By Carl Mayes
In public accounting, culture shapes how firms allocate resources, serve clients, uphold their professional responsibilities and maintain public trust.
Creating a shared sense of purpose can be challenging, particularly as firms navigate significant changes in how they operate. Artificial intelligence, changing business models and other shifts in the practice environment are introducing new questions about how work gets done and how firms grow. Through that change, firms still need a culture anchored in quality, ethics and professional responsibility.
That requires intentional effort from firm leaders.
Culture Is Tested During Change
Retirements, mergers and acquisitions, changing service models and other transitions can disrupt established cultural norms. Managing that disruption requires foresight and leadership.
Regularly revisiting succession plans can help preserve continuity as key leaders retire. During M&A, cultural fit deserves consideration alongside profit and growth. Moving into a new service area raises another set of questions: Does the firm have people with the right competencies? If not, is it bringing in professionals who share its expectations around quality?
During any period of growth, firms also need to guard against silos and make sure people are operating under consistent expectations and standards.
Earlier in my career at the AICPA, I was involved in an initiative launched in response to a Department of Labor study that identified significant quality concerns in employee benefit plan audits. As part of that effort, I contacted dozens of firms to better understand what was driving the problems.
What I heard was both enlightening and concerning.
In some cases, firms continued performing employee benefit plan audits after the partner who led the practice retired, but the person who inherited the engagements did not have the necessary competence to perform high-quality work.
Other firms accepted or retained benefit plan audits because they were concerned about losing the financial statement audit for the same client. Still others saw employee benefit plan audits as a potential growth area and expanded into the practice before investing in personnel with the necessary skills.
These situations were the exception, not the rule, and they did not originate from bad intentions. But they demonstrated how a firm’s priorities show up in practice. In some cases, decisions made in pursuit of growth put quality at risk.
Culture reveals itself through decisions like these. Firm leaders and personnel ultimately have to take ownership of the culture they want to create.
How the Profession Supports a Culture of Quality
Firms do not have to establish those expectations on their own. The accounting profession has a comprehensive self-regulatory framework designed to promote quality, ethical behavior and strong governance across firms of all sizes.
The AICPA Code of Professional Conduct provides the foundation, establishing requirements for integrity, objectivity, competence, due care and compliance with professional standards. Those requirements span service lines and call on CPAs to remain impartial, intellectually honest and free from conflicts of interest.
The Code also challenges members to continually assess their conduct and decisions by asking themselves: “Am I doing what a person of integrity would do? Have I retained my integrity?”
Additional requirements build on that foundation. For assurance engagements, the framework includes:
- Performance standards developed and continually updated by the AICPA’s Auditing Standards Board and Accounting and Review Services Committee. These standards establish expectations for practitioners and support high-quality assurance engagements.
- Quality management standards, which took effect in Dec. 2025 and require firm leaders to take accountability for quality and create a culture that reinforces ethical behavior.
- The AICPA Peer Review Program, which provides independent evaluations of firms’ assurance practices, helps identify risks and supports remediation when quality issues are detected.
Similar guardrails exist beyond assurance. AICPA tax standards establish expectations for professional conduct and quality in tax services, while consulting, valuation, forensic and personal financial planning standards establish performance expectations in those areas.
Together, these requirements give firms a foundation for strong governance and a culture centered on quality. But standards alone cannot create that culture. How leaders apply them when making decisions about growth, succession, people and services ultimately determines how those values show up inside the firm.
Supporting firms in that work is central to the AICPA’s mission. The strength of the profession depends on firms consistently meeting their responsibilities to clients and one another while preserving public trust.
About the Author
Carl Mayes is the AICPA’s vice president of CPA candidate quality and competency, where he oversees the Profession Ready Initiative, a research-backed effort focused on the skills early-career CPAs need to succeed. He previously held leadership roles at Aprio and the AICPA, including overseeing audit and accounting quality initiatives and directing CPA Evolution through 2021. Mayes has been named one of Forbes’ Best-in-State CPAs and a CPA Practice Advisor 40 Under 40 honoree. He is a licensed CPA in North Carolina and a Certified Association Executive.
