If a new forecast from the World Economic Forum is on the money, it could be a rough five years of job cuts for accounting roles, including bookkeepers, accounts payable clerks, and auditors, as new tech allows businesses to automate their work.

The WEF’s Future of Jobs Report, released Tuesday, surveyed more than 1,000 large global employers which, combined, account for more than 14 million workers around the world. According to the executives who responded, only a half-dozen roles including bank tellers, cashiers, and administrative assistants had a more dismal five-year forecast for negative net growth than accounting, bookkeeping, and payroll clerks, whose positions they believe will shrink by nearly 20% between 2025 and 2030. In raw numbers, they’re also expected to lose the sixth-largest number of positions over the same period. Just behind the clerical roles, in the positions expected to lose the seventh-most number of jobs: accountants and auditors.

The driving force behind the gloomy prediction is one you’ve read before. Executives told WEF that the positions in greatest decline, which tended to be clerical, are at risk due mostly to “broadening digital access, AI and information processing technologies, and robots and autonomous systems.” It’s not all machines, though: “Aging and declining working-age populations and slower economic growth also contribute to the decline in clerical roles,” according to the report.

For more on the decline in accounting jobs, click here.—GD

Dealing with the IRS got just a little bit less onerous over the past couple of years, National Taxpayer Advocate Erin Collins said in an annual report to Congress. But cuts to the IRS’s budget would threaten the progress it’s made, she added, and urged Congress to maintain or increase IRS funding.

The IRS answered 9 million more phone calls in fiscal year 2024 than it did in FY 2022, and halved wait times on calls, according to Collins, who heads the Taxpayer Advocate Service, an independent body within the IRS. In 2023, the agency employed around 2,000 more customer service representatives than it did the previous year, and has reduced the average time it takes to respond to “individual taxpayer correspondence” from seven months to three and a half months.

These improvements were partly made possible through $78.9 billion in additional funding the IRS received through the Inflation Reduction Act, Collins said. The inclusion of IRS funding in the IRA was politically contentious, and after the bill was passed some Republican lawmakers stated they’d slash the amount the IRS would receive. In 2023, as MSNBC reported, Congress used a budget deal to cut $20 billion in IRS funding, and it took back a further $20 billion in December 2024 when extending the deal to forestall a government shutdown.

Collins also argued that the IRA funds need to be distributed differently. Currently, 58% of the funds go to enforcement, even though less than 2% of the revenue the IRS collected in 2024 came from enforcement, she pointed out. Only 4% of the funds go to IRS taxpayer services, she said, and that money will likely run out in FY 2026. Adjusting what she called an “extreme imbalance in funding priorities,” she argued, and improving services would make “taxpayer experiences…fairer and more efficient.”

Click here to keep reading.—CV

You know that general feeling of optimism at the start of every new year? Well, businesses are feelin’ it, too, according to JPMorgan Chase’s 2025 Business Leaders Outlook survey. (Let’s hope that optimism lasts a bit longer than just a few weeks, when so many of us quit on our resolutions and it’s status quo until next year.)

Confidence in the US economy increased 12 percentage points to 55% for small business owners, and more than doubled to 65% among leaders of midsize businesses, according to the survey. Three-quarters of respondents said they were optimistic about their own companies over the coming year.

What’s more, fears of recession have waned, JPMorgan Chase found. Approximately seven in 10 small and midsize businesses said they were either uncertain about or not expecting a recession at all this year.

“Businesses are entering 2025 with positive momentum after navigating a period of elevated inflation and interest rates better than expected,” Ginger Chambless, head of research for commercial banking at JPMorgan Chase, said in a news release. “We’ll be watching closely to see how this optimism extends throughout the year and influences companies’ growth strategies.”

Click here for more on executive optimism about the economy.—AZ