of work or CFOs. You can automate that. And sure, maybe it makes mistakes, but you can then train these AI agents. You can improve their instruction sets. You can go in and tell it what to do better next time and improve it. And that's how I work. Iterate on it. It just gets better and better and better. So really cool ways to automate work. Do you want to continue on with app updates? I got so many, David. Um, here's a stat.

David Leary: [00:32:15] Yeah, jump in.

Blake Oliver: [00:32:16] Here's a stat that is encouraging for companies like Basis and Cloud Co-work and whatnot. According to a survey by Kantana, this is from their annual state of the Professional Services industry report. 87% of professional services firms plan to manage AI agents as part of their workforce. 87% huge market. 89% of leaders in professional services firms say that future revenue growth will depend more on scaling AI than scaling headcount. But their biggest challenge is managing and integrating AI agents into delivery workflows. What does this mean for workers? Well, there's also a new study that finds that AI makes workers faster, but it also made them take on more tasks and work longer hours without even being asked. Here's an interesting finding. Engineers in this study ended up spending more time reviewing and correcting AI assisted work from colleagues, including coaching people who were vibe coding. So that's the AI slop that we're talking about. We got to fix the fix, the work that was done. But it's interesting. Workers are working more productively because they're prompting AI during lunch and meetings, and then they wait for the results. And it doesn't feel like extra work for them, but it meant fewer natural breaks throughout the day. And that fits with my experience, where I'll just be like running different prompts throughout the day, and I'll go off and do something else and I'll come back and it feels fun because it's like I didn't have to go do all that tedious work. The AI did it, and then I just have to review it and clean it up. So you still have to have the ability to review the work and guide it. You have to know what you're doing. So that's why it's such an interesting job market right now because it's hard to get an entry level job. It's hard to get a job where you're the doer. But if you are a reviewer, if you're a manager, if you have experience and you know what you're looking at, you are super in demand. If you're willing to leverage AI to do the work.

David Leary: [00:34:21] I have an AI job that's even in more demand, at least salary wise.

Blake Oliver: [00:34:25] What's that? David?

David Leary: [00:34:26] So arguably, objectively speaking, we see there's been a lot of negative press about AI going to take jobs. It's going to cause a collapse. It's going to kill humans, right? There's been some negative press. But then also companies, every time they turn around AI does something and it's creating a stock market crash for that segment. Right. First it was the law firm software. Then it was accounting software. Right. We're seeing these crashes in software. Well, what's happening now? The people that are cashing in on AI are communication and PR leaders at tech companies. So big tech companies are offering up to $1 million plus salaries for senior communication executives. And the reason why is, though, even though these tech companies are creating AI, explaining it is actually almost as strategic and justification for it as building it. So as as AI grows more powerful and controversial, companies like Netflix, anthropic, OpenAI are seeking communication as a critical critical for managing risk regulation, investor confidence, and public trust. So some examples of these salaries. Netflix is hiring a senior director of communications, 650,000 to $1.2 million a year. Anthropic Head of product communications, $400,000 OpenAI's $430,000 plus equity. Um, the average US communications director salary is only $110,000. So communication. If you can communicate about AI and manage the public's impression in the streets impression of your company, especially with market caps, right. Paying somebody $1 million a year to to manage billions of dollars in market cap is not a big deal to do.

Blake Oliver: [00:36:04] I have another theory. Why they're getting paid so much is because AI is perfectly suited to helping those executives in PR and comms do their job. Without a big team, You could, as that executive, do the job of like ten people.

David Leary: [00:36:21] Now you just got rid of that department? Yes.

Blake Oliver: [00:36:23] One person with a good idea of what the communication should be, that you don't need a bunch of writers anymore. You don't know.

David Leary: [00:36:34] You'd be true at all companies, not just these tech companies. Shouldn't senior communication leaders be going up everywhere?

Blake Oliver: [00:36:40] Well, you know, maybe it's just that these tech companies are giving these people the tools and teaching them how to use it. Okay, so this is also the sort of thing where like like how will this apply in accounting? I think it will apply because if you're like a CFO or a controller level person and you want to own your own firm, you're going to be able to start a firm, leverage these AI agents in the next few years to do the bookkeeping and the accounting and the and the bill pay and the payroll, and you'll be able to basically have $1 million firm with just yourself. So that is really exciting. Like, if you don't want to manage employees and you just want to do great work as like a fractional CFO, this is where I would be looking is these AI agents figure out how you can automate all of the accounting for your clients and just oversee it and manage it, and have strategy meetings with them and explain the financials and address all their concerns. Help them out.

David Leary: [00:37:39] And this also explains, I think, the behaviors we've seen with Intuit, Xero and now Sage the last couple of weeks. Obviously, all three of those stocks have gotten hit as part of the SaaStr apocalypse. And basically the O. If AI can do something, I don't need this company anymore. The stock, the Street's punishing these stocks and Xero and Intuit, we talked about either last episode of the week before they're on the offensive about how like, oh no. Ai can't really do the stuff we do. We're magical. Well, now, Sage just had, uh, an article that came out from Aaron Harris. You know Aaron Harris. He's been on the show before. Yep. What I love about him he nerds into accounting technology. I really like it. He's the founder of Sage Intacct, right. He currently.

Blake Oliver: [00:38:23] Is the Chief.

David Leary: [00:38:23] Medical officer.

Blake Oliver: [00:38:24] Global CTO at Sage.

David Leary: [00:38:26] Cto, CTO of Sage. Yep. So he wrote an article and he argues that AI, while it can generate quick functional prototypes, it just struggles handling strict rules, edge cases, and accountability that you need in real world finance. And the summary is he thinks that AI is going to make GLS more valuable and it won't replace them. Right. This concept of so again, the same vibe or communication is coming out from Intuit, Xero and now Sage. They're fighting this narrative on the street that AI is going to get rid of these SaaS companies. Um, one thing you said that something to keep in mind with all this technology shifts faster than customer trust, and that's always something to think about. Yeah. Yeah. Especially. And it's probably even worse with accountants and accounting firms.

Blake Oliver: [00:39:13] And that's the thing is Sage into it. Zero. They have the trust in the general ledger. And so they're not going to lose that trust overnight maybe over time. But I mean they built up those brands and that trust over decades. It's not going anywhere just because we've got new tools.

David Leary: [00:39:31] And he introduced a term that I kind of like called finance grade AI. Like, you know, we always throw this word AI around there. But like finance grade AI, which would be domain specific, explainable, repeatable models, which is always my beef with it. It doesn't repeat very well built in approvals, permissions and audit trails and then clear accountability when AI confidence is low. Like why did this break? Who's responsible for it, etc.. So it's just a like it kind of ties in. All these companies are in the offensive defending why AI is not going to kill them, which is why they need communications people to defend these, because market cap is just huge. Um, and I have another story about market cap we could go into, but we might want to jump into the next ad first.

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David Leary: [00:41:22] So I have a story about how IBM lost $31 billion in market cap in one day this last week. Now, we're not a stock covering show, right? So how does this tie back to us? Well, the reason this happened is because Anthropic's Cloud announced they could actually do. They taught it to do COBOL programing.

Blake Oliver: [00:41:41] Cobol, COBOL is that rings a bell because I think the IRS is still using it.

David Leary: [00:41:46] Yeah. So so IBM a big chunk of their business still the revenue is supporting these old COBOL based mainframes that are out there. Um, now argue IBM argues that, you know, it's only a small piece of a piece of a much bigger, complex puzzle. Um, but they're getting punished for this. Now, what's interesting is the typical cobalt programmer is about 60, 65, 70, 55 years old. They probably entered the workforce in the 80s, so they're ready to retire. And I know I've heard about like there's a shortage of these cobalt programmers. Cobol was created in 1959. And this is you ready for this? It still runs an estimated of 70 to 80% of global business transactions. Wow. Like it's such an important thing. And the best example is this. Like you just said, the IRS is individual master file system is still running on these IBM mainframes in COBOL. So in theory now could could the IRS just use Claude to upgrade these IRS systems? Like, like obviously somebody's got to be trying to do that.

Blake Oliver: [00:42:52] I think uh.

David Leary: [00:42:53] And maintain it.

Blake Oliver: [00:42:54] Yeah. No, I mean, it could certainly help if there was motivation, any reason to get any better. David, I want to pivot to audit enforcement. We talk a lot on the show about the PCAOB. They had a big shake up last year with the retirement of Eric Williams or not retirement. Leaving the chair left and they they're swapping out board members and all that. Well, audit enforcement fell off a cliff after she left the PCAOB, and SEC brought just 39 enforcement actions against auditors in 2025, and that's down 33% over the previous year. Monetary sanctions fines dropped even harder, falling 66% to just 17.9 million. And basically all virtually all of the penalties and most of the actions, the vast majority of the actions came before Eric Williams resigned. She was appointed by Biden. After that, everything went quiet. The SEC only brought two actions all year, and it's not going to bounce back anytime soon. The PCAOB 2026 budget cuts enforcement funding by 15%.

David Leary: [00:44:09] Is this because they're cutting at the top and they're just doing less audits? So that means now at the bottom of it, there's less fines or is it just the industries? Everybody's being good citizens, so there's nobody to find?

Blake Oliver: [00:44:19] Or is it that the administration is just, you know, not interested in enforcement against audit firms? Whatever the reason, it's good news, I suppose, for the audit partners who don't like to deal with the pcob. Let's talk about a bill in the Senate to regulate tax preparers. Currently, believe it or not, there is zero minimum standards for paid tax preparers in the US. Millions of Americans use tax preparers to file their taxes because they don't know how to do it themselves. But there's nothing that requires those preparers to actually know what they're doing. And now there's a bipartisan Senate bill that wants to change it. It's called the Taxpayer Assistance and Service Act, and it would let the IRS deny, revoke or suspend preparer identification numbers, penalize preparers who alter returns or misappropriate refunds, and crack down on ghost preparers. The ones who don't even sign the return, they do the return and give it to somebody to sign, which is illegal. The bill also includes IRS modernization upgrades like digitizing more returns, improving the Where's My Refund tool, and expanding callback options so that you aren't stuck on hold forever. All right, the SEC is seriously considering letting public companies report financial results just twice a year instead of every quarter. Trump suggested this a while back, but nothing happened. Now, SEC Chairman Paul Atkins has asked his team to prioritize it as formal rulemaking. This would be a massive shift. This might be the biggest shift for public company reporting since the SEC was created, going from quarterly to twice a year. I have to admit, I like this idea.

David Leary: [00:46:20] It takes pressure from the street away on that quarterly quarterly performance? Yes. Will this cost the big audit firms.

Blake Oliver: [00:46:28] Maybe.

David Leary: [00:46:29] Billions because now they're well, half their workload just went away. There's no after demand.

Blake Oliver: [00:46:35] No no no no no. I see. I don't think so. Here's why. Right. Because you still have to audit all the transactions in the period, right? I mean, you still have to audit the whole year. It just means these companies are going to be issuing financial statements twice a year instead of four times a year. And like you said, David, one of the problems here in the US with our public companies is that they're expected to beat earnings estimates quarter after quarter after quarter and a quarter is just three months. And that's not a lot of time. And so they it may incentivize them.

David Leary: [00:47:10] To play games.

Blake Oliver: [00:47:11] To make short term decisions when they really should be looking longer term for the benefit of the investors and also gaming the financials in order to shift money from one quarter shift income, expenses, whatever, whatever it is, from one quarter to another. In order to.

David Leary: [00:47:27] I've had to take a four.

Blake Oliver: [00:47:28] Sage.

David Leary: [00:47:28] Earnings. Intuit did that once one quarter to make numbers. They made everybody take a week's vacation. So that way it would just come out of the liability account and the balance sheet and wouldn't be an expense. And they lowered the expense by millions that quarter to make the numbers. Yeah.

Blake Oliver: [00:47:41] That's funny. Um, so, you know, like, I don't know that this would be good too, because also there's like a big problem in accounting is deadlines. We're so deadline driven and there's so many of them, like, wouldn't it be nice to only have two big deadlines if that's what you're doing rather than, you know, four of them every year.

David Leary: [00:48:01] Especially if you stagger some companies to be on this quarter and these companies to be on this quarter and you and balanced it all out.

Blake Oliver: [00:48:07] And I just I haven't seen evidence that quarterly reporting is any better. And elsewhere in the world they do biannual reporting. They don't do.

David Leary: [00:48:16] Australia because I know zero is always biannual because I never can line up the numbers with Intuit. They're always every, every six months.

Blake Oliver: [00:48:22] So this could be a good way to like, you know, make accounting a better place to work and also reduce the workload because we don't have enough experience. People to do all this stuff could be helpful. All right, David, I'll let you take the next one. What about this tax expert who bet against.

David Leary: [00:48:38] I was going next? So.

Blake Oliver: [00:48:40] Okay.

David Leary: [00:48:41] Um, you're familiar with the Tax Foundation, the kind of slightly conservative leaning think tank?

Blake Oliver: [00:48:47] Yeah. I mean, they they they claim, you know, they're they're nonpartisan, but I think they tend to lean a little bit on the, you know, economically conservative side.

David Leary: [00:48:58] But and they have tax experts that work for them. Right. And, um, and these guys are super smart, right? Arguably tax expert slash economist slash law. Right. These are super, super smart people that that are part of the Tax Foundation. Well, Alan Cole he wagered nearly his entire non retirement savings on the prediction market. So it's catchy right. It's how you say it.

Blake Oliver: [00:49:24] Uh there's a few of them. Yeah.

David Leary: [00:49:26] Yeah. So so he did that on Calsci and the bet was against Doge. So essentially the.

Blake Oliver: [00:49:32] Department of Governmental Efficiency, Elon Musk failed partnership with Trump.

David Leary: [00:49:38] Yeah. So the bet was that the government would spend less in 2025 than 2024. And apparently that did not happen. So he bet $300,000, over $300,000 in this $342,000, and he wound up cashing out with a profit of $128,000. Because when the numbers finally came in this last January for the official 2025 reporting. They did not actually cut the numbers. Those did not cut it. So so he bet against Doge and he won.

Blake Oliver: [00:50:07] And how much did he win?

David Leary: [00:50:08] $130,000. 37% profit.

Blake Oliver: [00:50:11] What was the what was the amount he bet?

David Leary: [00:50:13] Uh, 340,000.

Blake Oliver: [00:50:16] $340,000 and won 128.

David Leary: [00:50:21] Yeah.

Blake Oliver: [00:50:21] So 28.

David Leary: [00:50:22] He received a payout of 470,000. So he profited 37%.

Blake Oliver: [00:50:26] Wow. I mean, we should maybe we should have made some bets.

David Leary: [00:50:28] David, honestly, I saw this. I was like, gosh, we were smart enough. We could have done this.

Blake Oliver: [00:50:32] Like, all right, I need I need to check out these prediction markets because like, I want to put my money where my mouth is the next time.

David Leary: [00:50:40] And we could publicly track those for the show. That's interesting.

Blake Oliver: [00:50:43] Here's a story I spotted on Going Concern that seems like good news, but might actually not be. Washington State they issued a record 2086 new CPA licenses in 2025, and that's an increase of 16%. 16% increase in the number of new CPAs in Washington state.

David Leary: [00:51:04] Probably because the 150 hour rule. Right?

Blake Oliver: [00:51:06] Well, 60% of those licenses didn't go to people in the United States. They went to international candidates. Only a quarter of the new licensees even lived in Washington. And that's because, as we learned from Lindsay Patterson, our guest a few episodes ago, Washington is one of the states that doesn't require you to be a resident to become a CPA. And you can even do it if you're out of the country. So all these accountants in the Philippines who want to work remotely for US companies can get their CPA in Washington and be US CPAs and fulfill that compliance requirement for these companies at a much lower cost than hiring somebody in the US. Washington doesn't even require a Social Security number to get a CPA license, and it makes it very popular for international applicants. And crazy enough. Um, like Nasba actually in AICPA, I think was involved in this. They've made it really easy now to sit for the CPA exam outside of the US. You can you can take the CPA exam in 19 countries and never even come here. So it raises an interesting question. This is Adrian Gonzalez's question on going. Concern is, you know, is is the accounting shortage actually getting solved? Or is Washington is the state Board of Accountancy in Washington just becoming a gateway for outsourcing and offshoring the work to other countries? I'll let our listeners in the livestream give us their take on that.

David Leary: [00:52:39] In some states, require you to join the state society if you're in that state to become a CPA. Right?

Blake Oliver: [00:52:44] I didn't have to I don't know.

David Leary: [00:52:46] You didn't have to. But so I'm wondering if Washington's one of those states that require all CPAs registered in that state to join the the state.

Blake Oliver: [00:52:55] Putting on your conspiracy theory hat David.

David Leary: [00:52:57] A little bit. I'm like, it's easy to turn a blind eye to it if you're getting all this revenue in. Right. Because you would think that the Board of Accountancy in Washington state would be there to advocate for CPAs in the state of Washington, right? But if they're just getting memberships paid by people that got their CPA in Washington and are actually in Washington, I'm sure it's easy to turn a blind eye. It'd be interesting. I just I'm looking at the website and of course it's horrible. I can't figure out how much it costs to register or anything like that, but it's just the thought. My thought.

Blake Oliver: [00:53:28] Allison says on YouTube, we need the AICPA to hammer down on the license. We need CPAs to be in the country. Otherwise, it devalues the license. Wasn't the point of the 150 change to bring value to the license? Allison also says, I feel like we're ten years away from hitting a button that says generate random business idea and running it through 12 different AI agents who run it into the ground autonomously. Let's see. So, David, one of our listeners asks, do you think Intuit stock is a buy? That's what Tate says. All I'm hearing is we should buy into IT stock.

David Leary: [00:54:05] I could disclose my stock portfolio. I mean, I don't know what's in my 401 (K). It's all mutual fund stuff. I don't know what's in there, but my personal IRA. I own four stocks. Right? Four. Yeah, I own Intuit, I own zero, I own Sage, and I own Oracle. Because my bet is you're going to have to if you're a business anywhere in North America and maybe the world, you're going to probably use one of those four girls. I'm betting on accounting, if you think about it that way. Or bookkeeping, accounting, whatever. Yeah.

Blake Oliver: [00:54:36] David Watts, what about this story about the IRS employees not getting prepared? Did you see this one?

David Leary: [00:54:42] I did see that, yeah.

Blake Oliver: [00:54:43] So back in 2024, when the IRS hired nearly 19,000 employees, they struggled to even get them set up to actually work. This is according to the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration, 40% of the new hires didn't receive a laptop until more than five days after their start date. 44% didn't get their performance expectations within 30 days.

David Leary: [00:55:06] Yeah, so so we hired these people. So we hired 8000 people, and we didn't tell them what their job is or what.

Blake Oliver: [00:55:13] What their expectations are, what their goals are.

David Leary: [00:55:15] What they're supposed to be doing. This is great. That's actually a staggering, mind blowing amount of just.

Blake Oliver: [00:55:22] The fact they didn't have laptops. Like, how did they even work, right? You're just sitting around waiting for a laptop for a week.

David Leary: [00:55:29] I yeah.

Blake Oliver: [00:55:32] I've got a funny story here, David, about another like idiot move while we're on that topic. You know, every now and then some crypto exchange screws up and loses a lot of money. Well, there was a recent one that I think every accountant should hear about. The exchange is called Bithumb Bithumb there in South Korea. And they were doing a giveaway, small prizes in Korean won. And somebody fat fingered the number and accidentally set sent 620,000 bitcoins to users. So one winner who should have gotten basically the equivalent of a cup of coffee, got $120 million. And the chaos triggered a 70% market drop in Bitcoin before Bithumb halted transactions. 30 minutes later, they've recovered 99% of the Bitcoin, but some users managed to cash out about $9 million and are refusing to give it back. And there's no way for Bitcoin bithumb to make them do it because its blockchain can't reverse the transactions. Now you might wonder how could this happen? How could they lose the equivalent of $40 billion of funds? And I think what happened is that Bithumb has like a ledger, and they sent funds to users that didn't exist. Are you.

David Leary: [00:57:00] Saying big thumb.

Blake Oliver: [00:57:02] Or thumb?

David Leary: [00:57:03] Okay. Part of me thinking like my guess is. Which is ironic, it got fat fingered incorrectly.

Blake Oliver: [00:57:09] Yeah. One of the jokes on social was they should rename the fat thumb. So. So I think what happened is a lot of these exchanges, they don't have accounting ledgers that balance. They just build whatever works. Right. So it's like a single entry maybe system. And so what happened is somebody at Bithumb sends the money, but there's no, like, automatic reconciliation on the back end, making sure that there's actually those Bitcoin in the bithumb reserves. And so users though, because they had a large sum on the Bithumb like website were able to withdraw and the exchange allowed you to withdraw if you had that money in your account, but only up to what they actually had in reserves. So it's not like the exchange like invented Bitcoin. They didn't like make Bitcoin out of thin air. But what they confused everybody. And then some users were able to steal a bunch of bitcoin.

David Leary: [00:58:10] So it's kind of like an old fashioned bank run.

Blake Oliver: [00:58:12] Yeah. Well except.

David Leary: [00:58:14] Stop people from pulling the money.

Blake Oliver: [00:58:15] Would be the analogy. It would be like. It would be like if, well, when banks had their own currency during the wildcat banking period, it would be like as if a, you know, a bank in Arizona accidentally printed a bunch of scrip and then or maybe, maybe they had like a bunch in the back and like it fell off the stagecoach and then like, people started taking it and spending it. Right. But there's not actually reserves in the bank to back it up. So that triggered like this chaos. But now there's this investigation in Korea because, you know, How could this happen? Well, banks are required to actually reconcile this stuff, right? A bank can't just put a bunch of money into your account that they, you know, like like they have to actually, like, the balance sheet has to balance and all this stuff. But these exchanges don't. And so that's why like it's crazy. The whole situation we have in crypto is crazy because you have basically these unlicensed banks that are acting as exchanges that can. And that's why this kind of stuff can happen because there's no internal controls. There's no like reconciliation that's happening.

David Leary: [00:59:19] So like that's what's crazy because in theory, the argument I've seen from blockchain is like, oh, it's triple ledger accounting. It's gonna like you guys aren't using it yourselves. Why would you expect the accounting industry to use this technology stack?

Blake Oliver: [00:59:33] Well, the problem is.

David Leary: [00:59:33] That.

Blake Oliver: [00:59:34] The blockchain is so difficult to use and user unfriendly, you have to build these interfaces and exchanges on top of it. And those are not secure. Secure? Those don't have like the blockchain backing it. Right. Like those are just abstractions of what's going on under the. The scene behind the scene. Um. All right, David, we're already at an hour.

David Leary: [00:59:57] I so I close this out with one more story. Unless you have another one.

Blake Oliver: [01:00:00] Go for it.

David Leary: [01:00:01] Um, so this is actually a story that all of you, if you need marketing content to email your clients, and you want to seem useful and have an email that they'll probably open and read. So, Blake, do you know about the federal IRS locker?

Blake Oliver: [01:00:14] No.

David Leary: [01:00:15] Good. Because it doesn't exist. And you probably should tell your clients this. Is this.

Blake Oliver: [01:00:19] Like the lockbox, Al Gore's lockbox?

David Leary: [01:00:23] I don't know what that is, but.

Blake Oliver: [01:00:24] You don't remember that. Okay. Never mind. Keep going.

David Leary: [01:00:25] So what drove. This is a Michigan man lost more than $1 million after falling victim to an IRS impersonation scam. Somehow, he got a pop up on his computer. He followed the instructions, and then he got a phone call from a person posing as an IRS clerk. And they liquidated his retirement and bank accounts to supposedly protect his assets. They were told that he needs to move these, this money to a secure federal IRS locker so nobody else can steal this money. And then they went on to, uh, get cash from him through an $8,000 ATM withdrawal. And then the rest of it, he got cashier's checks and then sent them off from his bank. So he basically drained his entire for1 k a million, million, over $1 million stolen from this man in Michigan. And so the IRS is like, warning, you know, you'll never the IRS will never say pay now, or else they'll never say they're going to arrest you or deport you to pressure you to pay. But like this is easy fodder for your just send all your clients an email, you know, telling them that this doesn't exist. It's a good story though. You can find the link in the show notes. It's a good story. It's an easy one that your clients will open up and it looks like you're providing value and you did no work. You're just educating them on a way to save them $1 million.

Blake Oliver: [01:01:38] Um.

David Leary: [01:01:39] And I just think, and this is very similar to what happened to my mother in law, right?

Blake Oliver: [01:01:43] Like, yeah, Um.

David Leary: [01:01:44] People have got to be. You can't trust anybody. Just I, I work, I go through life thinking everybody's trying to rob me. Like, you have to go through life like that. Every time you. The phone rings, some asshole is just trying to take money from my pocket into his pocket. That's the way I go through life. Somebody's trying to take my money. So I think you kind of have to think that way, because this is not like to just get it because you're never getting that money back.

Blake Oliver: [01:02:07] Nope.

David Leary: [01:02:08] It's just it's horrible. It's sad. But use this as a story to give to your clients.

Blake Oliver: [01:02:13] I want to highlight some of our live stream viewer comments before we go. This is regarding the, uh, AI that can do partnership returns. The dialect says. The problem is you still need someone qualified to make sure the input is correct. This will 100% cut staffer level jobs and pull what's left of the talent. Pull what's left of the talent ladder even higher. I agree it's going to cut staff jobs and put more work onto managers to review the AI outputs. Regarding the tariffs, Zweifel says only the richest companies will get tariff refunds, I bet, and consumers will get hosed in the end, like always. That's seems accurate, right? Because who's going to be able to file these lawsuits afford to do it? It's not the small importers, it's the big ones. And nobody except the importer of record is, uh, has any right to a refund. So if the importer passed on the cost of the tariff, they get to collect the refund. They don't have to pass it on to the consumer or the businesses in the middle.

David Leary: [01:03:17] And I still like your idea from last week. Offer this as a service at your firm, like spin up a shot, a service and be like, hey, we'll help you get your tariff refunds back if you're an importer.

Blake Oliver: [01:03:28] Uh, Social Security, our forum tax free 401 (K) says, hey, Blake and David, big fan of the podcast and really enjoyed the episode on CPA mobility. Well thank you. Thanks for listening. Glad you liked it. Boring accountant says doing a partnership tax return and doing a partnership tax return professionally and successfully are maybe not the same claim. My five year old daughter can also do a partnership tax return. Your five year old daughter must be a savant or a what do you call it? A child genius. The diet says tax software and accounting software already does a lot of base level calculations. I had to go back myself to learn how the calculations actually worked. Jumping from entry to manager is colossal. Boring accountant also said the help desk and live support agents for various accounting software are using the generated responses from AI agents to troubleshoot problems. And now the in-person help is completely unhelpful. You know, one thing I've started doing whenever I want to figure out how to do something in software now is like Chrome has the Gemini button enabled, and like I will just be on the screen, I'm on and I'll say, I'll ask Gemini, hey, how do I do this? And it has access to the tab I'm in And doesn't always get it right, because sometimes the data it's like pulling from is outdated. But like usually I get the answer really fast.

David Leary: [01:04:48] I've been using AI for more. How do I's like? I'm trying to do something and I know there's a click sequence I probably need to do, and if I after like two seconds if I can't find it myself, I usually go to AI now and be like, I want to do this and this app. And it can kind of navigate me there and I can do it.

Blake Oliver: [01:05:04] Tate says. Uh, regarding my story about making Google tasks, he says an AI takes your meeting notes, files them, and then you use other AI's to transfer everything into Google tasks. Blake, while that may sound simple and straightforward to you, it's actually not. Well, maybe I should do a a lesson on this because I could actually show you a webinar. Yes. Yeah, I should do a webinar on.

David Leary: [01:05:25] This for a webinar.

Blake Oliver: [01:05:25] Because I can I can show you how to do it in like an hour. It's really not that complicated. Um, but, you know, you're gonna have to take like half a day or a day to really just play around with it and get it working how you want. But once you build one of these, you know how to do it in principle. And and you can, you know, spend a little time every week rolling these out. Um, this is regarding the Washington state situation where more than half of the CPAs are out of the country or in different states. The diet says, honestly, it's kind of infuriating. I'm a Canadian and moved here to get my US CPA. It's infuriating that Nasba and AICPA let other people bypass it all like that, Tate says. I feel like cryptocurrency is a solution to a problem that does not exist. And Ark. Arcadis Rowe shares Ark says Blake, how can I get an autographed copy of your book? Come to AICPA engage. Earmark will be at the pool on Tuesday and Wednesday. We're getting a cabana, and anyone at the conference is welcome to join us there. And I'll have copies of my book that will be signed. So we'll talk about that on the show.

David Leary: [01:06:50] Sign up as we get closer.

Blake Oliver: [01:06:52] As we get closer, we'll put out a luma and you can you can register. I'll have copies of my book. And earmark is going to be exhibiting there this year. So you can learn all about how to offer unlimited CPE to your whole team. And if you do internal trainings, you get a private channel on the earmark app. And we can take your trainings and make them available for on demand CPE anytime, anywhere. It's great if you're a learning and development program manager who's doing webinars and you're doing all this great content, but not everybody's available at the time that you're doing the Lunch and Learn or the webinar. Well, now you can just send us that recording and it can become an on demand course on the earmark app. No extra effort required. And of course, all your team members then get access to all the other great shows on earmark for CPE.

David Leary: [01:07:40] And just be clear to everybody. I don't have my own autographed copy of the book yet either, so don't don't feel like you're left out if you don't have one, because I have yet to get one. And I think I wrote a comment on the back or something I'm quoted in the book.

Blake Oliver: [01:07:50] Maybe Tate wants to know when the audiobook version is coming, and I'm happy to report we're making progress on that. I hope to have that for you in the next couple of months, but we will have an audiobook version and you will be able to listen to it and earn CPE for listening, but it's going to be the same as the book version. So if you've already read the book, you can just blast through the the audio version and get your CPE taken. The quiz. That'll be great for subscribers. And I'm also working on like a downloadable version of the book as well. It's kind of funny. We did the print version before we did the electronic version.

David Leary: [01:08:24] And how did they get the book if they want to buy it?

Blake Oliver: [01:08:26] Or you can go to Blake@blakeoliver.com @BlakeTOliver book. It's called, um, what is it called, building a sustainable accounting firm.

David Leary: [01:08:38] And it's not called Blake's book. It's the title.

Blake Oliver: [01:08:41] It's a compilation of all of my knowledge from building my own small accounting firm and interviews I've done with other accountants, owners, operators, leaders, um, everything that I learned from them about building a firm. So if you want to build your own firm or take your small firm to the next level, check out my book, Blake Oliver Book. And if you want to earn free continuing professional education credit for listening to this episode and many other fine accounting and tax podcasts, get the earmark app, download it from the App Store, or go to Earmark app in your web browser. You can sign up for free and earn one free CPE or IRS CE every week. David, always a pleasure chatting with you about what's going on in the profession. Thanks everyone who joined us live. We'll see you here next week.

David Leary: [01:09:29] Thanks everybody.