Accountant Shortage Demands Proactive Steps From Business Leaders

Back-to-school season has put the accounting profession’s talent shortage back into the spotlight. It is time to rethink how we encourage rising professionals to consider a career in accounting and build a stronger pipeline.

Audit firms cite difficulties with attracting and retaining talent, and high-profile companies have identified material weakness in their controls over financial reporting due to the accounting shortage. The issue is particularly acute considering that auditors are typically seen as the safety net to guard against accounting errors. If both the audit and in-house accountants are stretched—or worse yet, inadequately staffed and trained—the risk of undetected accounting misstatements meaningfully increases.

As fewer graduates leave universities with accounting degrees and more accountants retire, the shortage of professionals will deepen. Organizations from in-house accounting teams to external auditors must act now to safeguard their talent pipeline and, by extension, the strength of their operations.

As business leaders, we can change the narrative on accounting from a procedural, “must have” function to a dynamic, value-adding operation that is attractive for new talent to find professionally fulfilling. Leaders can take several steps to help chart a path forward.

See accounting and audit as less of an overhead cost center and more as a partner in the business’s overall health and growth. For more than a year, several companies have been listing the accountant shortage as a material weakness in their internal control over financial reporting, indicating that a material misstatement could occur as a result.

Not only is this a red flag for investors, but it also impacts an organization’s overall financial and operational health. It gives exposure to potential regulatory scrutiny, reputational damage, and real impact on the bottom line.

Organizations should dedicate additional resources and focus to securing their accounting talent as they would to securing their revenue-generating talent. In recent months, audit firms and others have pledged long-term measures for increased compensation to entice talent, which can help alongside measures such as internal retention programs and demonstrated commitments to a pathway for career growth and opportunity.

Invest in accounting teams through training and other upskilling programs. As with any profession, the classroom only takes experience so far. Helping individuals upskill can have broader organizational benefits.

Tactical examples include mentoring programs; offering levels of reimbursement for continuing education; and highlighting training and development opportunities through an intranet or internal newsletter, curating opportunities for CPE credits, or other opportunities for skill enhancement.

Create closer relationships between accountants and students. Developing talent begins with education about the various career opportunities an accounting degree or CPA can provide. Such education could also be an opportunity to diversify the accounting or CPA pipeline.

In a May report on accounting talent strategy, the AICPA’s National Pipeline Advisory Group noted how this can expand the pipeline of qualified talent, writing that accountants can “build better awareness of accounting careers among underrepresented populations through targeted messages, scalable college-bound experiential programs, and closer relationships between the profession and colleges and universities with high minority populations.”

Relationships with students and professionals can begin earlier in the pipeline as well. In our own firm, we have worked with Boston Partners in Education, which brings community members into classrooms as academic mentors. This can provide public school students with real-world examples of the opportunities a degree in accounting or a CPA license can offer.

Consider how technology can help responsibly ease the burden of administrative or data-centric tasks, and provide a reprieve in the talent shortage. Technology has changed the way we work, and the accounting profession should continue to evolve. Consider what tools can help with the “first run” of mundane or repetitive tasks, freeing up time for more elevated or nuanced tasks.

There’s no replacement for sound human judgment and experience across accounting and auditing, but technology can speed up lower-risk tasks, allowing team members to validate results rather than spend time in repetitive execution. Software tools and technologies such as artificial intelligence are worth exploring for organizations’ individual needs, and they can help ease the burden for teams that have stretched resources. In addition to creating efficiencies, this can help make the job more interesting and rewarding.

Establish tone at the top within the function and in the organization to instill best practices and gravity of the function’s purpose. As leaders, we can create programs and policies, but exemplifying the words on paper through our actions will drive results.

Leaders should consider how their actions contribute to the future of the profession. This could means evangelizing on behalf of the profession, explaining complex scenarios, demonstrating thoroughness in day-to-day activities, or helping troubleshoot emerging issues. Teams will remember our actions as they grow in their own careers. As leaders, most of us can likely cite the long-term impact a mentor’s actions have had on our own career growth or journey.

Failure to safeguard the talent pipeline for accounting can have ripple effects in the business world at large. By demonstrating the value of accounting and auditing to rising professionals, business leaders can attract qualified talent to the accounting field, restoring a profession that would benefit from a boost.

This article does not necessarily reflect the opinion of Bloomberg Industry Group, Inc., the publisher of Bloomberg Law and Bloomberg Tax, or its owners.

Author Information

Brad Wilson is managing partner at StoneTurn, advising companies and their counsel on complex financial, accounting, valuation and compliance matters.

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