Louis Goss recently published an article titled The end of the accountancy gravy train.

Here are some extracts:

• Entry to the upper ranks of a “big four” firm was once considered the moment an accountant had made it.
• The prospect of becoming a partner at one of PwC, Deloitte, KPMG or EY was the ultimate reward for years of hard work.
• Along with prestige, those invited to join the elite ranks were entitled to a share of firm-wide profits, often meaning payouts of up to £1m a year.
• Partnerships came with solid job security, meaning those picked could usually expect to spend decades at the top, so long as they managed to keep themselves out of any serious trouble.
• As a bonus, former partners could often go on to secure lucrative non-executive director (NED) positions on the boards of top companies when they retired.
• This clear track to partnership has for decades helped motivate ranks of ambitious accountants into putting in the long hours required to rise to the top and reap those coveted rewards.
• However, the allure of the big four partnership is starting to lose its lustre.
• What was once a reliable path to a lifetime of riches may no longer be the case.

The article cites, among other things, the increased difficulty in becoming a salaried partner, increasing centralization that leaves many partners feeling like corporate employees (“the camaraderie of the old days has gone”), shortened partnership timelines shifting the calculus, the fact of former accountants increasingly losing out on highly coveted non-executive director positions, “the accountancy giants reaching the limits of their growth, as mounting regulatory pressures and ‘increasing complexity and cumbersomeness internally’ have constrained opportunities,” and this: “The prioritization of profits instead of ‘impact for society’ has also taken a psychological toll on many partners in the big four, (one interviewee) says, adding that some have lost faith in the value in their work, as ‘public perception’ has started to turn against the firms too.” Unusually, this particular article doesn’t mention the impact of AI except in passing, but of course that’s been cited elsewhere as a negative factor, in compounding all the prevailing uncertainties, and muddying the path by which even a dedicated careerist might climb to the top.

It would be hard to miss the predominantly materialist slant of Goss’s article, the emphasis on maximizing income-earning longevity at the highest earning levels. That might seem reasonable enough, and yet for most people in other walks of life, annual earnings in the millions wouldn’t typically be attainable, whatever the quality of their experience and skills. Perhaps accountants are predisposed to make ambitious comparisons (with top executives or those in other areas of big finance) because that’s what they’re exposed to, and yet, accountants should also be better able than most to put raw cash numbers in an appropriate context (how can one grapple with intangible assets in a corporate context, for example, if blind to them in one’s own life…) That is to say, maybe being focused on riding the plushest available car on the “gravy train” isn’t such a great way to live in the first place.

On that front, the article is tellingly missing any suggestion that despite all the issues noted, accountancy might on its own terms be a fulfilling way of spending one’s working life. As cited above, there’s a passing reference to how “impact for society” may matter less to the firms than it did, but the article doesn’t consider what that impact has historically been, or what it is now, or might be in the future. Not so long ago, it seemed possible that the new area of sustainability reporting might attract many of the people who would otherwise have gone into traditional financial reporting; that energy may have stalled a bit given regulatory foot-dragging and shifting market focus, but the area remains one of evolving potential impact. More broadly though, it’s not hard to see how the increasingly technical nature of financial reporting and the related compliance burden might increasingly squeeze the space in which a practitioner might develop a sense of intelligently applied self-expression, in which being a well-paid accountant might correlate with a flourishing sense of purpose.

Goss’s article cites a former Deloitte partner (who) says “the ‘relentless focus on profit per partner’ has caused the firms to become ‘a lot more short-term,’ as partners have pivoted ‘towards maximizing their personal take over a shorter time frame,” and that “this short-sightedness has limited ‘their ability to respond to market change’ as partners aim for quick gains over long-term growth.” Well, one must always be wary of placing too much weight on possibly unrepresentative personal testimony, but even if the article only identifies a tendency within big-firm accounting, it suggests the “gravy train” in its current form doesn’t really deserve to remain on the tracks…

The opinions expressed are solely those of the author.