Kullen Birkeland
Incoming Managing Partner
Southern California
Grant Thornton LLP
Irvine
As economic conditions continue to improve, we anticipate that the demand for entry-level applicants will eventually outpace supply. We have executed a plan to enhance supply by creating and expanding our resources outside of the United States. Within the U.S., we require greater skills from entry-level applicants due to the more complex needs of our clients and the higher requirements that many states have imposed on certified public accountant applicants.
While we continue to focus on top candidates, today those applicants with diverse backgrounds, language skills and information technology skills are in greater demand. The percentage of candidates with master’s, juris doctor and other advanced degrees is rising significantly relative to undergraduates.
We also continue to partner with the academic community across the United States, providing our insight and resources to assist in shaping students the market will demand. Complexity has brought greater breadth to our internal training and has required that we acquire experienced talent with specific industry or technical skills.
Technology is integral to the delivery of our audit, tax and advisory services. With more than 6,000 mobile professionals, our technology is available everywhere we are. Like many in the industry, we use commercially available applications and have also developed proprietary applications specifically designed to support the services we deliver.
Evolving with technological advances, including cloud, social, mobile and big data, is crucial to providing excellent client service. The pervasiveness of mobile devices is significantly influencing the development of Grant Thornton software applications for tablets and mobile devices, as well as a variety of cloud-based tools to expand our access to information and enhance efficiency. In response, safeguarding client data and information remains a top priority for the firm. Significant time and effort is dedicated to encrypting and securing this confidential information across our servers and devices.
Increasing demands for greater transparency and accountability creates an environment in which the organizations that are most agile and can adapt to the rapid change will be the ones that succeed. As the velocity of technological change continues to increase, Grant Thornton is committed to making the investments needed to enhance the quality of client service and protect confidential information.
Larry Gregson
Audit Partner
KSJG LLP
Irvine
In my opinion, the workloads for accountants are still greater than the amount of people entering the profession. Tax compliance requirements have expanded, and the amount of multistate tax filings has exploded. More companies need higher levels of assurance services, and there has been a greater need to provide consulting services to clients, all causing the great problem of having more work than people to do it. The national accounting firms are now recruiting college students and extending offers up to two years in advance of graduation. In my opinion, there has been a lot less attrition of people leaving their current firms due, I think, to the uncertainty of the economy and realizing that the grass may not be greener somewhere else.
Technology has had a great impact on the accounting profession in so many ways. When we started using computers to perform our audits and tax preparation, each computer was virtually like adding another person to perform the work, thus computers have kept headcounts down. Keeping employee headcount down has been very beneficial to our industry. What I have seen and that has been confirmed by my fellow competitors, is that the workload has been greater than the amount of people available to do the work.
Technology has allowed us to work within a more paperless environment. What this means is all the documents we need are stored online, keeping the cost of physical storage down and allowing faster access to any document. Handling less paper offers us the opportunity to provide much better service to our clients by performing more effective audit procedures. Tax preparation has also been enhanced because it allows for faster tax preparation. This is important considering the greater complexities involved in today’s tax preparation.
We have moved to a cloud environment, which has permitted our people to work much more efficiently. It allows our employees to have the option to work from anywhere, which is important because during our busy season, a lot of hours are required. Employing this cloud solution has allowed our staff the benefit of working from home so they can attend to family responsibilities.
Steve Milner
Managing Partner
Squar Milner
Newport Beach
Accountants are in hot demand. The economy is doing reasonably well, and accountants are needed for a variety of functions. Beyond audit and tax professionals, there is a high demand for accountants that can also perform consulting and investigative services. In years past, midsize and large regional accounting firms such as ours could depend upon available talent from lateral moves. That is no longer the case. Most firms, such as ours, have aggressive programs to recruit top talent from top universities. The need to feed the beast is insatiable. We must attract a large number of top recruits to guarantee proper staffing at upper levels as those people become more experienced. After a few years with an accounting firm, accountants are sought after by a variety of groups and companies beyond our competitors. Without aggressive recruiting, we would be unable to satisfy the demand curve from our clients. Further still, we believe in paying top of the market to assure that our talented professionals remain with the firm.
I have been doing this for nearly 30 years, and of course technology has changed dramatically during that period. In the past, it wasn’t unusual for accountants to fear technology, worrying that it would diminish their workload. Nothing can be further from the truth. Technology has not only enhanced the accuracy of our work but has also created an expectation of real-time information all the time. As a result, we have seen and we will expect to see that technology will continue to feed the demand for real-time information. Our firm, like so many others, has invested enormous amounts in technology to stay ahead of the curve to meet or exceed our client’s expectations.
Dennis Parrott
Managing Partner, OC Office
KPMG LLP
Irvine
Our professionals play a critical role in the functioning of our modern economy as we work to inspire confidence in the markets through independent audits. But the role of our professionals extends beyond that, as others in KPMG help companies interpret and comply with increasingly intricate statutory regulations, including the U.S. and divergent global tax codes. KPMG’s professionals also play an instrumental role in advising organizations on how to optimize processes and systems to enhance performance as business grows increasingly complex and global, and on how rapid advances in technology can help.
Competition is intense for the best and brightest candidates, both from the graduating student pool from our colleges and universities, and from the business world, where experienced executives bring their knowledge to our engagement teams. University students and executives with IT acumen are among the most sought-after.
There is a limited supply of university students, in particular, that have a well-rounded background in general data literacy, and are capable of coding and extracting data, understanding data and analytics routines and analyzing the outputs to conclusion.
KPMG continually invests heavily in new technologies that provide the underpinning of audit tools our professionals utilize to perform effective and efficient audits. Technology also allows us to provide our professionals with access to policies and guidance established by the firm on how we deliver audit work. Moving work from manual inputs and reviews to more automated IT applications takes out the human element, where miscues can occur. Our clients are also heavily invested in advancing technologies to report their financial information more effectively and efficiently, and our professionals need to be well versed in the corresponding IT control environment. The advances in IT have created new opportunities for a new kind of professional—one that understands business and the effect IT has on its ultimate success.
Wayne Pinnell
Managing Partner
Haskell & White LLP
Irvine
The war for talent is a constant in the accounting profession. During the Great Recession, public accounting firms curtailed hiring to effectively utilize the staff they had at the time. Fast-forward just a few short years, and collectively, we have created a shortage of professionals who would have gained that initial three to six years of experience we need now.
Students entering the accounting profession today are faced with the five-year education requirement for CPA licensure, which took full effect this year.
Meanwhile, firms are getting busier as the mergers and acquisitions, Securities and Exchange Commission, and other transactional markets have fired back up. This increased level of service opportunity opens new doors for people desiring careers in public accounting—and competition for spots remains fierce. Firms are seeking to hire the best talent from schools, the public accounting profession, and other professions as service offerings are being expanded, and recognition is given to talents that have been developed in other arenas. Firms are also looking to solidify succession plans, which have placed a greater emphasis on building leaders from within or recruiting leaders into the firm.
The firm continually monitors developments in the hardware and software arena to provide the latest tools to our team for use in the office and at our client locations. We are finding more and more applications that are hosted through cloud and software-as-a-service systems. For our folks on the go, we look for the latest high-speed connections in order to freely share data and provide backup data storage. And of course we provide advanced data-encryption technology to safeguard our clients’ financial information.
None of these functions were given much attention a decade ago, but today they are becoming a common practice in the accounting world.
One of the more low-tech but highly productive areas for us has been the use of multiple screens or monitors in the office. We adopted three screens for most of our people many years ago to facilitate the management of data and applications. We have also found various portable monitor solutions for our teams so they can have similar capabilities when working in the field.
Manuel Ramirez
Chief Executive
RJI Ramirez Jimenez International CPAs
Irvine
We have observed a substantial increase in the number of licensed CPAs in the eight years that I have served on the California Board of Accounting, which now numbers over 94,000 California licensed CPAs and CPA firms, and it appears that number will continue to rise in the coming years.
Accounting school enrollments, as well as graduation and hiring, have been steadily increasing so that supply and demand appear to be well matched in the
current post-recession business environment.
Accounting has typically been a popular major, as reflected in the annual American Institute of CPAs study, ‘Trends in the Supply of Accounting Graduates and the Demand for Public Accounting Recruits,’ which indicated a record 40,350 accounting graduates were hired by public accounting firms in 2012 and approximately the same amount in 2013. The study further indicated that, ‘Nearly 15% of universities continue to receive more applications from qualified applicants than they can admit, as they are constrained by limited spaces in the classroom. Even so, more than 60% of the universities predict increased enrollment in both MBA in accounting and MA in taxation. Hiring by public accounting firms also is at an all-time high, especially at the master’s degree level.’
Orange County is reflective of this national trend, as the local university system is producing an ample supply of qualified CPA candidates from the strong accounting programs of California State University-Fullerton, the University of Southern California, Chapman University, and the UC system.
A major factor impacting hiring trends for 2014 will be the Affordable Care Act. With a level of uncertainty on how the act will impact businesses, many companies may be looking at alternate hiring options, such as contract workers, independent contractors and part-time help, in addition to normal hiring of full-time employees.
The hiring outlook for 2014 remains positive from our perspective, especially in light of the robust business environment in Orange County and the growth of international business.
Greg Wahl
Founder, Managing Partner
Anton & Chia LLP
Costa Mesa
The industry is continuously in flux, with a greater number of professionals wanting to exit or retire and with increased regulatory demands. The increase in regulation does not always translate into increased fees or demand for services. Our firm has diversified its risk into managing various international platforms with being able to provide assurance, tax and advisory services to international clients that will go public in Canada, Europe, Hong Kong, Singapore and the United States.
Most students that enter the profession see it as a challenging and exciting career. There is a need to provide opportunity for new recruits. Smaller firms need to provide the appropriate level of client exposure, opportunities nationally and internationally, and diversified benefits to obtain qualified recruits.
Our firm continually reinvests and invests in new technology to improve client service, our employee execution of client work, and further integration of our offices while servicing clients in five continents. Technology is critical to ensuring work-life balance and execution to meet challenging client demands.
Philip Wilson
Partner-in-Charge, Southern California
Marcum LLP
Irvine
The days of doing pure compliance work, either tax returns or financial statements, are long gone for today’s firms. Clients today expect their CPA to be involved as a strategic partner, engaged in key decisions. The business of accounting is growing more complex, with added regulatory oversight from the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board, IRS and other federal and state agencies. As a result, the amount of work necessary has increased, but the supply of human resources has not kept pace. Fortunately, technological advances have allowed increased efficiencies in the way both information is transmitted and services are delivered. This allows us to service our clients and meet their needs in a rapidly changing environment.
The number of new accounting graduates has declined over the past several years. The accounting profession is taking steps to increase the availability of talent through outreach programs and scholarships at colleges and universities across the country.
With the retiring boomers over the next decade, it points to a critical time in the profession. As we emerge from the recent recession, demand for accounting professionals should spur students to reconsider their majors and prospects of a career in accounting. The amount of work is ever increasing, and we need talented professionals with the skills to service clients in ways that we can’t imagine today.
One of our priorities is determining how to leverage mobility and make it an advantage for our business. We are investing in our infrastructure to deliver content to internal users on a mobile platform, giving staff more convenience and easy access to our network. Part of this effort will include introducing tablets, which are lighter and smaller than laptops and therefore much easier to use as a mobile solution.
The challenge is that mobility has been developed from a consumer perspective, and it is not yet fully mature for business applications. It is just now approaching maturity, where business will be able to leverage mobile applications safely and securely.
When we invest in a new technology, we need to see the maximum dividend on an immediate basis, so overinvesting in something that is not yet mature doesn’t fit into our model. We don’t believe in paying a premium to be bleeding edge, because the return-on-investment isn’t where it needs to be yet. We don’t want to miss the boat, but we don’t want to overpay for the passage.
An IT department at an accounting firm used to be a “keeps the lights on” business, but that has changed dramatically. We certainly still do play that role, but our mission has evolved into helping to drive business efficiency. The challenge is how to leverage IT to be a partner in the business and not a cost center. We are constantly looking at how to best leverage people who are experienced in business applications, such as business process analysis, business intelligence, automated workflow, to improve the business.
