January 15, 2012
Mark Koziel and I (Richard Muscio) have had an ongoing series of opinion pieces stemming from my reaction to the CPA Horizons 2025 report. My initial article is here.

I’m happy to report that Mark and I had a great conversation on Thursday, wherein we reached 3 interesting conclusions:

First, while the CPA profession can no longer be defined by traditional services such as Income tax preparation and financial statement preparation, most consumers don’t know this because 90 % + of the CPA profession is very challenged by marketing.

Second, the CPA profession will probably lose income tax preparation as a core service within the next 10 years, due to reasons like standardization of reporting forms and Optical Character Recognition Technology, but 90% + of the profession is behind the curve on adapting to this fact.

Third, while technology is critical for efficiency and effectiveness purposes, it probably will never replace good old-fashioned face-to-face interaction with clients and referral sources, as “connection and collaboration” requires trust, and trust can only be built by spending time together.