What nobody puts on the tax careers page

Last week I wrote about AI. This week is about something that gets discussed far less openly, even though it's arguably reshaping firm structures faster. Offshoring.

Start with the scale, because it's larger than most candidates assume. The AICPA's MAP Survey puts around three in ten US accounting firms currently using offshore delivery, and nearly half of the firms it classifies as top performers. Inside Public Accounting's August 2026 Insights report found 70% of IPA 100 firms plan to increase outsourcing and offshoring this year. This stopped being a Big Four story some time ago.

The math that got firms here

The talent numbers explain most of it. The AICPA, NASBA and NPAG's Accounting Talent Strategy Report, drawn from around 8,000 survey responses, found roughly 340,000 accountants left the US profession between 2019 and 2023. That's about a 17% contraction from a base of roughly 1.6 million.

The pipeline hasn't refilled fast enough to cover it. US schools awarded 55,152 accounting bachelor's and master's degrees in 2023-24, down 6.6% year over year and a 20-year low, per the AICPA's 2025 Trends Report. Enrollment has since started to recover, but degrees conferred lag enrollment by several years, and licensure lags that again.

Firms can't hire people who don't exist. India and the Philippines have deep, English-proficient, well-trained accounting talent pools that pick up US GAAP and US tax workflow with proper onboarding. The direction of travel was fairly predictable once the arithmetic became clear.

One nuance worth holding onto, though. IPA's data suggests offshoring isn't a straightforward efficiency play. The firms using offshore staff also tend to be the ones under the most capacity and turnover pressure, which points to global staffing being a response to the talent problem rather than a pure margin lever. What it's given those firms is the ability to be selective about domestic hiring rather than simply filling open seats.

It's a layered model, not a replacement

It's rarely a case of the US team being cut and replaced. The pattern I see repeatedly is layered.

Offshore staff gather and organize client documents, do first-pass preparation, and self-review. AI tools sit underneath that handling extraction and drafting. US-based staff and partners do the technical review, the client conversations, and the sign-off.

The firms doing this well aren't cutting headcount for its own sake. I've had owners tell me directly that offshore economics free up enough margin to pay their US staff more, because routine low-margin work is no longer competing for the same billable hours as the advisory work that actually moves the needle.

The rung that's disappearing

The entry-level roles are under the most pressure, and this is the part I find genuinely difficult.

The jobs that used to be the on-ramp into public accounting, where a first-year would spend a busy season on data entry and basic prep to learn the fundamentals, are precisely the jobs AI and offshore teams do best. PwC has said it will cut US entry-level campus hiring by roughly a third by 2028. A BambooHR study reported by Fortune this year found a third of new accounting and finance hires quit within their first year, with senior staff now handling AI-assisted work that used to go to juniors.

Yvonne Hinson, CEO of the American Accounting Association, has framed the problem plainly in Bloomberg Tax: the profession may be automating away the very rungs of the ladder that young accountants need to climb.

There's a real debate happening inside the profession about where the next generation of managers and partners comes from if that apprenticeship rung goes. I don't think anyone, the AICPA included, has a clear answer yet. It's also worth saying that this is a problem for firms before it's a problem for you. A firm that hollows out its junior intake is deciding, whether it means to or not, that it will buy its future managers on the open market rather than grow them.

Where the ownership model actually shows up

Private equity money has poured into accounting over the last few years, and PE-backed platforms are the more aggressive adopters of both AI and offshore delivery. IPA's data bears this out: PE-backed firms make greater use of offshore staffing, retain more capital for reinvestment, and show more operating discipline on realization, profitability, and utilization. Exactly the levers you'd expect an investor to pull.

But here's the finding that complicates the usual story. In IPA's numbers, PE-backed and independent firms posted identical organic growth of 7%. The differences show up elsewhere. Independent firms currently deliver stronger partner compensation and distribute more of their earnings, while PE-backed firms hold more back for reinvestment.

So the choice isn't growth versus stagnation, whatever either side's recruiting language implies. It's closer to a choice about where the money goes and how the work gets built.

Independents tend to move more cautiously on offshore delivery and lean harder on relationship-driven, judgment-heavy work as their point of difference. Partly that's genuinely how the owners think. Partly it's one of the few competitive advantages left that a platform can't easily replicate.

Both of those are legitimate businesses. They're just different bets, and they'll shape the first five years of a career in different directions. Worth factoring in properly when you're comparing offers rather than treating it as background noise.

Sources: AICPA PCPS MAP Survey, reported by Accounting Today; AICPA/NASBA/NPAG Accounting Talent Strategy Report; AICPA-CIMA 2025 Trends Report; Inside Public Accounting, August 2026 Insights report; Bloomberg Tax; Fortune, reporting BambooHR workforce data.