I'm delighted by the opportunity to play a role in guiding the profession toward our future, the subject of this first column. The economy is strong. Members are making money. Now is the time to prepare for a future we know to be inevitable. The biblical analogy of storing grain in good times for the famine to come may be overly dramatic, but it makes a point.
Trends underway can undermine our current position.
Financial accounting has not kept pace with the sources of revenue in post-industrial business. Software will replace a good deal of compliance work. More and more of our services will be subject to non-CPA competition. Preparing remedies, in keeping with the biblical analogy, makes good sense. But the analogy totally misses what the trends tell us about opportunities.