There has never been a better
time to be an accountant — or
a more challenging time for firms trying to hire on a
talented number-cruncher with the right grades, expertise
and experience.
Thanks to a perfect storm of
circumstances of recent years — a growing economy, a heavy workload prompted
by requirements of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, the impending
retirement of up to 50 percent of government accounting
employees, and a shortage of accounting majors during
the 1990s — entry-level and experienced accountants
alike are now being scouted and recruited as if they
were top prospects for the NFL draft.
“The jobs and opportunities are just incredible right now,” says
Dr. Douglas Ziegenfuss, chairman of the accounting department at Old Dominion
University. “I wish I was a young accounting student again.”
Compensation is skyrocketing.
A recent survey by the National Association of Colleges
and Employers found
that accounting graduates now command an average starting
salary of $43,809, a 3.9 percent jump from last year.
But top students being recruited by
national accounting firms are getting salary offers of
up to $55,000. With
overtime, some recent graduates hired by Big Four firms
are earning more than $65,000 in their first year.
And the windfall isn’t limited to CPAs; even those
with just an undergraduate accounting degree can pick
and choose. Brad Roof, associate dean at the College
of Business at James Madison University, says every graduating
accounting student this year who wasn’t going on
to graduate school had at least two offers by the end
of February.
Many students set to graduate
next year not only have jobs for next September but
they’ve already received
salary hikes. Firms are trying to get — and then
hang onto — the best students as early as they
can, Roof says, noting that JMU has recently started
getting inquiries from public accounting firms that they’ve
never received before. They’re watching the market
closely and making sure that they remain competitive.
For a while in the 1990s, many students who might have
majored in accounting were lured away by sexier options
like finance and computer science. Now, however, the
number of students studying accounting is rising again.
From 2000 to 2004, enrollment in undergraduate accounting
courses and graduate programs increased 19 percent, according
to a recent report by the American Institute of Certified
Public Accountants.
That increase, however, is being
easily absorbed by the marketplace, thanks mostly to
the Sarbanes-Oxley
Act, which Congress passed after the Enron and WorldCom
scandals. The law essentially changes the way publicly
traded companies are audited. “These are brand-new
requirements,” says Ed Offterdinger, managing partner
of Beers and Cutler, an accounting firm based in Vienna. “People
have had to come up from a dead start to full speed pretty
quickly. It’s a lot to do, and it takes a lot of
people.”
Sarbanes-Oxley has led the Securities
and Exchange Commission to require some public companies
to perform cleanup projects
and to restate their financial results. The law also
has inspired some private companies to take a more stringent
look at their accounting practices. “The workload
that’s out there is pretty staggering,” Offterdinger
says.
Moreover, the supply of new accountants
will get even tighter next year, predicts Roof, if
only temporarily.
Beginning in July, would-be CPAs must have 150 credit
hours of education (before, the requirement was 120 hours)
before they can sit for the exam. That means that instead
of entering the job market, many students will stay for
another year of graduate school or undergraduate classes
in a complementary field like information systems. “There
will definitely be a dip [in accounting graduates],” Roof
says.
