Critique Research: The profession’s biggest challenges

Critique Research: The profession’s biggest challenges
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Critique Research: The profession’s biggest challenges
Introduction
Leaders in accounting profession constantly face challenges including tax reforms, recruitment, succession planning, and cyber security. While these concerns are important to the profession, there are two prime concerns that accounting leaders must address to remain relevant. Hood (2018) identifies these issues to be the impact the new technologies on the profession and the ability of accounting profession to accommodate the increasing speed of change. In a recent survey published in Accounting Today, different accounting practitioners, organization leaders, consultants, industry regulators, and think tanks cited the two issues as the leading challenges to accounting practice. Like in many other professions such as medicine, recent developments in information technology have resulted in social and economical effects. As regards to change, professional accounting leaders perceive change as one of the important aspects that the industry needs to address. These concerns have sparked a plethora of other subsidiary challenges that professional accountants need to address in future. This paper is a critique to the article “The profession’s biggest challenges” by Daniel Hood, and from the analysis, the paper shows the effectiveness of the article in highlighting the two greatest challenges that impact the accounting profession today.
Summary
One of the issues affecting accounting profession is the rapid technological advancements that have a seen economy-and society-wide effects that will transform the way businesses are conducted and how people live. Technologies such as artificial intelligence, big data, and block chain have ushered a new revolution of Transformation Economy. This “Fourth Revolution” demands extensive changes to recruitment practices, customer demands, and the general running of businesses. Although these technological effects cut across different professions, there are those that particularly affect accountants. For instance, artificial intelligence and data analytics have made it possible for the creation of drones and bots that have largely impacted the accounting profession (Hood, 2018). Besides the possibility of technology to commoditize traditional services such as tax preparation, bookkeeping, and auditing, technology will impact these services and entirely redefine the job descriptions of accountants.
The second issue that has remained to be a challenge to accounting as a profession is change. Many accounting leaders have expressed pressing concerns about the ability of professional accountants to embrace change. Firms must keep up with the pace as technology continues to evolve. Only firms with robust change management strategies will prosper in the future and those that tend to fight change will find it difficult to compete with their rivals. Accounting leaders have identified that some firms have decided to avoid taking steps towards embracing change. These firms either fail to adopt change or resist change. Resistance to change has been cited by leaders as an issue that holds the accounting profession back. A number of firms have an organizational structure that resists growth and their business models serve as an inhibitor to sustained growth (Hood, 2018).
Evaluation
The rapid advancement in technology has impacted the accounting profession in many ways. According to Bill Sheridan, the chief communications officer of Maryland Association of CPA, fields such as block chain technology, cognitive computing, artificial intelligence, social media, and cloud computing have transformed the roles of professional finance and accounting experts. Today, accountants are expected to learn new skills that demand them to work alongside machines and execute services that machines cannot do. In the coming decade, the relevancy of accounting as a profession will be defined by the accountants’ ability to visualize and embrace the potential of new technologies and the willingness to accept changes and reap from tomorrows’ advancement...