Yet another reflection on accounting’s current woes…

This is by Matt Levine on Bloomberg.com, titled Accounting isn’t Cool Anymore. The article (which draws heavily on an underlying article on Business Insider) quotes a retired accountant as saying that “”The pay is crappy, the hours are long, and the work is drudgery,” and notes that “Students can get higher-paying and arguably more exciting finance jobs right out of college” without going through the grueling exam process. As usual, more money is thrown in there as part of the solution, but this is where the article ends up:

• The way accounting is taught could also help stanch the shortage, [New York University accounting professor Amal] Shehata said. “It’s up to us as academics to make the curriculum exciting and interesting,” she said. “To me, that means it’s relevant and it’s timely.” For example, she recently taught a class about the intersection of the blockchain and accounting.
• .. (recent) suggestions included “placing highly engaging instructors” in those classes, “incorporating gamification and other technology” to “stoke engagement and demonstrate the vital role technology plays in the accounting profession,” and exposing students to “more real-life accounting practitioners in a range of career vocations.”
• I kind of love the idea of gamifying introductory accounting education? It is probably not the case that every accountant should be trained to think of accounting as a game that they can win, but the ones who are trained that way can probably have a lot of fun.

It’s unfair to suggest though that accounting education in its current form should all be branded as irrelevant and untimely, delivered by highly unengaging instructors, who altogether ignore the role of technology. The “gamification” idea isn’t a new one: Toby York’s Accounting Café website indicates a 2021 virtual conference devoted in its entirety to “games, simulations and playful learning in accounting and finance education.” Still, as noted in another post on that site, “persuading some colleagues to change their teaching methods is just about impossible (and) this resistance to change has led to a disconnect between what is taught in universities and what is required in the real world.” It sums up:

• (A recent) workshop made it clear that accounting education stands at a critical juncture. The rise of AI and other technologies and growing societal demands for accountability and sustainability necessitates fundamentally reimagining how we prepare future accounting professionals.
• By embracing a more holistic, critical, and inclusive approach to accounting education, we can ensure that future professionals are equipped not just with technical skills but with the ethical grounding and critical thinking abilities needed to navigate the complex challenges of the future.
• A speaker called on participants to remember that accounting is not boring but very exciting. “It’s more than just a technical practice — it’s a practical mechanism shaped by our economic and social systems.” There is an opportunity to contextualize accounting in a very different way and help students see it as a way to fulfill their objectives in life.

So there’s some work to be done there. But still, students won’t get to experience either the best or worst of accounting education if they’re never tempted to step through the door into the classroom. I certainly don’t have any answers, but I’ve suggested in the past that the very term “accountant” with its narrowly computational connotations is unhelpful at this point and might be productively replaced with “enterprise reporting specialist” or suchlike. I don’t know how much popular culture can really do to help, but as we recently observed, it may be notable that while none of the main characters in the TV show Industry appears to be an accountant as such, the show certainly shows the potential value and dynamism of being able to engage quickly and incisively with financial information. Maybe the superficial trappings of the profession are getting in the way of promoting its substance and capacities…?

But ultimately, if accounting has permanently slipped a bit in the hierarchy of desirability, there’s no point endlessly wringing our hands about it. Better to accept the new realities of the supply chain, and to accordingly adjust the demands on the profession, something that should be easier than ever to accomplish, given the sky-rocketing capacities of AI. Maybe it’s time to jettison the least value-added and most off-putting aspects of the accountant’s lot, to deemphasize the more mundane face of compliance, for example by accepting that much of what’s currently audited or verified doesn’t need to be, that the more arcane and obscure portions of the notes to the financial statements can acceptably be reconstituted as supplementary unaudited information. Such steps may be particularly necessary in Canada, given the destructive ongoing accounting wars, which might almost be designed to repel potential recruits. Unless, perhaps, the dysfunction can be creatively packaged as an attractive sign of a profession attuned to playing elaborate games…

The opinions expressed are solely those of the author.