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Filling in the Blanks on Global Staffing: Part 1

How do we fill in the blanks on that org chart of ours? Do we leave these spaces unfilled? The world is an unknown, the unknown is risky and we all know how CPAs feel about risk. Let's reduce some of this risk of outsourcing by turning the unknown into known.

Filling the Blanks: Part 1

Anticipating the Future

Rohit Bhargava is on a mission to inspire more non-obvious thinking in the world—and he'll be bringing his insights to CalCPA's Members Club Summit on July 31 as keynote speaker, where he’ll share strategies on how being a non-obvious thinker can help you and your firm or business thrive. 

Rohit Bhargava Members Summit Q&A

The Accounting Profession is Alive and Well

Not long ago, I had the opportunity to speak to a group of college students about accounting careers. The session started at 8 a.m. on a Saturday and I was met with a packed hall full of energized, curious accounting majors. It was a moment that reminded me why I'm so optimistic about the future of our profession.

May 2025: The Accounting Profession is Alive and Well

Belonging: Building Resilience

To build resilience, accounting firms must take proactive steps to address concerns and strengthen their commitment to diversity and belonging. Here are some suggestions for navigating these challenges.

Building Resilience

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CPAs: Making Sense of What Comes Next campaign

CalCPA is working with the AICPA and other state CPA societies to encourage action opposing the targeting of pass-throughs, such as those of accountants, dentists, doctors, lawyers and pharmacists, through the elimination of the Pass-through Entity Tax (PTET) SALT deduction. This would increase taxes on the partners/owners of many service-based businesses, such as accounting firms, discourage the creation and growth of such businesses, and further expand the disparity between C corporations and pass-through entities.

CalCPA and the AICPA are encouraging members to 

. To help with the efforts, the AICPA has provided a 

—will unfairly increase taxes for many regional accountants, pharmacists, dentists, and others, but retain deductions for large corporations. The legislative package would eliminate state and local taxes (SALT) for many pass-through entities.

Under this legislation, accounting firms will be worse off than they were after the application of the SALT cap under the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) and before the IRS-approved deductions were authorized. Specifically, the proposal newly subjects local entity level taxes to the individual SALT cap.

The proposed tax legislation unfairly subjects specified service trades or businesses (SSTBs), such as accountants, doctors, lawyers, dentists, veterinarians, etc., to the individual cap on state and local income tax deductions at the federal level, regardless of partners’/owners’ income level or the state in which they live.

When comparing the tax treatment of state and local taxes for pass-through entities between the TCJA and this proposed bill, the sole change is the targeting of pass-through service providers, who were already substantially limited under the qualified business income (QBI) deduction for SSTBs.

CalCPA and the AICPA believe that this bill further increases the lack of parity between pass-through entities and corporations; we strongly oppose the targeting of certain pass-throughs from deducting state and local entity taxes at the federal level. We urge you to 

, to express your opposition to this unfair limitation of pass-through entities and ask them to support service trades and businesses.

I urge you to oppose provisions included in the House Ways and Means Committee’s tax reform legislation that unfairly target the ability of service businesses structured as pass-through entities to deduct their state and local taxes (SALT) from their federal tax liability while providing no such limit to other businesses. This legislation effectively discriminates against particular pass-through businesses by indirectly raising taxes on those entities that are considered the backbone of the American economy. These provisions greatly widen the disparity in treatment between pass-through entities and other kinds of businesses, and I strongly urge you to oppose these provisions of the bill. 

CalCPA will continue to follow this issue and provide any further updates.

Call to Action: Preserve the PTET SALT Deduction

CalCPA is working with the AICPA and other state CPA societies to encourage action opposing the targeting of pass-throughs, such as those of accountants, dentists, doctors, lawyers and pharmacists, through the elimination of the Pass-through Entity Tax (PTET) SALT deduction.

Sitting down to write this article I start by facing the blank page, not quite sure how to fill it. The blankness is intimidating, and it gives no guidance on what should be there—which is totally appropriate for the topic. 

When we look at the blank spaces on our team rosters, we are often just as rudderless, just as apprehensive. Demand for our CPA and advisory services is crushing you and your team as much as ever. But the talent pipeline is reduced to a trickle. And those blanks are not filling themselves. 

(By the way, it’s not lost on me that using physical paper, just like back when I took the CPA Exam, is maybe excessively old school.)

Back to the topic at hand, fewer experienced professionals are coming from fewer staff staying in the profession, backing all the way up to fewer students going into the accounting major. There’s even generational narrowing, making fewer young people available from the very start! Every profession, industry and job classification are going to continue to vie for the same talent. And guess what, we have sort of a reputational problem—somehow the public we serve thinks we are all overworked and unfun! True or not, it’s a hard sell for a young person mapping their career.

So how do we fill in those blanks on that org chart of yours? Do you leave these spaces unfilled? Or is your face looking a little blank too?

The world is an unknown, the unknown is risky and we all know how we CPAs feel about risk. Let's reduce some of this risk by turning the unknown into known. We have known that the big CPA firms have been using staffing around the world since long before there were just four of them. They did it sometimes to access new markets and sometimes to access new labor pools. 

These early adopters paved the way, investing capital—both human and monetary—and created areas of the world that had tons of well-trained staff and whole ecosystems around their global offices. This absolutely improved the economies of where they invested. Though right along with excellent training and experience, the profession exported its nose to the grindstone, production-oriented work ethic (who said CPAs aren’t a good time?).

Where do you look? Some of the top contenders are India, Philippines, Mexico and South Africa, though there are many places that are up and coming. Some of the commonalities are high levels of education for portions of the population, large English-speaking populations, and direct experience with accounting. Time zones differ and the relative cost differs. But whether the resource is a thousand miles away or 12,000, smaller firms often do not have the resources to set up their own entities with employees (or a JV with a foreign firm). Since this capability is often cost and resource prohibitive for small firms, they are exploring options in different structures such as-through finding individual contractors, hiring through employers of record (like an international PEO) and outsourcing.

Each method has its own plusses and minuses, and the right mix will likely be different for each firm.

Individual contractors are not always available. For example, they are common in Philippines but less common in India. They can be hard to find since you're looking for a single individual who wants to devote their time to your firm. Managing one or a few people can be difficult if you have no boots on the ground locally where they are and because of that, it can be hard to scale up this as necessary. If you do happen to find the right person or two, it can be an immediate shot in the arm however, as you will have a resource that you can integrate into your team at a lower price point.

Right alongside individual contractors is the possibility of hiring through Employers of Record (EOR) where the employees truly become part of the firm's team but are employed by a professional employment organization, a third party, in that foreign country. This allows for a bit more control without having to learn foreign employment law or most other compliance. However, this worry-free option isn't free, and you will get charged hundreds or thousands of dollars per employee per month for this service. It also doesn't obviate the need to find staff members in the country in the first place (you have to do that), nor does it help manage for performance, etc. Using EORs can be a solution if you have small numbers of highly qualified (i.e., harder to find) staff in a number of foreign jurisdictions.

The last structure, and the one near and dear to my heart, is outsourcing. This solution puts all the hiring, management and training of staff onto someone else. Very often you're able to get a breadth of skill sets instead of the skill set confined to one person. But you pay for what you get since you have to then pay that vendor's profit margin on the staff. You probably have already been approached by multitudinous would-be vendors hawking their miracle solution to your staffing problems. They can make the issues vanish with the flick of a wire transfer button. Annoying, isn't it? I hate being sold to and I'm sure you do too. But at the same time, we small firms need to explore ways to get the work done!

So how to find out more about these options? Do some research yes, but you should not need to become the expert on global labor. Ask questions, get referrals. Be clear about what parts of your processes need to be filled, what blank spaces on your org chart are missing. From there find out whether the various offerings meet your needs and budget. Like with any business deal, it comes down to what you have to give up compared to what you receive. The more specific your ask, the more likely you are to find a successful global staffing solution. The chart below will help give you a framework for navigating what each solution provides.

Hopefully, this has shed a little light on a subject largely kept in the shadows. But I don't expect this article to fill you with courage all by itself. In the next installment we will tackle some of the common concerns around using global labor—some are real, some are phantoms, and all can be put to rest. 

 is on a mission to inspire more non-obvious thinking in the world. He is a three-time WSJ bestselling author of 10 books on marketing, innovation, diversity and trends, including his No. 1 bestseller "Non-Obvious Megatrends." Rohit has been invited as a “non-boring” keynote speaker to events around the world and is a monthly columnist for Inc. Magazine and founder of the Non-Obvious Company.

CalCPA’s Members Club Summit on July 31

 as a keynote speaker, where he’ll share strategies on how being a non-obvious thinker can help you and your firm or business thrive. 

You encourage people to shift their perspectives so they can see what others miss and “win the future.” What are some practical ways that we can start doing that?

When you think about gifted detectives from movies and books, they usually solve the case through their ability to see that one detail in a scene or the incongruous moment in a story that everyone else missed. My term for this skill is non-obvious thinking and what I've discovered over the past 10 years of studying this is that it can be taught. 

One practical way to start doing this is to reduce the distractions that often prevent us from seeing this sort of detail. Removing notifications from your phone, choosing to look around and making a mental commitment to pay attention to things that most people walk past unknowingly are other great ways to start doing this. For example, challenge yourself the next time you're walking from one point to another (especially if it's a common route for you) to mentally catalogue everything that is blue. The next day, pick yellow. This sort of mental game is perfect for training your brain to stop skipping over the things that you may always have dismissed as unimportant background details. 

Tell us about your recommendation to use unexpected resources, such as magazines, to keep a broad perspective and “step into someone else’s world.” 

Yes, I do love magazines as a way to create empathy for someone not like yourself. They are printed celebrations of a niche passion, and you can learn the most when you choose to buy and flip through one about a topic or category you never would otherwise be interested in. Some of my favorites, aside from Teen Vogue, are Monocle, Modern Farmer and The Walrus. 

The other key thing, particularly important for professionals like CPAs who have a deep expertise in a specific area, is to consume media from outside your own industry. Read updates on luxury retail or cloud computing or makeup and fashion. Anything you choose to read that opens your perspective is always a good use of time, even if that little voice in the back of your head keeps insisting it's not relevant. 

How did you realize that seeing the unexpected was unique and something you should start teaching people about?

There are daily examples of people who are unable to see beyond the world they inhabit. It's not because they are bad people. It just takes work to escape the algorithm that keeps your perspective locked into a certain frequency. The more we hear the same ideas over and over, the cheaper each of those insights feel. And so we get frustrated by the sameness of what we consume and feel like originality is harder to find. That feeling was what started me down this path to try and put more original thinking into the world. I want to challenge my audience to see things they haven't seen before. And the more I teach this method, the more fulfilling it is when people come to me and share all the new ideas and energy they have as a result of breaking themselves out of their fixed thinking. 

What motivates your mission to inspire non-obvious thinking in the world?

I feel there's a danger in the world that with ease of content generation and all the people who want to capture our attention and use it for their own benefit, we will no longer be able to think for ourselves and separate fact from lies. To some degree, that is already happening. It would be nice to create some sort of technology solution to filter out the noise. Unfortunately, this will never be good enough. The only real solution is for all of us to build our own skills to be able to consume media more intelligently, think for ourselves and refuse to be manipulated. To me, that's the most important part of this mission to teach and inspire more non-obvious thinking in the world. I want everyone to have the confidence to think for themselves, form their own beliefs and refuse to be easily manipulated. 

Does this mission ever feel like a burden? 

I'm not sure I would use the word burden, but it can feel overwhelming. The more stories we see or actions that seem to push the world toward disaster, the harder it can feel to maintain a sense of optimism and believe that positive forces can win. Sometimes the evidence doesn't really support that belief. What helps me most are the conversations I have with amazing people who are doing something to move the world in a more positive direction. They need support, funding and for their story to be told to the world. No one wakes up every morning wanting to feel outraged or hopeless. These positive stories and the people behind them are what give me hope, but it can still feel like an overwhelming challenge to get them out in the world. 

What are your favorite topics to think about at the moment?

I do a lot of trend research and one of the most exciting areas of development here is in the world of immersive storytelling. The ability for people to live inside a story, experience something in a mind-altering way (with or without the aid of psychedelics!) and the push to create these types of experiences is exciting. This encompasses everything from Google's recent release of the digitally upscaled and remastered Wizard of Oz film at the Sphere in Las Vegas to the popular music show in London featuring digital avatar versions of the legendary ‘70s Swedish rock band ABBA. The future of how we will not just be entertained, but the crossover between this sort of entertainment and travel, financial literacy, education, retail and health care is fascinating. 

Can you give us a sneak peek of what you’ll talk about at 

My goal is to inspire members to bring non-obvious thinking into their practices and the way that they approach their work and life daily. I believe we all have the capacity to be more open minded and evolve our mindsets. Particularly when you are a successful person, this is even more important because it helps you get to the next level in your work and as a person. I’ll share stories of why this matters, how to navigate the noisy media ecosystem of today, what impact AI will really have on the world that we live and work in, and specifically the four habits of non-obvious thinkers that can help you win in the future. The future belongs to non-obvious thinkers. I can't wait to share some insights on how to use this thinking to succeed in 2025 and beyond. 

Register today for CalCPA's Members Club Summit and hear more from Rohit during his session, Keynote Session: 7 Non-Obvious Trends Shaping the Future Normal

Not long ago, I had the opportunity to speak to a group of college students about accounting careers. The session started at 8 a.m. on a Saturday and I braced myself for a quiet and sleepy crowd. But when I walked in, I was met with a packed hall full of energized, curious accounting majors, eager to learn and ready to engage. It was a moment that reminded me why I'm so optimistic about the future of our profession.

While we face issues like outdated images of the accounting career, and a smaller pipeline of candidates than we actually need — the reality is accounting is an exciting, fulfilling career path that continues to play a vital role for consumers from Main Street to Wall Street.

Today's CPAs aren't just number-crunchers who pop up during tax or audit season. They're strategic advisers who help organizations big and small navigate uncertainty, drive innovation and make smarter, data-backed decisions. With a strong ethical core and technical expertise, CPAs see the full picture — and help businesses make sense of what's next.

You'll find CPAs in every corner of the business world—from advising small, family-owned companies to guiding Fortune 500 giants. They hold C-suite roles in businesses and nonprofits, uncover financial wrongdoing, and keep markets trustworthy by providing reliable data. They're at the forefront of innovation, leveraging new technologies and leading the way in areas like sustainability reporting, AI and cybersecurity.

The demand for accountants and auditors is still going strong—despite the noise about the profession's supposed decline. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, jobs in these fields are expected to grow 6 percent from 2021 to 2031—that's over 81,000 openings each year in the U.S. alone. With market needs expanding and seasoned professionals retiring, we can expect these numbers to remain high.

Meanwhile, a new generation is stepping up to fill that demand. The National Student Clearinghouse Research Center reports a 12 percent jump in accounting enrollments for Fall 2024 compared to Fall 2023—the highest level since Fall 2020.

As the need for trusted experts grows, there are challenges to tackle. We need to tell a better story about what CPAs really do. We need to address the time and cost it takes to get licensed. We need to support those in the profession so they can succeed and thrive in their careers.

We know this isn't a challenge that "others" need to address, which is why CalCPA is responding to these challenges head-on. Through various programs and partnerships, we are working to shift the identity of the profession, inspire diverse and talented individuals to become CPAs, and empower them to thrive within the profession.

We're visiting schools to show students just how versatile and meaningful a CPA career can be. Whatever you're passionate about, you can shape your accounting path to match your interests and become an expert in what you love, from tech to sustainability to entrepreneurship.

 so everyone sees us for what we are: the trusted advisor, the forward-thinker, the leader behind the scenes. The CPA story is a compelling one—and it's time we told it boldly.

We're also paving the way for national efforts to 

modernize the process for entering the profession

. Together with regulators, we created a modernized CPA licensure blueprint that aligns with today's realities and market demands. This plan simplifies licensing requirements and offers more inclusive, flexible pathways that we believe will welcome aspiring CPAs while maintaining the high standards essential to public trust. We are pleased to see that these efforts are gaining traction as states across the country work to implement them.

And we're lifting up forward-thinking CPA leaders who are reimagining the workplace—raising salaries, embracing technology, and creating vibrant environments where professionals can grow and thrive. This is the kind of profession that excites Gen Z—and it's the one we're building, together.

The CPA profession is evolving, and like any transition, there are bumps along the way. And we're tackling the challenges head-on because we believe today's investments will build a new generation of talented, passionate CPAs who will shape the profession and drive our collective success.

The CPA profession is alive, evolving and thriving—and that's good news for everyone.

In recent years, the accounting profession, like many others, has found itself in the midst of discussions surrounding diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging initiatives. While these efforts aim to create more inclusive workplaces, they have also faced significant pushback from various quarters. As the profession grapples with these challenges, it's essential to understand the nuances, confront the criticisms and chart a path forward toward resilience.

Critics have raised valid concerns about the potential drawbacks of these initiatives, citing fears of undermining meritocratic principles and questioning the legality and morality of certain approaches. Legislative actions in several jurisdictions have added further complexity, casting doubts on the future of DEI implementation. Moreover, resistance to these efforts can take various forms, from outright denial of structural inequalities to disengagement.

Despite these hurdles, the accounting profession has much to gain from embracing DEI wholeheartedly. Research consistently demonstrates that companies with diverse workforces and inclusive cultures outperform their counterparts financially. Moreover, such organizations tend to attract and retain top talent, particularly from younger generations who prioritize diversity and inclusion in their workplace choices.

To build resilience, accounting firms must take proactive steps to address concerns and strengthen their commitment to diversity and belonging. Here are some suggestions for navigating these challenges:

: Firm leaders must demonstrate unwavering support for these initiatives. This commitment should be communicated clearly and consistently across all levels of the organization, emphasizing the importance of diversity and inclusion in achieving the firm's goals and values.

: Implement comprehensive DEI training programs for all employees, including leadership teams, that focus on raising awareness about unconscious biases, fostering empathy and providing practical tools for creating more inclusive work environments.

: Establish transparent processes for tracking and reporting progress on DEI initiatives. Set measurable goals and hold leaders accountable for achieving them. Regularly review and assess the effectiveness of DEI efforts, making adjustments as needed to ensure continuous improvement.

: Create safe spaces for open and honest conversations about diversity and inclusion. Encourage employees to share their experiences, perspectives and concerns, and actively listen to their feedback. Foster a culture of respect and empathy, where everyone feels valued and included.

: Collaborate with industry peers, professional associations and community organizations to share best practices, resources and insights. By working together, accounting firms can leverage collective expertise and drive positive change on a broader scale.

: Actively promote diversity in leadership positions within the firm. Establish mentorship and sponsorship programs to support the development and advancement of under-represented groups. By cultivating diverse leadership teams, firms can better reflect the communities they serve and foster innovation and creativity.

: Stay informed about evolving trends, research and best practices in DEI. Embrace a growth mindset and be willing to adapt strategies and approaches based on new insights and feedback. Cultivate a culture of continuous learning and improvement, where experimentation and innovation are encouraged.

While navigating DEI challenges in the accounting profession may seem daunting, it also presents an opportunity for growth and transformation. By embracing diversity and inclusion, and taking proactive steps to address concerns and strengthen commitment, accounting firms can build resilience and create more inclusive and thriving workplaces for all employees.