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Friday Footnotes: MLB Poaches KPMG; PwC Gets Back to Work; No to Deloitte | 8.7.20

Major League Baseball taps KPMG diversity exec to lead HR [The Business Journals] Major League Baseball has named Michele Meyer-Shipp to oversee all of MLB’s human resources activities, including talent processes and programs, workplace culture and diversity and inclusion. Meyer-Shipp joins MLB from KPMG LLP, where she served as chief diversity and inclusion officer. While at KPMG, she led all firm programs and initiatives relating to workforce, workplace, and marketplace diversity and inclusion and consulted with clients on building diverse and inclusive workplaces.

PwC staff encouraged to return to work [City A.M.] Kevin Ellis, chair of accountancy firm PwC — which has more than 22,000 staff across the UK — said he hopes to have around half of the company’s employees back at work by next month. Covid-19 has “bashed away presenteeism for ever”, Ellis said, adding that PwC would look to slash office attendance from five days a week to three or four days a week as a result of the pandemic.

Deloitte appoints first woman to lead its financial services arm [Consulting.us] Monica O’Reilly is the new leader of Deloitte’s financial services division. The first woman to hold this role in Deloitte’s 175-year history, O’Reilly leads the firm’s largest industry vertical in headcount and revenue. After serving Deloitte for 27 years, company veteran Kenny Smith recently retired from the Big Four firm, vacating the role of US financial services industry leader. Now appointed to fill his shoes is O’Reilly, another longstanding Deloitter – she has been with Deloitte since the turn of the century, and previously worked at Arthur Andersen (parts of which were acquired by Deloitte in 2002).

EY Aims to Double Legal Services Revenue Over Next 12 Months [Bloomberg Law] EY’s John Knox has a new job with an ambitious mandate: grow his part of the massive Big Four accountancy’s legal division—fast. “Our plan is to double, triple, quadruple the size of our business pretty quickly,” Knox, who took over July 1 as EY’s new global legal managed services leader, told Bloomberg Law. That starts with doubling legal managed services revenues over the next 12 months, he said.

Accounting in the COVID era is more subjective than ever [MarketWatch] Filed under things y’all already know: “‘The pandemic has created a lot of uncertainty, and since accounting involves a lot of estimates about the future, it makes the accounting numbers much less reliable,’ said Eli Bartov, an accounting professor at New York University’s Stern School of Business.”

Accounting’s new normal: Balance, relationships and flexibility [Accounting Today] In which AT discusses straggling firms migrating to the cloud at gunpoint.

AICPA continues to ask Congress to include PPP deductibility in upcoming legislation [Journal of Accountancy] In a letter dated Aug. 4, 2020, the AICPA joined over 170 organizations to urge Congress to “include a technical correction addressing the tax treatment of loan forgiveness under the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP)” in its next round of legislation addressing the coronavirus pandemic. The letter, addressed to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., explained, “When the PPP was adopted as part of the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act, [P.L. 116-136,] Congress made clear that any loan forgiveness under the program would be excluded from the borrower’s taxable income. Specifically, a recipient of a PPP loan was eligible for forgiveness of indebtedness for amounts equal to certain payroll, mortgage interest, rent, and utility payments made during a prescribed period, with any resulting canceled indebtedness excluded from the borrower’s taxable income.”

DeSantis makes it clear that he doesn’t like the state giving Deloitte a new contract [Miami Herald] Deloitte Consulting, which helped construct the state’s unemployment CONNECT system, was announced earlier this week as the state’s preferred vendor for a potential $135 million contract to beef up Florida’s Medicaid data infrastructure. This happened despite an ongoing state investigation into how Florida paid the firm more than $40 million in 2011 to build what turned out to be a largely non-functional unemployment site. “It’d be my preference that [Deloitte] not get anything,” DeSantis said at a discussion about Florida’s transportation industry in Orlando. “At the same time, there’s a process, unfortunately, that has to play out.”

KPMG’s Russell Mifsud gives advice on reputation management [CalvinAyre.com] Y’all really couldn’t find anyone else to interview on this topic? Literally anyone else.