TALENT PIPELINE

Full attendance?

The reports of the death of the accounting pipeline are greatly exaggerated. Well, kind of.

There is a massive accountant exodus happening right now, and the headlines are appropriately dire. Here’s Bloomberg: “There Are 340,000 Fewer Accountants, and Companies Are Paying the Price.” Or take the Wall Street Journal: “Why No One’s Going Into Accounting.”

But as we’ve reported previously, strange blips are disrupting that narrative in unexpected ways, like the odd surge in remote accounting jobs.

Today, we add another weird blip to that list: On Handshake, an employment platform that caters to college students, accounting careers are experiencing something of a resurgence, according to a recent survey from the company.

While the results are exclusive to Handshake, some of the topline survey findings offer a glimpse into where student interest in accounting might head in the coming years, as Christine Cruzvergara, chief education strategy officer at Handshake, explained.

Click here to read if accounting is making a comeback for students.—NP

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FRAUD

Patchwork quilt

Although we’re talking about shady corporate practices, not stagecoach robbery, a well-known, old-timey method of nabbing Wild West outlaws is basically the strategy of the Department of Justice’s new whistleblower rewards program.

“Going back to the days of ‘Wanted’ posters across the Old West, law enforcement has long offered rewards to coax tipsters out of the woodwork,” Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco said last week at the American Bar Association’s annual summit on white-collar crime in San Francisco. “And today, we’re announcing a program to update how DOJ uses monetary rewards to strengthen our corporate enforcement efforts.”

Under the new initiative, DOJ officials will award whistleblowers part of the forfeiture that results from prosecuting the “corporate or financial misconduct” they helped uncover. The DOJ will implement the new whistleblower program later this year, and “over the next several months, we’ll fill out the particulars,” Monaco said in her keynote address.

For more on the new whistleblower proposal, click here.—AZ

TAXATION

Taking a hike

In his State of the Union address last week, President Joe Biden staked out his policy positions on taxing corporations and the ultra-wealthy.

“The way to make the tax code fair is to make big corporations and the very wealthy begin to pay their fair share,” Biden said.

The fine print. According to a White House fact sheet, if reelected, Biden will seek to implement these corporate tax policies:

• Raise the corporate tax rate to 28% and the minimum tax on billion-dollar corporations to 21%
• Instate a minimum tax rate of 25% for billionaires—Biden claimed the current average federal tax rate billionaires pay is a paltry 8.2%
• Eliminate corporate tax breaks for executive pay over $1 million
• Quadruple the stock buyback tax from 1% to 4%
• Eliminate a tax break the White House says benefits corporate jets more than commercial aircraft, as well as increase the fuel tax on corporate and private jets

For more on the new corporate tax proposals, click here.—AZ

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