- For tax professionals: CRI has a history of rolling out new processes and / or software in January. They give you little to no heads up and you're lucky if you get any training on the software. So you have the ordinary stress of busy season and then have the frustration of having to teach yourself a new program on the fly.
- For audit professionals: When I first started working with CRI, they were pushing documentation procedures that were supposed to "streamline" the process. The goal was to limit the number of workpapers to the bare minimum while increasing the effectiveness of each workpaper. Quality over quantity, so to speak. It made perfect sense to me. Fast forward three years (and one bad peer review) and all of a sudden you basically have to include the same information on three different workpapers. Their philosophy essentially became to document everything, whether we needed it or not (just in case). The worst part is, part of the implementation process was having an out-of-state audit manager review the workpapers and an in-state manager or partner perform an additional review. The two reviewers could hardly ever agree on what was necessary. This held up essentially all of our audits and really irritated our clients (not a smart move).
- Tone at the top: If anyone should understand the importance of the tone at the top, it should be accountants. On the outside, corporate seemed great. You had Bill Carr and a few main guys who were very approachable and helpful. When we were bought up and went to our first CPE Week, everyone seemed to love the people in corporate. Things began to gradually break down over a few years. Last summer, Bill Carr visited our office (located in a small town in NC). He walked around and shook everyone's hand, learned our names, saw the pictures of our families in our offices, and then fired each and every one of us. We were one of several small offices across the firm to get the boot. The Executive Committee decided CRI didn't want to be in small towns anymore. Which is interesting since all firm data was potentially accessible from any location and one of the main draws was that people in one office could do another office's work. The partner in our office decided to buy the clients from him and kept the office open. CRI did at least agree to let us continue working for them for three months while we transitioned out. Although then they filled out the termination paperwork in various ways to basically offset any liability. Some paperwork showed that we quit, but when it came to paying out PTO (two weeks according to their own policy), we were terminated and left in poor standing.
