Pevita Pearce
Phew, another tax season done! Yay! And for many of you, this was a tough one (I hear you, Marty)! Because of personal circumstances, I’ve had more time with my oldest son over the past two months than usual. He recommended two Netflix specials we watched: The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist, a superb documentary on AI, and Miriam Margolyes Australia Unmasked about the concept of a “fair go.”
Many of you know my Mum was from Australia, and much of my attitude to life comes from her. In Australia, a “fair go” is an informal but powerful idea: everyone should get a genuine chance, be judged on their efforts, and be treated with decency—rooted in early working-class values, mateship, and egalitarian traditions. I want all firms, clients, and suppliers to the profession to have a “fair go.”
As I mentioned last month, colleague Brian Tankerley and I have had the pleasure of helping many firms and organizations refine their AI strategy this year. AI leverage is already making, and will continue to make, a significant difference in how individuals, businesses, and firms operate. We’ll speak about AI more at both the Wolters Kluwer CCH Connections Conference 2026 in Orlando and Thomson Reuters Synergy 2026 in Las Vegas.
Brian and I have recorded podcasts on some of the topics below, and I would invite you to listen to AI Liability for Accounting Firms: Are You Covered? (Microsoft, Google, OpenAI, Anthropic) and Technology Mergers & Acquisitions.
On the Accounting Technology Lab podcast, we review leading products and talk with thought leaders. We expect to debrief both the Wolters Kluwer CCH Connections Conference 2026 and Thomson Reuters Synergy 2026 conferences.
So, What Are the Top 10 Concerns?
The trade press and conference record suggest that public accounting leaders are less concerned about a single disruptive issue than about managing several connected transitions at once: AI, talent, security, regulation, ownership, workflow, and the shift toward advisory services.
This is a synthesized ranking, not the result of one published poll. I weighed:
Executive Summary
| Rank | Concern | Why it matters in 2027 |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | AI adoption, governance, and measurable ROI | Firms must move from experimentation to controlled, repeatable use. |
| 2 | Talent shortages and changing skill requirements | The shortage is shifting from headcount alone to technology, advisory, and leadership skills. |
| 3 | Cybersecurity, privacy, and AI-enabled fraud | AI is making attacks more convincing while firms hold highly valuable client data. |
| 4 | Tax-law complexity, IRS service, and compressed deadlines | Smaller firms continue to rank tax complexity and IRS challenges among their most pressing issues. |
| 5 | Capacity, workload, and burnout | Extension season exposed bottlenecks in intake, review, and partner capacity. |
| 6 | Technology integration, tool sprawl, and data quality | Firms have too many disconnected applications, inconsistent data, and fragile integrations. |
| 7 | Audit quality and assurance risks involving AI | Auditors must assess both clients’ AI use and their own AI-assisted procedures. |
| 8 | Ownership changes, private equity, and consolidation | New capital models are changing governance, careers, independence, and firm culture. |
| 9 | Moving from compliance to advisory services | Automation is eroding the value of routine work while clients expect timely business guidance. |
| 10 | Succession, leadership development, and trust | Retiring leaders, changing career expectations, and rapid technology adoption create leadership gaps. |
AI Adoption, Governance, and Measurable ROI
The leading issue is no longer whether firms should use AI. The challenge is embedding AI safely into tax, audit, CAS, and internal operations while proving it improves capacity, quality, or profitability.
The AICPA Top Issues Survey placed technology change and rising AI adoption in the top three for nearly every firm-size category. Among larger firms, technology adoption and AI ranked in the top two.
An Intuit survey reported by CPA Practice Advisor found that 88% of respondents used AI for at least one client service, but only 30% said AI was fully embedded as the default; 54% were still using it situationally. This suggests broad adoption, but operational maturity remains uneven.
The subject also dominates Q4 CPE programming. The December 2026 Accounting Today AI Summit focuses on agentic AI, practical firm use cases, and the build-versus-buy decision, while the Digital CPA Conference 2026 centers on moving AI and transformation “from vision to velocity.”
A practical Q4 question for firms is: Which two or three AI workflows should the firm standardize before the 2027 busy season, and what human-review, documentation, and data-protection controls must accompany them?
Talent Shortages and Changing Skill Requirements
Public accounting still has a pipeline problem, but the concern is becoming more nuanced. Firms need people who combine accounting knowledge, AI fluency, data skills, project management, business judgment, and consultative communication.
CPA Practice Advisor reported that 61% of surveyed finance and accounting leaders found it harder to locate skilled professionals than a year earlier. Skills shortages caused project delays for 75% and project cancellations for 62%, including AI, automation, forecasting, and security initiatives.
The AICPA Top Issues Survey also showed crucial differences in firm size: hiring experienced staff ranked first for firms with 11 to 30 employees. In comparison, next-generation leadership development ranked first for firms with 31 to 100 employees.
Trade reporting increasingly emphasizes workplace culture, flexibility, mentorship, and professional development as competitive recruiting and retention tools. Accounting Today’s 2026 Best Firms to Work For workplace culture coverage highlights employee experience and inclusive, human-centered cultures as key differentiators, naming thirteen CPAmerica firms as best firms to work for according to Grace Horwath and two firms as Best for Women, including Maxwell, Locke & Ritter LLP and Vesta.
A practical Q4 question for firms is: Does the firm’s 2027 staffing plan address skills and role design, or does it merely seek replacements for traditional positions? The article "Accounting’s Talent Crisis Is Also a Systems Crisis" drives this point home.
Cybersecurity, Privacy, and AI-Enabled Fraud
Cybersecurity is getting harder because AI gives attackers better tools for impersonation, social engineering, malicious code, and payment fraud. CPA firms are attractive targets because they hold tax returns, Social Security numbers, banking information, payroll records, and business credentials.
The Journal of Accountancy’s October cybersecurity coverage warns that AI is accelerating the threat environment and presses firms to address data leakage, authorized AI use, output review, recovery, and responsible AI governance.
CPA Practice Advisor notes that small firms are not protected by their size. Automated attacks seek weak passwords, unpatched systems, and exposed remote access rather than targeting firms by revenue. It also emphasizes obligations under the Federal Trade Commission Safeguards Rule, including written information security plans, multifactor authentication, and encryption.
AI also adds professional-liability questions, as covered in the podcast AI Liability for Accounting Firms: Are You Covered? (Microsoft, Google, OpenAI, Anthropic). Vendor indemnification for intellectual-property claims generally does not eliminate a firm’s responsibility for confidentiality, accuracy, governance, and client-facing work. HIPAA violation fines make FTC Safeguards numbers look like chump change.
A practical Q4 question for firms is: Can the firm demonstrate MFA, endpoint protection, tested backups, vendor oversight, an updated WISP, employee training, and an enforceable AI-use policy?
Tax-Law Complexity, IRS Service, and Compressed Compliance Cycles
For smaller practices in particular, tax complexity remains one of the profession’s most immediate concerns. Solo practitioners and firms with up to ten employees ranked tax-law complexity first in the 2026 AICPA Top Issues Survey. IRS challenges also appeared among their highest-ranked concerns.
Meanwhile, compliance is becoming more continuous. Paul Henderson’s “There’s No Such Thing as a Compliance Deadline Anymore” explains that changing tax rules, tariffs, sanctions, digital reporting, and real-time e-invoicing requirements increasingly flow directly into finance systems rather than being handled only at periodic filing deadlines.
The prominence of year-end tax conferences reinforces this concern. For example, the Kansas Society of CPAs scheduled its annual tax conference for November 19–20, 2026, where the author has presented on tax-related technology for many years, while several other state societies announced Q4 conferences and technical programming. The author will be presenting at the North Carolina Association of CPAs 87th Symposium November 16-18, 2026, on three tax topics, including What’s New in Tax Technology: Tools Worth Your Attention.
A practical Q4 question for firms is: Has your firm translated late-2026 legislative, regulatory, and IRS developments into staff training, client communications, tax organizers, and 2027 workflow changes?
Capacity, Workload, and Burnout
Capacity remains a structural issue, not simply a seasonal inconvenience. Extension season often exposes returns delayed by poor intake, missing information, reviewer constraints, or work that stopped and restarted multiple times.
Recent reporting by Richard Lavina for Inside Public Accounting identifies three recurring extension-season bottlenecks: incomplete intake, limited review capacity, and the cost of restarting work set aside for months. The central challenge is that preparation capacity can be supplemented, but experienced review capacity is much harder to expand. Tools like Liscio, Truss, Keyveve, SmartVault, and SafeSend can help address this.
The AICPA survey found that all four larger firm categories placed staff workload management in their top four issues.
Workload also affects AI adoption. Amy Vetter, writing for Accounting Today, has framed burnout as an innovation barrier because exhausted staff lack the time and psychological capacity to learn, experiment, and redesign workflows.
A practical Q4 question for firms is: Which work should be eliminated, standardized, automated, delegated, or moved to a shared service or offshore team before January? Can an improved portal and AI automation eliminate the need? The articles “The Most Expensive Work in Accounting Is Waiting” and “The End of the Digital Filing Cabinet” strongly suggest that traditional DMS systems are nearing obsolescence.
Technology Integration, Tool Sprawl, and Data Quality
Firms have acquired many specialized applications, but often without creating a cohesive technology architecture. The resulting concerns include duplicate entry, inconsistent client records, broken integrations, subscription waste, security exposure, and dependence on one employee who understands the connections. This is a common observation in CPA firm consulting practices.
October reporting from CPA Practice Advisor describes “The Hidden Cost of Tool Stacking in Growing Accounting Firms”: integration maintenance, conflicting data, institutional-knowledge risk, and expanded vendor-security exposure. Concerns about excessive tool costs have been noted since at least 2018, most recently in the July column, "Real Products in 2026? — AI and Application Progress — What We See, and How You Can Get There." Fewer tools are generally better than more for numerous reasons.
The 2026 accountant technology survey found persistent problems with too many tools and too much data cleanup. Respondents reportedly lost about five hours per week moving, re-entering, or reconciling data between applications, while manual data cleanup was the leading barrier to expanding advisory work. In his article, Chris Farrell noted “Manual File Naming is Slowing Down Your Firm’s Client Work.” Farrell’s experience as a Big 4 CPA and founder of Tallie and Liscio lends significant weight to this observation.
State society technology conferences are consequently emphasizing platform selection, data analytics, digital communications, AI integration, and getting more value from existing technology investments.
A practical Q4 question for firms is: What is the firm’s authoritative client data source, which applications are redundant, and who owns every major integration?
Audit Quality and Assurance Risks Involving AI
Auditors now need to consider two dimensions of AI risk:
- The AI used by reporting entities to generate financial information.
- The AI used by audit firms to perform audit procedures.
On October 13, 2026, the AICPA issued a practice aid covering AI use by reporting entities and audit firms. It stresses risk assessment, data reliability, quality management, supervision, professional judgment, and professional skepticism. As noted by Jason Bramwell, the auditor remains responsible for the audit and opinion.
Broader risk reporting also links audit quality to firm culture, training, and quality-management systems. Firms face exposure when workload, staffing, or commercial pressure encourages shortcuts or lets professionals work outside their competence.
A practical Q4 question for firms is: Do the firm’s audit methodology, quality-management system, and engagement documentation explicitly address AI-generated evidence and AI-assisted audit procedures?
Ownership Changes, Private Equity, and Consolidation
Private-equity investment, alternative practice structures, and continuing merger activity are reshaping public accounting. Concerns extend beyond ownership to independence, governance, partner economics, career paths, investment priorities, and professional culture.
The 2026 CPA Practice Advisor Thought Leader Symposium identified private equity, governance, staffing, AI, data security, and practice management among the central forces shaping the profession, as discussed on April 10 on the 2026 Thought Leader Symposium — Accounting Technology Lab Podcast.
October research coverage reports that private-equity investment may change compensation, specialization, training, partnership opportunities, and the balance between assurance and higher-margin advisory work.
Firm leaders are therefore weighing whether to remain independent, merge, obtain outside capital, or join a larger platform. Accounting Today’s July 2026 coverage explicitly frames independence as a strategic question requiring firms to assess their future direction and capital needs. For the second year in a row, the author attended and presented at QXcelerate 2026: The Innovation Summit in Chicago, where Private Equity and independence were on the agenda.
A practical Q4 question for firms is: Does the firm have a clearly articulated ownership and capital strategy, including the implications for independence, partner succession, employees, and clients?
Moving From Compliance to Advisory Services
Automation and AI are reducing the time required for data entry, reconciliation, research, and routine compliance work. Firms increasingly must decide how to redeploy that capacity into advisory services clients will value and pay for.
The December Accounting Today AI Summit specifically connects AI adoption with the movement from compliance toward strategic advisory.
CPA Practice Advisor’s 2026 technology survey found demand for real-time insights, forecasting, and higher-value services, but data cleanup and disconnected systems continue to limit firms’ advisory capacity.
Recent workflow coverage from Kevin Saboori in “Helping Clients Remove Complexity From Their Accounting Processes” and Aamir Iqbal in “Before the Next Software Purchase: Help Clients Fix Invoice Approvals and AP/AR Workflows First” suggests an immediate opportunity: firms can help clients redesign AP, AR, approval, and accounting processes before recommending additional software. That creates a tangible, diagnostic advisory engagement rather than merely reselling or implementing another application.
“Real” advisory services is a topic for a completely different article, such as the March 2020 column on “Does Your Firm Have a Clear Vision on Advisory Services?” or the July 2021 column “Client Experience for Today — Client Advisory Services.” In the author’s consulting practice at NMGI, they have been teaching firms how to deliver advisory services for almost 30 years.
A practical Q4 question for firms is: Has the firm defined repeatable advisory offerings, pricing, delivery methods, and target clients, or is “advisory” still an informal collection of partner conversations?
Succession, Leadership Development, and Preservation of Trust
The final concern ties the others together. Firms need leaders who can make difficult decisions about AI, ownership, staffing, service mix, pricing, and risk without weakening the profession’s core asset: trust.
Next-generation leadership development ranked first among firms with 31 to 100 employees in the AICPA survey.
The Journal of Accountancy’s recent coverage emphasizes that accountants must embrace change while preserving trust as a competitive and professional advantage. More insights are expected as the Rise2040 initiative identifies key forces shaping the profession, why embracing change is critical, and how trust can remain a powerful advantage for CPAs gains traction.
Leadership development is also connected to outsourcing and automation. As repetitive work moves to technology or global teams, firms must ensure younger professionals still get the experience, coaching, and progressively difficult assignments needed to develop judgment. Offshoring has become widespread among large firms, making workforce design and professional development inseparable issues. However, AI and automation could rapidly change that formula.
A practical Q4 question for firms is: Who are the firm’s next leaders, and are they receiving responsibility for people, clients, technology, financial performance, and strategic decisions now?
So, What Should You Do Now?
The Q4 2026 agenda can be reduced to three overarching questions:
- Readiness: Is the firm prepared for the 2027 busy season and beyond?
- Impact: How will the top 10 concerns affect client service, firm economics, and employee experience?
- Action: What specific steps must be taken before January 1, 2027, to address these issues?
For most public-practice firms, the immediate priority should be a 2027 readiness plan covering AI governance, cybersecurity, capacity, technology rationalization, talent development, and service-line economics. These should not be managed as separate initiatives because each one materially affects the others.
This is a lot to consider, so take a moment to breathe, clear your head, and identify the most time-consuming issues from the past year. Build a plan focusing on the top issues, sorted into priority order. Solve a few simple problems first to get momentum, then tackle a hard, time-consuming problem. This may involve using AI by building a library of prompts that solve specific problems.
Firms may need to overhaul their technology stack, remembering that less is often more. They may also decide they need different talent than they have traditionally hired. However, as pointed out earlier, many of these items are interrelated. While the author cannot see over every firm’s shoulder or feel their pain directly, extensive experience across numerous firms suggests a clear understanding of what works.
However, no single solution fixes everything. Each firm has unique clients, people, talent, and markets. Most CPAs strive to do the absolute best for their clients without overworking themselves or their team.
The old phrase “work smarter, not harder” comes to mind. The critical question for every firm is: Will your readiness plan address your real concerns?
