A report from BILL found that 92% of business leaders worry about fraud. Not occasionally, not during tax season, but as a persistent concern shaping how they run their businesses. When I read that number, my first thought wasn’t about detection systems or compliance checklists. It was about who in those businesses is actually carrying that weight day to day, and whether they’re carrying it alone.
In most small and mid-sized businesses, the answer is one person. A controller. An outsourced accountant. The CPA who said “I’ll handle your payments” and quietly absorbed every liability that comes with that arrangement. The same BILL report found that 56% of businesses saw fraud attempts increase over the past year, and 42% say those attacks are growing more sophisticated. That’s more frequent and harder to catch at the same time. No single person should be expected to absorb that on behalf of every client they serve.
The good news is that this is a structural problem. Structural problems have structural solutions.
Recommended Articles
Why one person should never be the only line of defense
I have an audit background, and part of what that training gave me was a way of reading financial behavior—noticing when something is slightly off, when a vendor name doesn’t look right, when an employee’s behavior pattern changes. Those instincts are still useful. What they were never designed to do is watch every transaction for every client in real time.
I learned of a situation recently where a business owner in construction handed complete financial control to his CFO. He didn’t understand accounting, so he trusted someone who did and stopped looking at the details. The CFO was the one committing fraud. He was creating fictitious vendors, routing millions into a separate account. It wasn’t caught until the CFO went on vacation and the bank called about something unusual.
The fraud patterns in that story are not new. What made it possible was the absence of any oversight structure beyond one person. No second set of eyes and no system watching what that person was doing.
Mary Kay Bowman, EVP and Head of Payments and Financial Services at BILL, put it plainly when I spoke with her about how technology changes this dynamic: “You already have a second person in charge. You have the system in charge of that, and you have the bill pay network in charge of that.”
That second layer of oversight is not a luxury. For accountants advising clients on payment management, it’s part of what the engagement should be built around from the beginning.
How advisory relationships absorb risk by default
The most common way accountants end up carrying disproportionate fraud risk is through relationships that were never designed to share it. A business owner who doesn’t understand their own financial operations hands the keys to someone who does. That person becomes both the single point of trust and the single point of failure.
This pressure isn’t easing up. The same BILL report I mentioned earlier found that 77% of businesses worry about the rising costs of accounting services, and 60% say they may be forced to handle more work in house. Your clients are leaning on you more, with higher expectations and tighter margins for error. That makes how you structure oversight within engagements more important, not less.
This is worth examining in your own practice.
When a client hands you their bill payments, what oversight structure exists beyond you? When you recommend a platform to manage their accounts payable, have you evaluated what that platform is actually doing to protect their transactions from bad acting AI and by extension, your professional relationship with them?
We’re currently in an innovation battle, with AI functioning as both the source of more sophisticated fraud attempts and the primary tool for stopping them. Bowman described the evolution she sees for accountants who engage seriously with this tension: moving away from being “fraud gatekeepers, or fraud reporters” toward becoming “more knowledgeable and more risk strategists to advise their customers.”
It doesn’t require becoming a fraud expert. It requires building engagements where oversight is shared rather than siloed, and recommending partners who are doing their part of the job.
What shared vigilance actually looks like in practice
Restructuring how fraud responsibility sits in a client engagement starts with one conversation most accountants aren’t having at onboarding: an explicit discussion about oversight. Not because you assume bad actors, but because no individual should be the only check on a client’s financial activity. That includes you.
On the technology side, evaluating a payment management platform before recommending it is part of the advisory responsibility you’re already accepting. Bowman offered a useful framework for that evaluation.
- Do they maintain strong data security, specifically PCI DSS compliance and the appropriate payment network licensing?
- Do they have dedicated people actively running fraud operations, not just systems running in the background?
- Are those systems learning continuously from transaction patterns, or are they’re static?
She also described what genuine peace of mind looks like for accountants navigating this: “Knowing that you have someone to trust, and that they are qualified and sufficiently experienced and using the right tools—that would give you more peace of mind.”
That peace of mind is what you’re passing on to your clients when you recommend a platform. Knowing whether a provider actually delivers it is the question worth asking before you do.
The stress during reconciliation is telling you something
When the weight of fraud vigilance sits entirely on one person, that person will eventually feel it. The practices that hold up over time are the ones where the accountant’s judgment is backed by systems and partners doing real work on the other side. Fraud has always required more than one set of eyes. Now you have the infrastructure to make that possible at scale.
===
Amy Vetter, CPA, CGMA, is the CEO of The B³ Method (Business + Balance = Bliss) Institute, where she empowers accounting professionals to transform their firms through connected leadership and client advisory excellence. With over 25 years of experience, including executive roles at global technology companies, Amy blends deep industry knowledge with mindfulness principles to help practitioners create sustainable success. Her Cherished Advisory Services programs guide firms in developing high-value client relationships that drive growth and profitability. Amy is a best-selling author, sought-after keynote speaker, and host of the Breaking Beliefs podcast. She has been repeatedly recognized as one of the “Top 25 Most Powerful Women in Accounting” and a “Top 100 Most Influential Person in Accounting” by industry publications.
Thanks for reading CPA Practice Advisor!
Subscribe Already registered? Log In
Need more information? Read the FAQs
