Confessions of a Charlotte accountant

I’m not good at numbers. I still use my fingers to add and I’m convinced my calculus teacher only passed me because he saw me breakdown and cry during my final exam. But some people spend their careers crunching numbers, and for some unknown reason they love it.

I spoke with one Charlotte accountant about Enron, tax loopholes and if all accountants are really boring. Here are his confessions:

What are the dumbest ways people try to get around paying taxes?

In my experience, outright tax fraud is really uncommon. This sounds obvious, but a big one we see is when people just can’t be bothered to file and/or pay their taxes. The IRS will catch up with you and I guarantee their penalties will far outweigh the short-term pain of just getting your taxes done on time.

A more subtle one that we see is deducting personal expenses on business returns. You can get away with a lot of things as long as there’s a plausible business purpose, but no one thinks that $30,000 to take your entire family to Europe is a legitimate business expense. (And yes, we did have to talk one client out of claiming that.)

Are there any tax loopholes you can teach us?

Ha! A lot of people think we have this magic bag of tricks that we can pull out on April 15th to make your tax bill shrink. These simply don’t exist. For most people, the best answer is really boring: contribute the maximum possible to your retirement accounts.

Are all accountants boring?

First off, I laughed out loud when I saw this question. For the most part… yes. But a lot of us actually know that we’re boring and are happy just being able to have a job that fits our skill set and serves a need.

If you worked for Enron would you have told on them?

There’s a common misconception that Enron failed due to some bad accounting. But in reality, a disaster of that proportion could only come as a result of a lot of people doing a lot of bad things. The people in charge at Enron were extremely determined to perpetuate their charade.

My favorite Enron story was that they claimed they were making so much money because they ran a sophisticated energy trading operation (which didn’t exist). When investors wanted to see this in action, Enron hired dozens of actors to sit in front of computers as if they were really trading.

So, yeah. It went way deeper than accounting.

Oh, ok. Well if you were working for a company that was committing fraud, would you tell on them?

It’s difficult to say what it would be like if I found fraud from the inside. I have a lot of admiration for people who are willing to speak up.

I know a guy who brought up some issues he found as CFO and was given the choice of keeping his mouth shut or resigning. He resigned (which sounds like the right move) but the fraud in question continued for several years and he was unemployed for over six months. It was a lose-lose for him.

Tell me about a nightmare client.

Let’s just say if you bring in a literal shoebox of receipts, your accountant probably hates you.

What’s one of the biggest misconceptions about accountants?

Pretty much everyone hears “accountant” and automatically assumes that we do taxes, but there’s a huge variety of roles for accountants. In fact, CPAs are one of the most recruited groups by the FBI due to their value in investigating white collar crime.

Any other confessions?

Accounting doesn’t really lend itself to juicy stories. A veteran of this business once told me, “If this job gets exciting, something has gone very wrong.”