PAY & COMPENSATION

Tax Season Leaves Accountants Drained, Disappointed

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The 30-point swing: Accountants close the season feeling slightly negative, at minus 1.8, a collapse of more than 30 points.

The Busy Season Barometer Shows Exactly When—and Why.

By CPA Trendlines

After starting near historic highs, sentiment among tax professionals fell more than 30 points by April, as workload, client behavior and system failures overwhelmed expectations.

MORE Busy Season Barometer | Join the survey. Get the results

The 2026 tax season began with confidence.

By December, sentiment among tax professionals had climbed to a positive 29.8—the strongest reading in the CPA Trendlines Busy Season Barometer cycle. A majority expected better conditions. Few anticipated what came next.

By April, that optimism had vanished.

Accountant attitudes closed the season slightly negative, around -1 to -1.8, marking a swing of more than 30 points in four months.

It was one of the sharpest same-season reversals in the Barometer’s 24-year history, and it followed a pattern practitioners have seen before: expectations rising in the fall, then breaking under the weight of the season itself.

The difference in 2026 was the speed—and the causes.

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Accounting’s Hidden Talent Risk: The Sandwich Generation | ARC

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The 2026 MOVE Project aims to turn caregiving challenges into actionable insights for firms.

 

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The step-by-step operating guide for firms building, pricing, and scaling advisory services that clients value—and pay for.

Accounting ARC
With Liz Mason, Donny Shimamoto, and Byron Patrick
Center for Accounting Transformation

As accounting firms continue to grapple with talent shortages, retention challenges, and evolving workforce expectations, a growing segment of professionals is quietly carrying an additional burden — one that rarely shows up on a balance sheet. 

They are caregivers. 

MORE MOVE: Learn more and register.

MORE Accounting ARC: Built Fast. Sold Faster. Broken Later? The Truth About Accounting Tech | Recognize When You Need to Recharge Before You Burn Out | Valuing More Than the Balance Sheet | Accounting’s “Untalked-About” Frontier | Why Happiness is Hard-Fought for High Achievers | The Fastest Way to Lose Talent Is “Dick Leadership” | Post-Holiday Fatigue Isn’t a Failure; It’s a Signal | OCR, Research Bots & Meeting Assistants: What Actually Helps Now | Return Season is the New Stress Test | Small Firms May Have the Biggest Advantage in 2026 | Downgraded: What the DOE Said About Accounting | Savage: Using Your License as a Megaphone |  Baker: Interpreting Pricing Psychology | Don’t Get Fired by Your Own Automation | What Amazon Doesn’t Tell You | Royalties, Residuals, and Reality Checks | ARC-SLC 

In the latest episode of Accounting ARC, Donny Shimamoto, CPA.CITP, CGMA; Byron Patrick, CPA.CITP; and Liz Mason, CPA, turn their attention to the 2026 Accounting MOVE Project — and the professionals it aims to better understand and support.This year’s emphasis: the “sandwich generation” and others balancing careers with caregiving responsibilities. The topic reflects a broader shift in how the profession defines talent, productivity, and success — and raises questions about whether traditional firm structures are keeping pace with reality.

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Who Gets the Credit? Why Attribution Deserves a Closer Look

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The Matilda Effect offers a lens for understanding how recognition shapes advancement in accounting firms.

Where does your firm stack up?

By Bonnie Buol Ruszczyk
Accounting MOVE Project

The accounting profession has spent years grappling with a persistent and uncomfortable reality: women enter the field in strong numbers, perform at a high level, and yet remain underrepresented in leadership.

That gap has been measured repeatedly through industry research, like the Accounting MOVE Project. The harder question is why it keeps showing up. The answer may lie in something more fundamental than policy or pipeline: how work is recognized, attributed, and ultimately rewarded,

MORE Accounting MOVE Project: 2026 Research – Caregiving and the Sandwich Generation | Register for MOVE 2026 | Get a Firm Benchmarking Report

That’s where the Matilda Effect comes in.

The Matilda Effect is about attribution, not participation.
First defined by historian Margaret Rossiter in Social Studies of Science, the Matilda Effect describes the systematic tendency for women’s contributions to be overlooked — or credited to men.

When contributions are not accurately recognized, firms are not just creating internal inequities; they are undermining leadership development, pushing experienced professionals out the door, and losing people who can easily take their talent elsewhere.

It is not simply about exclusion from opportunity. It is about who gets recognized as the source of ideas, innovation, and results. Participation without recognition does not build careers, particularly in a profession where visibility drives opportunity.

History shows the pattern clearly.
Long before anyone had a name for it, the Matilda Effect was quietly reshaping the scientific record.

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 Busy Season 2026: Clients, Pricing, Staffing… CRUNCH

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CPA Trendlines Busy Season Barometer: Modest Gains, Mixed Outlook, Cautious Tech Upgrades Ahead

Top concerns: “The returns aren’t harder—they’re just later.” (CPA Trendlines Busy Season Barometer)
Join the survey. Get the results.

By CPA Trendlines Research

The 2026 tax season shows some gradual improvement for certain firms, but most practitioners report conditions that remain largely unchanged from a year ago, according to the latest data from the CPA Trendlines Busy Season Barometer.

For More Busy Season Trends and Strategies: Join the survey. Get the results.

MORE Tax Season 2026

The good news is: 2026 hasn’t turned into the disaster some were expecting with a new tax law and diminished IRS. The bad news is: 2026 is turning into a relatively routine year — without the advances in workflow or the better margins from higher-value services that some were hoping for.

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How AI Upends CPA Firm Pay Structures: Bloomberg Talks with Piscopo

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Big 4 Transparency founder Dominic Piscopo makes featured appearance on Bloomberg.

By CPA Trendlines

Accounting firms are being forced to rebalance compensation structures—shifting pay and incentives away from entry-level staff and toward managers and reviewers—as artificial intelligence reshapes how work gets done, according to Dominic Piscopo, host of Big 4 Transparency on the CPA Trendlines Streaming Network.

MORE Dominic Piscopo and Big 4 Transparency | MORE CPA Trendlines Streaming Network

Piscopo’s full discussion on AI, compensation trends, and the future of accounting talent is available on Bloomberg Tax’s Talking Tax podcast. His ongoing analysis of salary data and workforce trends is featured on the Big 4 Transparency show, streaming on CPA Trendlines.

“Having transparency in those models and being willing to talk about it with people —not just have this very kind of cold process where a number is thrown out—can make all the difference, even if the number is exactly the same,” Piscopo tells Bloomberg Tax reporter Jorja Siemons.

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