Human Interest doesn’t audit anything. It keeps the records for retirement plans, and since plan year 2026 it has assembled the audit package for the plans it administers, offered the sponsor a curated network of CPA firms to choose from, and credited the sponsor up to the full value of the standard audit fee. Human Interest says a sponsor saves $10,000 or more per plan year.
A licensed firm from that network still signs the opinion, so nobody replaced the auditor. What changed is who pays for it.
You hand the client every hour AI saved and keep the liability.
The employee benefit plan audit is one of the four lines our accounting census marked defensible, the verdict we give a line in the Index when nothing on the market does the billed work at all. By our own test it is safe.
What held, edition by edition
- Accounting, 4 of 17. The financial statement audit, the employee benefit plan audit, reviews and compilations, and forensic accounting.
- Law, 4 of 21. White-collar defense and internal investigations, public-company reporting, public-company M&A, and first-chair trial practice.
- Consulting, 2 of 14. Board and C-suite strategic advisory, and change management facilitation.
- Marketing, 1 of 16. Brand strategy and identity.
We ran a separate census in each profession, so the four counts hold inside a profession and never add up into one field. Read down all four anyway and the same person turns up at the end of every line. A licensed firm issues the opinion. Disclosure counsel signs the filing. The forensic accountant defends the report under cross-examination. The trial lawyer stands up.
Consulting has no paperwork to point at and works the same way. Nobody countersigns a board recommendation or a change program, but the client hired a named advisor and calls that person when it doesn’t work.
Every one of those lines is safe the way the plan audit is safe.
Who else can reach that fee
The obvious wall around this work is a license. Oath went and got one. Lead investor M25 wrote on May 28, 2026 that Oath had received its CPA license that week and was accepting audit clients, with former PCAOB board member Christina Ho as Chief Assurance Officer. Oath runs the audit procedures as software and signs the opinion through its own licensed entity. The product is in early access, and the route is open to anyone willing to build a firm.
Ownership is a quieter route, and it leaves the fee intact while changing who collects it. Modus pairs its audit platform with an investment strategy that takes stakes in audit-first accounting firms, on the $85M seed and Series A round led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, announced April 7, 2026. Current, which rebranded from Crete Professionals Alliance in June 2026, holds stakes in nearly 30 independent CPA firms with more than 2,000 employees and over $500M in annual revenue, backed by Thrive. Neither platform holds a license. The signed audit reaches the client from a member firm, and no regulator has to approve any of it.
Brand strategy holds without anyone’s license
Marketing is where you can check whether any of this is really about licensure. Brand strategy and identity is the single defensible line out of sixteen, with three companies selling against it. Positioning, naming, and creative direction have no substitute a client can buy off a shelf, and no regulator requires a brand to hire anyone for the work.
That line survives for the same reason the audit does, minus the statute. A client commissions a brand platform from people who will stand behind the recommendation and still be there when it tests badly. The accountability is contractual and reputational, and clients pay for that the way they pay for a signature.
Licensure is one way to enforce accountability. It isn’t the source of the protection, and that matters for every firm whose best work carries no license at all.
Check what your engagement letter quotes
Look at your own defensible lines and read the engagement letter beside them. Most firms price them on the preparation: the fieldwork, the document review, the analysis, the deck. That is what the billable hour was hiding, itemized, and it is the part AI compresses first. Human Interest says auditor time on a plan audit drops to about five hours, down from a range of 40 to 80 plus, and the software covers every transaction instead of a sample.
The part a client can’t get elsewhere is the judgment and the name at the bottom. Pricing the result instead of the time is the other side of that.
Next spring your audit partner signs the same opinion and carries the same liability for it. If the engagement letter still quotes the fieldwork, the fee follows the fieldwork down.