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When I started at CFO Brew in January, I’d reported plenty of business and markets stories, but finance and accounting were a whole new ballgame. Would I embarrass myself by confusing the FTC for the SEC or accidentally mix up P&L with the acronym for pumpkin spice latte?
Luckily neither happened, and in fact I learned a lot this year. Not just about how CFOs do their job—although I definitely did learn that, including how they prepare for a product launch, take a company private, secure government incentives, and manage a company’s operations and finances.
But reflecting back on the year, three big themes called out to me—like the last cookies on a tray at a holiday party. And unlike those cookies, I’m happy to share these takeaways with you.
Aud(it)acious. ’Twas a year of evolution in the auditing world, which was a wild time to jump into the beat. The Public Company Accounting Oversight Board upped its standards (and received SEC approval) on an auditor’s role to include “violations caused by negligence, not just recklessness,” as CFO Brew reported in August.
Meanwhile, “the board had fewer quality control criticisms” of Big Four firms, I reported this summer, and that hadn’t happened in three years, leading Chair Erica Williams to praise (well, not quite praise) the firms’ “small signs of movement in the right direction.” It was also a year with its share of big headlines for shoddy auditors (shodditors?), including bad news cycles for FTX’s former auditor and the “sham audit mill” that signed off on the books for the media company of once-and-future President Donald Trump.
So ruled. While Trump’s return to power sets up 2025 and beyond for potentially vast changes to tax and regulatory policies, the Supreme Court made sure that 2024 supplied its share of regulatory bombshells affecting finance teams. The high court’s rulings this past term will allow more challenges to regulations and give agencies including the SEC fewer ways to enforce and defend them, although they could also slow down federal courts and, according to a PwC analysis, make future regulations more uncertain.
Regulators weakened by the end of the Chevron deference may be more open to cooperating with businesses instead of taking them to court, according to Hadas Jacobi, a financial regulatory lawyer at Reed Smith and former regulator with New York state, but it could “take a while for things to scramble back together in an orderly fashion.”
Status qwhoa. My final takeaway is admittedly vibey, but throughout the year, my little reporter nose booped into realigning business trends more often than I would have expected: forecasts of falling profitability, more wealthy consumers shopping discounters, climate change’s strange effects on earnings, and private equity’s stake in a third of big CPA firms. Future economic historians will have the benefit of hindsight that we do not, but we can all agree that 2024 was a strange one.