PwC Australia cuts staff 40% while boosting productivity with AI tools

There may be errors in spelling, grammar, and accuracy in this machine-generated transcript. Blake Oliver: [00:00:04] The firm cut partners by 35% and staffed by nearly 40% since 2023. That's crazy. 35% and 40% since 2023. And they said that productivity improved 10 to 20% thanks to AI tools. Ceo Kevin Burrows put it bluntly the future is fewer people doing the same amount or fewer people doing more. David Leary: [00:00:25] Coming to you weekly from the OnPay Recording Studio. Blake Oliver: [00:00:30] Welcome back to the Accounting Podcast, your weekly roundup of news in the profession. I'm Blake Oliver. David Leary: [00:00:36] I'm David Leary. Like, I'm dried out, man. I'm dried out. Blake Oliver: [00:00:41] From what? David Leary: [00:00:41] You know, yesterday in Phoenix. Blake Oliver: [00:00:44] A reggae fest. David Leary: [00:00:45] It's dusty and hot, and I'm a little sunburned, but we're showing up. We're still doing the show today. We're good. Blake Oliver: [00:00:51] And we're done with tax season. We're through it. We're going to talk about the IRS CEOs, uh, recap to Congress. He says it went really well. Even though the IRS has 25% fewer employees than it did previously. But first, David, let's thank our sponsors. David Leary: [00:01:07] Yeah, our sponsors this week, we have Digits Cloud Accountant staffing on pay and worthy. Blake Oliver: [00:01:13] Let's be honest, accounting software hasn't changed much in decades except for rising costs and declining service. Now there's finally a reason to switch and never look back. You can now do your bookkeeping on digits. Digits is AI native accounting software that works for you, not the other way around. While other platforms just slap ChatGPT on old workflows and call it AI, bookkeeping demands more than a chatbot. It demands precision, auditability, and trust. Digits rebuilt ledger software from the ground up with probabilistic categorization and human review prompts. The result? Over 95% of transactions auto book with unmatched accuracy. 54% better than ChatGPT style models, so you can close faster, stay in control, and finally, stop wrestling with your accounting software. Low value clients are now high value for years worth of cleanups now take just two hours, all while your clients get visually stunning reports, streamlined collaboration, and the insights they need to make better decisions. To see why hundreds of firms are making the switch to digits, head over to The Accounting Podcast dot promo digits. That's The Accounting Podcast dot promo forward slash DIGITS. David Leary: [00:02:25] You're back the whole time you're reading the ad, you're froze. Oh, but you're back. I'm glad I was going. Blake Oliver: [00:02:31] That doesn't keep happening. David Leary: [00:02:32] I was going to ask the live stream viewers if Blake was froze for them, but you came back the second you stop reading the ad. Maybe it's when you brought something else up on your screen. Blake Oliver: [00:02:39] I don't know, I'm having some video issues, but thankfully we're a podcast, so you don't really need to see me. Anyway, let's talk about the IRS tax season. Irs CEO Frank Bisignano busy, busy. I can never say that, right? Bisignano told the Senate Finance Committee that the 2020 filing season was the most successful filing season in IRS history, unquote, despite the agency having lost about 25% of its staff. He said that the performance was due to technology upgrades and implementation of new tax breaks under the One Big Beautiful Bill act, which, um, is, uh, well, let's look at the numbers. Let's, let's see how how the IRS did. Bisignano said the IRS received more than 104 134 million individual returns, with over 98% filed electronically. The agency issued more than 80 million refunds, with 98% sent by direct deposit. And according to him, over 90% of filers got refunds in under 21 days. The average refund was up from last year, 11% up to over $3,400, and total refunds surpassed $280 billion, which is up 16% year over year. More than 53 million Americans were said to have benefited from provisions covering tips, overtime, car loan interest and seniors. The senior deduction was claimed over 30 million times, averaging more than $7,500. Treasury said the average tax cut for benefiting filers was over 800. That Tips deduction. More than 6 million filers claimed that the overtime deduction, over 25 million claimed that, and the car loan interest deduction over a million claimed that new one. 34 million families claim the expanded child tax credit, and over 105 million filers used the enlarged standard deduction. And like you said, David, that Trump account is very popular. Families enrolled more than 5 million children in that, including 1.2 million covered by elections for the $1,000 pilot contribution. David Leary: [00:04:56] So kind of. David Leary: [00:04:58] Make sure I'm not crazy, right? We still do not have an IRS commissioner. It's currently vacant, right? Blake Oliver: [00:05:04] Uh, correct. He's doing the job. David Leary: [00:05:07] They appointed him just to do it as CEO. Bypassed the congressional approval, but now he's reporting to Congress. Yeah, I'm surprised anybody from Congress is like, this is not your job. Who are you? And like, there's no fight against this. They're just accept the fact that there is no IRS commissioner now. And everybody's just moving on with life. Blake Oliver: [00:05:29] I guess so it didn't come up in this Accounting Today article that covered the hearing. Um, maybe there was just there was too much debate about other things the Democrats were going after, uh, Bisignano for the IRS cutting direct file and the delays that issue with people unable to get their refunds because they only can take paper checks. Democrats are saying service actually deteriorated. Republicans are saying it got better. David Leary: [00:06:03] We will never stop this. Like there's just black and white views of the world. We can't agree on anything. Blake Oliver: [00:06:09] Uh, yeah, I guess we'll have to wait for the Treasury Inspector General report to find out what actually happened. Here's an interesting bit about enforcement. Bisignano said that they're using technology to offset the reduced staffing in enforcement. They used AI and data analytics to identify underreporting and sent 500,000 letters that prompted corrections. And he said that those efforts generated $250 million in additional collections, and that enforcement revenue was up 12%. He also said that amended return processing had improved from six weeks to three days, and just five noncompliance cases brought in $2 billion. Just five cases. David Leary: [00:06:53] Wow. Blake Oliver: [00:06:54] Which indicates just how there are some real whales out there when it comes to not paying your taxes. Five cases and $2 billion. So of course, like I said, Democrats criticized the Trump administration ending the Direct file program. Bisignano defended the move, saying free file and other private sector free filing options are sufficient. 2 million taxpayers use free file this season. Uh, and he repeated that claim that direct file cost $72 million to build and operate with a per return cost of more than $242. So he said that it was more expensive to the government than just having free file. So that's the update on tax season from the CEO of the IRS. David. David Leary: [00:07:45] Maybe in the chat, anybody at the live chat who's now done with tax season. You want to give us a thumbs up. Did you make it. How'd it go. Little thumbs up or thumbs down emoji would be great. Blake Oliver: [00:07:54] All right let's talk about tariffs. David Leary: [00:07:58] Yes. So today apparently is happy tariff refund portal day. So the portal has opened. The system is called Cape CAPE. Um and apparently as of April 9th some people could start the process but it wasn't fully rolled out entirely then. But about 56,000 importers have completed the process. Um and they're requesting about $127 billion in potential recoveries. So this is like one of the biggest refund initiatives the government has done and some sort of organized way. Now, I'm going to go back to, I don't know, four months ago when you said you should help your clients get these refunds because I wanted to just like poke around and just go look at the website and I can't find the website I'm into like PDFs of PDFs with a PDF with four QR codes. I don't know how to get to the website, so. Blake Oliver: [00:08:51] And if you can't figure it out. David, as a very tech savvy person. David Leary: [00:08:55] Like a ton of effort because I have no skin in the game. I don't know if I, if I was trying to get money back, I'd probably put more work in, but it's only for importers. So any consumers that this cost has been passed on to you, you're not going to get any refunds back. Um, Thomson Reuters has a good blog post out. It's this huge blog post that helps you kind of navigate the system a little bit, but it makes sense because Thomson Reuters apparently also has like this tariff importer software as well. So it makes sense they're driving people to their website. Blake Oliver: [00:09:23] But what's the title of that post so that people can find it? David Leary: [00:09:26] Um, the Cape Tariff Refund system is here. Blake Oliver: [00:09:29] By Thomson Reuters. David Leary: [00:09:30] Global trade team is ready. So it's kind of a big long post, but all right. Yeah. So help your clients get through it. Um, I think it's. Blake Oliver: [00:09:39] A great option, a great service. It's a great if you are an accounting firm, you have clients, some of them probably paid tariffs. You can message them and find out who. Figure out who it is and help them out. Great great service offering. David you had a story here about IRS criminal investigations refocusing their efforts. Do you want to talk about that since we were talking about the IRS? David Leary: [00:10:03] This caugh