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Audit committees are ‘zeroed in on’ cybersecurity: report

New SEC rules may be partly why nearly 70% called it a top-three priority.

Planning taxes in unplannable times

KPMG experts laid out the dilemmas facing tax leaders.

Drew Adamek

Cheat sheet round up: aligning FP&A and the C-suite, retained earnings, and essential skills. 

More quick reference guides for corporate finance.

Cheat sheet round up: FP&A and the C-suite, retained earnings, and essential skills. 

A broken out piechart icon denoting accounting

Accounting

Jesse Klein

While most AI agents have been underwhelming so far, KPMG has built one that may ease the collective shudder that comes with the words “tax day.”

 aren’t the magic wand AI companies have been selling. A study from Carnegie Mellon University 

 that the best-performing model completed the intended task just 30.3% of the time. Just a few months ago, Glenn Hopper, head of AI at VAI consulting, 

 that AI agents “are not ready for primetime” and are still mostly “vaporware.”

But the Australian branch of KPMG is claiming that a 100-page prompt for AI they’ve written can autonomously create tax advice for clients “​​far faster than humans,” tech publication 

The company created its own AI bots, using models from all major AI players, including OpenAI, Microsoft, Google, Anthropic, and Meta. It fed them as much historical tax advice as it could, along with the Australian tax code, according to The Register.

“It is very efficient. It does what our team used to do in about two weeks, in a day. It will strip through our documents and the legislation and produce a 25-page document for a client as a first draft,” KPMG Chief Digital Officer John Munnelly said at a recent tech summit, The Register reported.

But don’t uninstall your TurboTax software just yet. Apparently the AI tax output is only understandable by tax experts, not your average Joe trying to file last minute.

KPMG creates an AI agent that does taxes

KPMG Australia’s chief digital officer says the AI does in a day what it takes his human team two weeks to do.

Courtney Vien

The IRS has a little more egg on its face. (By now it’s a 

 hundreds of audit staff who accepted deferred resignation offers, the Federal News Network reported. In an email to IRS employees, its HR heads stated that staff cuts had “created a potential gap in mission-critical expertise” and that the agency would take steps to solve that problem, “including details, reassignments, DRP/TDRP [Deferred Resignation Program and Treasury Deferred Resignation Program] rescissions, [and] external hiring.”

An IRS employee told FNN that management said during a town hall that the agency had “let too many people go” and that it wanted to “bring back 400 revenue agents and 300 revenue officers who accepted the DRP.” The employee said the IRS planned on “DRP rescissions,” meaning it would contact staff who took DRP offers and ask them to reconsider.

But even bringing back 700 people would be a drop in the bucket. The IRS lost 

of its revenue agents, who conduct audits, and more than 600 of its revenue officers, who handle collections, as of this March, a 

. It’s likely that more audit staff have left since then: The IRS’s workforce will 

 when all the reductions in force are completed, according to the National Taxpayer Advocate.

This isn’t the first time the IRS has tried to walk back the staff cuts. Earlier this month, it 

 for around 4,500 customer service representatives. About 9,000 employees have left or resigned from its taxpayer service division, which includes customer service, this year.

IRS to RIF’d staff: We goofed

The agency is looking to rehire hundreds of audit staff who took deferred resignation offers.

Natasha Piñon

There’s nothing better than a good matchup. George Foreman versus Muhammad Ali, milk versus cookies, Star Wars versus the other one that can’t be named.

And that’s exactly what appeared to be happening in the latest batch of earnings reports, which looked like battle royale for big box retailers, with key players facing their competitors. These closely watched reports each offered a look at how cash-strapped consumers are (and aren’t) spending in a darkening economic landscape.

In one corner, Home Depot. In the other, Lowe's. Both are watched for their proximity to the housing market and homebuilding, neither of which have been doing especially well lately. In August, homebuilder sentiment in the US 

 to its lowest level in over two-and-a-half years.

Home Depot seemed unfazed by the low morale in housing, sticking to its full-year outlook. In its latest earnings report, the company said it still expects full-year total sales to climb by 2.8%.

But is that confidence fully founded? This marks the second straight quarter of earnings misses for the home improvement retailer, and its Q2 2025 report was the first since May 2014 to miss on both earnings and revenue expectations, 

But you can see where the optimism is coming from, as the company waits for the tides of home improvement spending to tick up. On the company’s earnings call, CEO Ted Decker noted that “some relief on mortgage rates, in particular, could help.”

The biggest culprit holding consumers back from spending is the elephant in 

“The No. 1 reason for deferring the large [home improvement] project is general economic uncertainty,” he said. “That, you know, is larger than prices of projects, of labor availability, all the various things we’ve talked about in the past by a wide margin.”

And those deferred projects have caused Home Depot to change its course on tariff-induced price hikes, with McPhail telling the 

 now “there will be some modest price movement for some categories.”

Meanwhile, competitor Lowe’s was largely playing catchup. The company announced a $8.8 billion cash deal to purchase building materials maker Foundation Building Materials; this follows a Home Depot subsidiary’s purchase of a specialty building products distributor for $4.3 billion under 

Lowe’s reported $2.4 billion in net income, a 0.6% climb from the same time last year. Michael Baker, an analyst at financial services company D.A. Davidson, 

 that Lowe’s showcased plenty of positives in its latest report, especially when it comes to comparable sales growth. Lowe’s bested Home Depot in that category, which he said was the first time that has happened since Q3 2024.

 There was a more obvious winner in the showdown between Target and Walmart.

. Its longtime CEO Brian Cornell is stepping down, a widely anticipated move that analysts thought could usher in a fresh, outside voice to the struggling company. Instead, Cornell 

 in February 2026 by the company’s COO Michael Fiddelke, who’s been with the company for 20 years.

In its latest earnings report, Target posted sales that marked a 

. This year, Target’s stock has ranked among the worst performing companies on the S&P 500, 

With that backdrop, everything that competitor Walmart had to offer looked positively rosy. So, even as the big box retailer missed on quarterly earnings for the first time since May 2022, 

The company raised its full-year earnings and sales outlooks. On an earnings call, CEO Doug McMillon noted that while lower- and middle-income consumers have turned to cheaper alternatives, the company hasn’t encountered an across-the-board pullback on consumer spending because of tariffs, which have pushed up Walmart’s costs every week.

Even in the best matchups, it’s not always a fair fight.

Big box retailers duked it out in earnings reports last week  

These closely watched reports offered a look at how cash-strapped consumers are (and aren’t) spending in a darkening economic landscape. 

On August 7, OpenAI’s latest LLM, GPT-5, came out, and landed with more of a whimper than a bang.

Its previous models, GPT-3 and GPT-4, each improved dramatically upon their predecessors, raising hopes that GPT-5 would prove a similar advance. Instead, GPT-5 seemed to be more of an incremental improvement. It still hallucinated, and it still 

 basic reasoning tasks: The model that Sam Altman likened to having a “team of 

 in your pocket” couldn’t tell you the 

The GPT-5 fizzle was the start of a rough month for generative AI’s reputation. In a New Yorker article, Cal Newport 

 whether the technology was ever going to get that much better. The New York Times 

 on McKinsey research showing that ~80% of companies were seeing “

” from GenAI, despite having spent billions on it. And a 

 by MIT’s NANDA showed that 95% of companies’ pilots of enterprise AI tools fail.

All of that is hard to square with the bold claims GenAI proponents made early on: that the technology would be a “

, that it was a step that would lead humanity to artificial general intelligence (

 a wide swath of white-collar jobs. Almost three years after the public release of ChatGPT 2, where is the technology really headed?

GenAI sentiment has had about as many eras as Taylor Swift. There was the “free your workforce up for 

 with bots” cycle. Now, we may be entering the decidedly less-sexy era of modest efficiency gains.

For instance, JPMorgan’s employees use an AI assistant to help them with tasks such as research and report writing, the New York Times reported. About half of the 200,000 staff who use it save up to four hours a week, the bank said. As CFO Brew 

, Salesforce and PayPal’s COFOs both said that AI has let them “reallocate” staff away from redundant tasks.

Outside the office, AI can help with productivity and even safety. Technicians at Johnson Controls were able to shave 10–15 minutes off hour-long calls by using an AI that suggests repair options. Metals and mining company Phoenix Global installed AI dashcams and apps on tablets that can 

 and alert them to drowsiness or inattention. The system cut unsafe driving incidents by 40% in just its first month in operation. Given the high cost of an accident, the system could potentially save the company millions, CFO Jeff Suellentrop previously told CFO Brew.

Much of the buzz around AI this year has centered around agents—programs that can 

—such as sending reminder emails, generating PowerPoints and Excel spreadsheets, categorizing expenses, or booking flights. Theoretically, one day, agents could be linked together to complete entire workflows.

But don’t clean out your desk just yet. Developers give agents 

. Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University 

 agents’ performance in a model company and found that even the best of them independently completed office tasks just 30.3% of the time. (The worst had a 99.9% failure rate.) The agents could be stymied by something as simple as pop-up ads on a website. A Salesforce 

 similarly found that agents only have a 35% success rate in “multi-turn interactions,” in which they respond to more than one prompt.

Agents aimed at consumers are likewise still pretty wonky. A ChatGPT agent took almost an hour to 

 of five Japanese-style lamps sold on Etsy.

That’s not even getting into the security risks. The Salesforce study noted that agents “demonstrate near-zero inherent confidentiality awareness.”

Agents might become a threat to jobs some day (though there’s always that pesky 

 to contend with), but what’s happening right now?

There, the picture is murkier. Individual companies have made headlines with 

 about replacing people with AI, and large employers like Amazon and JPMorgan have claimed AI-related layoffs are coming. A 

 by Revelio Labs found that job postings for roles with “high exposure” to AI disruption, such as database administrators, data engineers, and IT professionals, dropped 31% over the past three years, compared with a 25% drop for jobs with “low exposure,” such as restaurant managers and mechanics.

But it’s hard to disentangle the effects of AI on the job market from other macroeconomic factors, like inflation, tariffs, reversing pandemic-fueled 

, and the changes to the tax treatment of R&D that have led to around half a million tech layoffs since 2023. Tech and media/communications are the only two sectors that have seen “clear signs of AI disruption,” the MIT report said. The “jobs most impacted were already low-priority or outsourced,” Aditya Challapally, research contributor for NANDA, told Axios.

Instead of laying people off, companies seem to be holding off on 

 to see whether they can be performed by AI. More of the gains companies are seeing come from “replacing BPOs [business process outsourcing] and external agencies, not cutting internal staff,” the MIT report stated. Those are changes, to be sure, but hardly a “

Even Altman, who once asserted that AI would “

” and drive the value of labor “toward zero,” is walking back some of his claims. On a recent episode of CNBC’s 

Is this AI’s age of disillusion?

Doubts are rising about the tech’s ROI. 

Is this AI’s age of disillusion? 

It’s no secret that AI is being touted as a boon for the accounting industry, with some saying it could both help overcome the 

. But how much of that is hype, and how much is reality?

A research paper from MIT Sloan and Stanford University Graduate School of Business shows that AI could be delivering on some of its productivity promises for accountants. In partnership with an unnamed AI-based accounting software and a San Francisco accounting firm, researchers analyzed hundreds of thousands of transactions for 79 small and medium-sized companies and surveyed 277 accountants on how they adopted AI.

According to the paper, accountants using generative AI tools managed 55% more clients a week (though, not a significant difference in unique clients overall) and were able to pivot 8.5% of their time from routine, manual tasks to “higher level tasks.” Accountants who used AI tools also shaved 7.5 days off the month end close. That’s as much as 3.5 hours of routine work freed to dedicate to other tasks per 40-hour work week, according to the researchers.

“These patterns indicate that AI integration can improve the timeliness and precision of financial reporting, likely by automating data processing and flagging anomalies in real time,” the researchers wrote.

They noted that these factors suggest “that while AI may enhance processing speed, efficiency, and task automation, its ability to consistently improve financial reporting quality also depends on proactive error management, high-quality input data, and careful human supervision.” They wrote that the data showed accountants using AI had a 12% increase in more detailed reports. The paper defined more detailed as an “increase in general ledger granularity as measured by the number of unique accounts used to categorize transactions.”

“Rather than rendering accountants obsolete, AI appears to be most effective as a collaborative tool that works in tandem with professional judgment,” researchers wrote.

Accountants are benefitting from AI

 Study shows accountants using AI are faster and more detailed.

Private equity is transforming accounting—PE-backed CPA firms, mega roll-ups, bold ESOPs, and skyrocketing valuations. Explore the accounting revolution in this CFO Brew E-book.

Balance sheets & buyouts: Private equity's power play in accounting

We know all about challenges facing the accounting pipeline. But how’s the corporate finance and accounting hiring environment looking?

A recent survey by the Controllers Council, a national association of controllers, CFOs, and other finance professionals, helps answer the question.

The survey polled more than 300 executive-level finance and accounting leaders across North America, and included private, public, and nonprofit companies across 31 industries. Over half (53%) of respondents reported that their companies suffered no staffing shortages in corporate F&A, a stark change from the 69% of respondents who dubbed hiring “difficult or very difficult” in 2024.

This time around, only 10% of respondents reported “significant” staffing shortages, while 33% said they faced “minor” shortages.

“These results suggest a cooling labor market and possibly a rebalancing between employer expectations and candidate availability,” the report’s authors noted. “This improvement may reflect a combination of more stable hiring practices, expanded recruiting strategies, and shifts in market participation following widespread changes in workplace models and job mobility.”

In any case, respondents didn’t feel especially risky when it comes to staffing. Nearly 71% of respondents planned to maintain current staffing levels, a jump from 64% last year. Only 24% of respondents planned to expand their teams, which suggests “more caution in growth planning,” the report said, compared to the 32% who expected to grow their teams in 2024.

Plans for staff reductions, meanwhile, have ticked up: 5% of respondents expected staffing reductions at their organizations, up from 4% last year, and 2% in 2023.

“F&A hiring trends indicate a measured approach as economic and regulatory uncertainty persists,” the report’s authors noted. “Employers may be planning to optimize current teams rather than pursue aggressive expansion. Decreasing hiring trends may reflect rising cost pressures, and possibly automation replacing some manual and repetitive duties and corresponding staff.”

Accounting

KPMG creates an AI agent that does taxes

IRS to RIF’d staff: We goofed

Big box retailers duked it out in earnings reports last week

Is this AI’s age of disillusion?

Accountants are benefitting from AI

Balance sheets & buyouts: Private equity's power play in accounting

Corporate F&A has its own talent concerns

News built for finance pros