Creative accounting: doing more with less.

• Position: Hiring trends of accounting firms in North Carolina; interview with accounting professor Jack E. Wilkerson Jr. - Interview

BNC: Why has hiring in accounting firms stalled and why the drop in 1995?

We can approach it from an economic standpoint and from a technology standpoint. The economic issue has made the hiring trend flat. And I think things are coming to a head in 1995. The major concern of the firms is, "How do we convince our clients that our work is something more than an interchangeable commodity that Firm A can do just as easily as Firm B?" You know, how does an Ernst & Young convince the client that the audit work they do is somehow different from the audit work that Price Waterhouse does? I don't think they've done a good job of doing that.

BNC: But wouldn't the improved economy mean more business?

There's just frankly not a lot of growth in audit/tax, especially for the larger firms. A lot of the bang-for-the-buck work that they do has been fairly flat over the '90s to this point, things like mergers and acquisitions. That's picked up a bit recently, but there's just not been as much of that as there was in the '80s. And if they can't improve the bottom line through increased revenues, and I think that's really a struggle today for accounting firms, then they've got to look to costs. So what's happening is that firms are continuously rethinking audit and tax technology.

BNC: So computer technology means you don't waste good young accountants' time?

When you're among the best and the brightest in your graduating class at an accounting program and you start to work and you're basically given tedious accounting tasks to do, it's a turnoff. And I think the best and the brightest are going to say, "This isn't for me. I want something a little more challenging." [The firms] are looking more and more at how we can better challenge these very good people.

BNC: Why the swing toward new hires with advanced degrees?

What we've not done such a good job of is getting students to think about the unstructured or semistructured accounting problems. Frankly, what we've done is attract students to accounting who like the very structured problems they see in accounting textbooks that have nice, clean solutions. And what the accounting firms are interested in are individuals who can think analytically in a very unstructured or semistructured [situation]. What we're trying to do in the master's program is hone those analytical skills so that students can almost immediately start dealing with the gray issues, those issues where there's not a clear-cut accounting...