Accounting traveled offshore because its rules were written
A trade body vetted the provider. The seat is still your problem.
The hard part of offshore hiring is deciding which work leaves your office. Nobody outside it can decide that for you. Outsource Accelerator reported in May that ConnectOS was named the official outsourcing partner of the National Tax & Accountants' Association, a membership organization for accounting firms and professionals. The report carried the Melbourne firm's growth too: the company expects revenue to rise again this financial year, with an outsourcing workforce based largely in the Philippines.
So an entire membership body now has a vetted provider. Its firms still lack a vetted seat. Those are different purchases, and only one of them was made in May.
What an endorsement covers
An association can check a company properly. The entity, the payroll, the security posture, the customer list, whether anyone has been left holding a bill. A small firm doing it alone would do it badly. Firms start by asking a provider which roles their other clients send offshore, then pick from that list. It feels like research. It is a menu.
The endorsement is hearsay about your own office. It says a vendor behaved well elsewhere, which tells you nothing about which work on your floor can be handed to somebody who does not know what you want. An association can tell a whole membership the provider is sound. It cannot tell any one of them what to send.
Why accounting went first
Accounting firms sit among ConnectOS's customers, according to the report, and the chief executive told the Australian Financial Review that clients turn offshore when they cannot find skills at home quickly. Accounting is the nearest professional-services neighbor law has: licensed signoff, client confidentiality, a regulator with opinions. If it travels there, the instinct is that it travels here next.
It does, but not on the same timetable, and the reason is the work rather than the country. A reconciliation has a right answer before anyone opens the file. Whether work can travel comes down to whether its output can be checked against a written standard, and accounting arrived with its standards already printed. A law firm has work that qualifies. Intake criteria, file setup, cite-checking, document prep against a model. None of it is written down, because the partner who knows it has never needed to write it down.
Write the standard down and the provider becomes a detail.
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