A quick introduction, since this is the first of these: my name is Angelo Policicchio. I’m a CPA. I started at local tax firms in Metro Detroit, worked with the Department of Justice in forensic accounting during college, briefly worked at Ernst & Young, and then worked on Wall Street as a research analyst at HOLT Credit Suisse (now UBS), where we made accounting adjustments to financial statements to give investors a more accurate view of the true economics of the company. And now I’ve started a tax software company. That’s the last of the biography, because this column is not about me. It’s about the accounting industry: what’s happening to it, where it came from, and where it’s headed. It’s written for the people who work in it, run firms in it, and invest in it.

The only honest place to start is with the profession’s most alarming number: between 2019 and 2022, more than 300,000 accountants and auditors left the profession in the United States, a decline of roughly 17% of the entire workforce, as the Wall Street Journal reported in December 2022. That is not one bad busy season or a rough quarter of attrition. That is a sixth of the profession walking out the door in about three years. The short version of what follows: the exodus was real, most of the wounds were self-inflicted, and (the part almost nobody covers) the numbers have already started to turn.

The natural question is where they went, and the answer is less dramatic than the number suggests: mostly retirement, plus a steady bleed into corporate finance, tech, and anywhere else that pays comparably without a February (OK, I guess I am part of the problem). The more important question is why nobody was standing in line to replace them.

The pipeline cracked at both ends

Accounting has a demographic problem it saw coming for two decades. The AICPA has long estimated that roughly three-quarters of practicing CPAs are at or near retirement age. Baby boomer partners built the modern profession, and they are leaving it on schedule. That part was predictable.

What wasn’t in the plan: students stopped showing up at the same time. U.S. schools awarded 55,152 accounting bachelor’s and master’s degrees in the 2023–24 academic year, down 6.6% from the year before, with master’s degrees in accounting and taxation falling about 15%. That came on top of nearly a decade of declines before it.

The CPA exam pipeline tells the same story with more noise. In 2023, 42,626 new candidates entered the exam pipeline, the highest since 2016, but that was largely a rush to beat the January 2024 exam overhaul. In 2024, the number fell to 28,082. Strip out the exam-change distortion and the trend line through the early 2020s pointed one direction: down.

Why it happened

There is no single villain here. There are three compounding problems, and the profession is finally being honest about all of them.

The price of admission got too high. For decades, becoming a CPA in most states required 150 college credit hours (effectively a fifth year of school) plus a year of experience and the exam. That fifth year is real money and a real year of forgone salary. When the competing offer is a finance or computer science degree that starts paying twelve months earlier at a higher number, you lose students on arithmetic alone, before a recruiter ever gets a word in.

The entry-level pay math stopped working. Starting salaries in public accounting lagged banking, consulting, and tech for years, while the hours matched or exceeded them. The old bargain was clear: endure brutal springs in your twenties in exchange for a license that compounds for forty years. The bargain still exists. But students started reading the front end of the deal more carefully, and firms were slow to reprice it. Said differently: the profession kept charging a premium for entry while paying a discount for the work.

The story got stale. The profession kept selling stability to a generation that watched the work itself change (more complexity, more regulation, more technology) without the pitch changing with it. Meanwhile the loudest narrative in the culture was that software would automate the job anyway. Hard to recruit against that when your counterargument is a PowerPoint about job security.

It showed up in the financial statements

If this all sounds like an HR problem, it stopped being one. A Wall Street Journal analysis found that nearly 640 U.S.-listed companies reported material weaknesses tied to accounting personnel between mid-2023 and mid-2024, with the share of companies citing staffing-related internal control problems climbing from 30% in 2022 to more than 34% (the Journal’s analysis sits behind its paywall; the figures are summarized here). Firms turned away engagements. Offshoring, once a quiet practice, became an open one. Fees rose, and so did salaries: the market doing what markets do when supply falls.

The correction is underway, and it’s real

Here’s the part most coverage still misses: the pipeline has started refilling.

Accounting undergraduate enrollment has now risen for three consecutive falls: up 1.9% in 2023, 11.3% in 2024, and again in 2025, when total postsecondary accounting enrollment reached 313,397 students and undergraduate growth outpaced the 1.2% average across all majors. Susan Coffey, the AICPA’s CEO of public accounting, put it plainly: “Three straight years of growth is energizing for the profession.”

The license itself is changing too. It’s the biggest structural reform in a generation. In May 2025, the AICPA and NASBA amended the model law to add a new path: a bachelor’s degree, two years of professional experience, and the exam, as an alternative to the 150-hour route. Ohio went first, effective January 1, 2026, and the majority of states have now enacted or introduced similar legislation; Texas’s new Pathway B, for instance, takes effect August 1, 2026. The fifth-year tollbooth is coming down in real time. (That reform deserves its own piece, and it will get one.)

And the exam pipeline is stabilizing: 16,448 new candidates entered in just the first half of 2025, trending back toward a normal year.

The honest ending

None of this means the shortage is over. Enrollment today becomes graduates in two to four years and licensed CPAs in four to six. The retirements don’t wait for them. The Bureau of Labor Statistics projects six figures of accounting and auditing job openings every year this decade, most of them replacement demand. The gap closes slowly, if it closes.

And there is a detail worth sitting with: the students walking in right now are not entering the profession the retirees are leaving. They’re entering one being reshaped simultaneously by license reform, private equity ownership of firms, offshore delivery, and AI: four once-a-generation shifts landing in the same five-year window.

The number of accountants is starting to grow again. The job those accountants will do is another story. That’s what this series is about.

This is the first in a series on the accounting profession: where it came from, what’s changing, and what it looks like from the inside.