As a CPA and now software engineer, I'm observing quite a bit of confidently incorrect or misguided takes in here. For starters, people are comparing EY to McKinsey and other consultancy firms, but this article is discussing EY's auditing practice, which begs for comparison to the other members of the Big 4: PwC, Deloitte, and KPMG.

I do think the incentives are entirely wrong for auditing. Auditors should be paid for by shareholders. Even if it decreases your dividends, you _want_ to pay for an auditor to provide reasonable assurance that there is no funny business going on with your money. In fact, that's how auditing began. The current system provides for conflicts of interest where partners are incentivized to please the board of directors that hire them and pay them large sums of money.

However, this doesn't lead straight to all auditors covering up fraud, and I feel that many people in these comments are overly critical. Having skepticism of the process is great (and auditors emphasize professional skepticism themselves), but I don't think we should throw the baby out with the bathwater as the current system does still provide a lot value. I also think many people here believe auditors at Big 4 firms are forensic accountants, which they are not. In the US, the FBI employs the forensic auditors many here may be thinking of. The auditors that EY employs are there to provide an audit opinion that expresses reasonable assurance that the financial statements are fairly presented. It's a very tough job that cannot be performed perfectly in its current form yet works remarkably well, all things considered. Finally, EY is a very large company that's really made up of many individual pieces that share a larger name but are structurally different, particularly between regions such as the US and Europe. EY in Germany certainly deserves the negativity they're receiving here, but that shouldn't necessarily be applied to all employees of EY all over the world. It's an accounting firm made up of thousands partners who are CPAs (in the US at least).

The exciting thing is that given the nature of accountancy, the industry is extremely conservative and open to disruption. However, that disruption has to adhere to numerous rules and regulations that would probably frustrate many entrepreneurs here. Most auditors are working with Excel and PDFs and do mindless work at the lower levels. A lot of this is getting off-shored, which is lessening the quality of the work. If a new technology was able to be designed that could overcome the shortcomings of humans manually using Excel and PDF markup tools while providing a higher quality of work than the off-shore work many in the industry are using, there would be a great opportunity to replace jobs at the lower level - boy I don't like saying that out loud. Hopefully it would allow for new employees to focus more on judgement based decisions using their expertise gained from obtaining the difficult to attain CPA license. They say that every year at a Big 4 accounting firm is equal to two years in industry, and I certainly believe that. Based on my experience, I strongly believe that licensed CPAs that come from auditing firms know far more about the ins and outs of businesses than the MBAs at consulting firms like McKinsey that many here seem to be conflating them with.

Perhaps I should join an accounting software company. It can be easy to forgot how much expertise I have as a CPA when I was surrounded by them in my previous career. Yet I have found that the software companies I have reached out to undervalue my CPA and overemphasize leetcode skills, which is truly a shame. If anyone is interested in a decent software engineer with a CPA to add, I'm open to talking!