The Wednesday Lowdown ⬇️

Happy Thanksgiving, you glorious birds. Hope you shut the laptop tomorrow and actually hang with the fam. I’m doing the same. Enjoy it.

If you're new around here, every day I share the 4-5 best accounting insights I saw in the past 24 hours.

I scroll. so you don't have to.

💎 WTF of the Day

School Accountant Gets Prison for Stealing From Kids’ Budget

A Missouri school district just learned the hard way that their accountant, Anthony S. Moon, was cooking more than the books.

Moon stole about $92,747 from the Savannah R-III School District, plus another $29,700 he quietly skimmed from his own employees’ retirement plan.

The DOJ hit him with 1 year and 1 day in federal prison, no parole. He also has to pay back over $122,000 in restitution and forfeiture.

Source: U.S. Department of Justice

💎 What’s poppin in accounting

Female CPAs Are Actually Liking Their Jobs Now

New data says something you don’t hear often in accounting, the vibes are getting better. Since 2023, job satisfaction for female CPAs has jumped twice as fast as it has for men, and women are now reporting slightly higher happiness overall.

Why the glow up? Three big things
• Culture stopped sucking as much – More flexibility, less “sit at your desk”
• More women in leadership – Turns out having role models helps.
• Tech finally doing its job – Cloud tools and AI are cutting late nights and mind-numbing grunt work.

Firms that invest in culture and flexibility are winning.

 📊 Weekly Trend Chart

Americans Are Job Hugging Again

Layoffs are up, hiring is down, and workers are holding tight to the jobs they’ve got. Big companies like Amazon, UPS, Target, and Microsoft are all cutting staff, and October saw the most announced layoffs since 2003.

The quits rate, the “how confident are you?” metric has dropped to 1.9%, the lowest in a decade (outside COVID). And surveys show workers expect to stay put because they trust leadership more, like their culture more, and think the job market outside kinda sucks.

Job hoppers used to get a fat raise. In 2022, they got a 2.2% wage premium. Now? 0.1% basically nothing.

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