Every managing partner we speak to has the same problem. They can’t find enough people to do the work. Graduates are down, experienced staff are leaving, and the pipeline isn’t refilling.
This isn’t a hiring slump. It’s a structural shift in the accounting workforce, and it’s been building for over a decade.
The numbers
CPA Australia and CA ANZ have both reported declining student enrolments in accounting programs across Australian universities. The trend started before COVID and accelerated after it. Fewer people are choosing accounting as a career, and the ones who do increasingly gravitate toward advisory, consulting, or industry roles rather than public practice.
At the same time, attrition in mid-tier and smaller firms remains stubbornly high. Staff leave for better pay in industry, for less demanding hours, or for careers outside accounting entirely. The people who stay are doing more work with fewer colleagues.
Why offshore hasn’t fixed it
Offshore outsourcing was supposed to solve the capacity problem. For many firms, it helped temporarily. But the structural issues with offshore labour are well documented:
High turnover in offshore centres means constant retraining. Quality inconsistency means senior staff spend their time reviewing instead of advising. Management overhead creates a new bottleneck. And the cost savings, once you account for the hidden costs, are smaller than the headline rates suggest.
Offshore outsourcing addresses the symptom (not enough hands) without addressing the cause (the work itself is labour-intensive and process-heavy).
The work itself is the problem
The core issue isn’t that firms can’t find people. It’s that the work requires too many people in the first place.
A standard company tax return involves pulling data from accounting platforms, classifying transactions, applying tax rules, performing reconciliations, running validation checks, and producing the return. Most of these steps are rules-based. They follow defined logic. They have clear inputs and outputs.
This is exactly the kind of work that should not require a human to perform manually. The judgement calls (the client-specific decisions, the edge cases, the strategic planning) absolutely require qualified professionals. But the production work? That’s process, not expertise.
What a structural solution looks like
If the workforce problem is structural, the solution has to be structural too. That means changing how much human labour is required to produce a unit of work, not just finding cheaper humans.
Agent-sourcing is one answer to this. AI agents that can execute the rules-based production work (pulling data, applying tax logic, running validations, producing deliverables) reduce the number of people needed to deliver the same volume of compliance work. Your qualified accountants review and approve work packets instead of preparing them from scratch.
This doesn’t mean fewer jobs. It means different jobs. Accountants spend their time on review, advisory, and client relationships instead of data entry and return preparation. Practices can take on more clients without proportionally growing headcount. Graduate accountants learn by reviewing agent-produced work instead of doing repetitive prep.
The firms that move first
The accounting workforce shortage is not going to reverse. Universities aren’t suddenly going to produce more accounting graduates. Mid-career professionals aren’t going to stop leaving for industry roles. The economics of public practice aren’t going to become dramatically more attractive to new talent.
Firms that restructure their delivery model around AI-augmented workflows will be able to serve more clients with their current team, maintain quality, and offer their staff more interesting work. Firms that don’t will continue competing for a shrinking pool of labour, paying more for the same capacity, and watching margins compress.
The question isn’t whether this shift happens. It’s whether your firm leads it or follows it.