A Look Into the Future of Accounting

After a year of research the AIPCA has released their findings from a yearlong initiative to examine what's on the horizon (up to 2025) for CPAs and the accounting profession in general. The research included getting insight from over 75,000 comments from CPA's in all professions.



The results showed that there is a bright future for CPAs everywhere, accounting opportunities are expected to be on the rise along with some needed changes in regulation. Some of the findings included:


-"CPAs overwhelmingly agreed that the profession's core purpose, "Making sense of a changing and complex world". remains relevant today and for the future"
-The profession's core values remained substantially unchanged
-The profession's core competencies evolved to reflect the 21st century.
-The services provided by CPAs have become so varied and diverse that the concept ofcore services is no longer representative of the profession. "



(How they were able to get an unbiased sample is beyond me, and their comments may have been skewed because of the inability to create a double-blind test.)


 Then the article provides a list of 10 insights and directions which I won't get into here. Reading over this I can't help but feel very speculative of their findings because there was no job market statistical analysis and projections. This was all based on anecdotal evidence from a variety of accountants. The validity of this test is definitely in question but as for the results, they didn't seem to be unreasonable.


Although some people may believe that accoutnatnts will soon be replaced by machines, I feel that it can never happen. Humans provide a control that artificial intelligence can't compete with. In the near future I can definitely see the profession expanding and Accounting becoming a bigger job market. Because of this expansion however, I could definitely see the regulations loosening and the Certification necessary to become a CPA tighten.


The future looks good for CPA's and Accountants, let's make sure it stays that way.

Works Cited:
"CPA Horizons 2025: A Road Map for the Future." Journal of Accountancy. Web. 03 Nov. 2011. <http://www.journalofaccountancy.com/Web/20114688.htm>.