Challenges for CPAs at Corona Pandemic Time

With the pandemic coronavirus, the economy gets reeling, and the accountants find themselves having difficulty in creating a new normal for the clients. At this uncertain time, CPA firms are not only helping the clients but also practising themselves to stay viable. The importance of remaining silent and open-minded helps a lot for the clients in creating new opportunities.

Tax authorities and tax issues are guiding Certified Public Accountants in the firm. Those issues can also update the state, federal, and local tax regarding property tax, payroll tax, and real estate. All the levels of government have different modification levels that CPAs need to monitor the clients they support.

Urgent needs from small businesses

The Coronavirus crisis has created urgent requirements from all the small businesses. At this moment, the biggest challenge for the CPAs is the urgency of helping the clients in small business for getting access to the relief programs and Paycheck protection programs in the middle of tax season. It requires the firms to pivot as the advisors to help the businesses and make through the shutdown. Some of the things like financing option review and flow forecasting help the company to go online for the firms right now. The next process will be supporting the relief loans, auditing, and interpreting more relief packages.

Thrust into Work from Home

While most of the firms were exploring remote work, the firms adopted new ways of working from home with new tools like Skype, Zoom, and Google Hangouts.

Moving to the Cloud

Nowadays, most of the firms are reporting challenges with visual communications like Zoom. It leads to moving more systems to the cloud. If this uncertainty continues, the client accounting services will excel.

Interaction with Clients

CPAs need to interact with the clients and swift the action to save mainstream businesses. They have tools for creating new opportunities to help them in surviving short-term challenges. CPAs are referred to as engines in thrusting their clients and help them to get their needs met.

Among tax and audit seasons, the CPAs have to adjust to this pandemic time of COVID-19, and the CPA USA is postponed. The payments for CPAs were delayed. Many companies allow their employees to work from home and are followed by a mandate to stay at home. Along with numerous businesses having quick adjustment of operations, the terms resulted in a lot in CPAs. Due to the social distancing measures, the respondents revealed the interactions with clients are changed a lot. Also, many offices had to create car-side services and pickup/drop-off stations for their clients who are not familiar with electronic documents. Some other companies have to depend on courier services, mails, virtual meetings through Zoom, and telephone calls.   

During this uncertain time, the clients took guidance from financial advisors. Some of the clients need to navigate the “CARES” (Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security Act). Others want to continue maintaining normalcy. Besides, many respondents know that the ability to get work done through the clients is challenging at this time.

Employee Interactions

According to the measures of social distancing, many firms have changed their employee interactions and work routines. Due to the existing infrastructure like cloud-based software, some offices were transited to remote environments. To safeguard the client information, few companies are unable to give work from home for their employees. 

Many respondents also emphasized the need for continued communication with their employees to make sure that both the clients and staff have to move forward. Also, they stressed and answered questions to alleviate employee stress. 

Conclusion

As it is the hardest time of the year for the accountants besides COVID-19 added new challenges to them, which made the tax season more complicated for the clients. Also, most of the employees work remotely, but they do not do seamlessly. Right now, the accountants can’t meet face to face interactions with their clients. The accountants should help the clients in figuring out the new obligations of CARES act, and it was promulgated for further complicating things.

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