Taking the reins as CEO of the world’s largest accounting association feels like coming home, Mark Koziel, the newly appointed head of the AICPA, told CFO Brew.
Koziel worked at the AICPA for 14 years, rising to EVP of firm services, before a four-year stint as president and CEO of accounting association Allinial Global. Now he’s back, taking over from Barry Melancon, who recently retired as AICPA CEO after a storied 30-year tenure.
Koziel is starting things off by hearing what members have to say, he told us. He’s in the midst of a listening tour, and encourages members to reach out to him at [email protected]. He’s already received around 500 emails, and he plans to reply to all of them.
Keeping sight of small firms: What he’s been hearing the most so far is requests to keep small firms top of mind, he said. The AICPA is a large, diverse organization with members representing everything from Big Four firms to small firms with a handful of employees, to sole practitioners. Koziel believes the organization needs to change the way it reaches those members. “We try so hard to be fast and communicate once and try and hit everybody,” he said. “We shoot in the middle and we kind of miss everyone.” Instead, his goal is to “speak to our constituencies in the way they want to be spoken to” and stay relevant to each group, he said.
Koziel also wants the organization to be mindful of the pace at which change happens and not to push too much change on firms before they’re ready. “It’s important for the Association to be leading the profession, but we can’t lead so fast that no one’s willing to follow,” he said. “And we have to understand that we are not going to get the entire profession to follow at the same speed.” The profession’s adoption of technology, he said by way of example, tends to follow a bell curve, with a small group of early adopters followed by a later majority.
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The need to upskill: One key challenge the profession is facing, Koziel said, is upskilling. Employers are asking much more of entry-level accountants than they did, say, thirty years ago. When he was starting out as an auditor, he recalled, one of his tasks was making photocopies of accounts receivable confirmations. Today, new accountants “may need to know data analytics,” he said. “They need to have the communication skills to take a complex transaction or complex financial information and make it simpler for the business units that they’re servicing.”
Upholding DEI: In the wake of Deloitte’s decision to roll back some of its DEI commitments, Koziel clarified the AICPA’s position on DEI.
“At the Association itself, we do not have hiring preferences,” he said. “We encourage DEI placement, but that is not a preference or a requirement for a position or for promotion.”
That said, he noted, the accounting profession as a whole isn’t as diverse as the communities it serves. “We need to attract more underrepresented minorities into the profession,” he said. “So we’re going to talk about diversity and inclusion. We’re going to talk about why having a diverse leadership team is important to provide diversity of thought on a variety of aspects, not just race or gender.”
Accounting in 2035: Looking at the state of the profession as a whole, Koziel sees certain trends intensifying. Large firms will get larger, he believes, and globalization will continue in spite of growing nationalism in the US and other countries. Midsized firms will “be the most squeezed,” he said. “We continue to watch the number of firms in the midsize [category] shrinking.” And small firms, he said, “are going to completely crush it with helping small businesses do what they do.”
Koziel’s neutral when it comes to private equity investment in accounting firms. “I have no opinion on PE,” he said, as long as “it’s right for the firm…As long as quality is maintained,” he said, “firm structures shouldn’t be as big a deal.”