-
How an assurance background shapes one Shreveport accountant’s view that the record behind a number matters more than the number itself.
Shreveport, Louisiana, Jul 18, 2026, ZEX PR WIRE — In an industry where the largest numbers on a financial statement are estimates rather than measurements, the question of what supports them tends to get asked late. Energy accounting runs on reserve reports, engineering judgment, and assumptions about costs that will be incurred years from now. The figures look precise on the page. Behind many of them is a calculation nobody has revisited.
Todd Muslow, CPA and Chartered Global Management Accountant, argues that the record supporting a number is the number’s only real claim to being true. He is a partner of Muslow+Agnew Group, LLC, a full service CPA firm based in Shreveport, Louisiana, with offices in Shreveport, Dallas, and Homer, Alaska.
His position is not a warning about dishonesty. It is a statement about how numbers decay.
Where the Habit Came From
Todd Muslow began his professional work in 1997 in the Assurance division of KPMG LLP, specializing in oil and gas audits for public and privately held companies across the United States and internationally. The work involved sitting with schedules prepared by people who had produced them for years and asking a question that sounds simple.
“You are not there because you know more than they do,” Muslow explains. “You are there because somebody has to ask how they know what they know.”
The answers divided cleanly. Some numbers came with an invoice, a report, a contract. Others came with a pause.
“A record that only makes sense to the person who wrote it is not a record. It is a memory with a date on it,” Muslow says. That distinction, formed in audit work, became the organizing idea of everything he has done since.
Why Energy Makes the Problem Sharper
Depletion depends on a reserve estimate produced by an engineer. Asset retirement obligations depend on what someone believes it will cost to plug a well and restore a site at a date well into the future. Intangible drilling cost elections depend on classifications drawn at the invoice level, often in a hurry.
None of these are facts that can be counted in a yard. Each is a judgment, and each judgment rests on a document that usually lives outside the accounting department.
“Auditing taught me to write for the person who arrives three years later with no context and every right to ask,” Muslow says. In his view, that person always arrives. The only variable is whether the file is ready.
The Failure Is Rarely the Treatment
Todd Muslow observes that when energy accounting goes wrong, the error is seldom in the tax treatment or the accounting standard. It is in what sits inside the account before anyone applies either one.
A capital item coded to repairs. A vendor invoice covering both intangible and tangible drilling costs booked entirely to one account because splitting it took an extra five minutes. A depletion rate carried forward for years without anyone tying it back to the reserve report it came from.
“You can compute a deduction perfectly on a number that was wrong before you ever touched it,” Muslow says. “Correct math on a bad input is still a bad return.”
The remedy he describes is unremarkable. Classify at entry rather than at year end. Keep the supporting report with the calculation. Track by property, because that is how the questions get asked.
Documentation as an Asset, Not Overhead
Owners tend to treat records as the administrative residue of real work. Todd Muslow treats them as the thing that makes the work defensible, which is a different category entirely.
“Documentation is not the paperwork around the work,” Muslow says. “In this business, the records are the asset.”
The claim has a practical edge. A buyer discounts what cannot be verified. A lender prices uncertainty. An examiner asks for support and accepts what is produced or does not.
In each of those moments, Muslow argues, the value of the business is set by the quality of its records rather than by the quality of its operations. The operations may be excellent. If the file cannot show it, the file wins.
What Executive Work Added
After five years in public accounting, Todd Muslow co-founded Temple Oil Company, LLC, where he served as Chief Financial Officer, and later became Chief Accounting Officer of O’Brien Resources, LLC, overseeing financial reporting, tax compliance, and audit matters across affiliated entities.
The seat changed. The question did not. What changed was the consequence of the answer, because an officer relies on the numbers rather than reviewing someone else’s.
“When you are the one signing, you find out quickly which of your accounts you actually understand,” Muslow says. Multi entity reporting sharpened it further, since transactions between affiliated companies leave a record in two places or in neither.
The Habit Cannot Be Built Under Pressure
Todd Muslow is direct about when documentation discipline gets established, which is never during the event that requires it.
“Nobody builds a filing habit during an examination,” Muslow says. “You either had one or you did not.”
The same applies to a due diligence request, an insurance claim after a storm, a lender’s review, or a partner’s question about an intercompany balance. Each arrives on a schedule set by someone else.
Todd Muslow draws a distinction between records kept for the business and records kept for scrutiny. The first set exists to run operations and is often adequate for that purpose. The second set has to persuade a stranger, and the difference between them is usually a source document and a sentence of explanation.
What Muslow describes as preparation is small and repetitive. Reconcile monthly rather than annually. Attach the source to the entry. Write the memo when the position is taken, while the reasoning is still in someone’s head.
A Standard Worth Adopting
Todd Muslow believes energy accounting should be held to the standard assurance work already applies, which is that a number stands only if something outside the accounting system supports it.
He earned his CPA credential in 2002 and his CGMA designation in 2014. In 2009 he partnered with his father to form Muslow & Muslow, LLC, which later expanded into Muslow+Agnew Group, LLC, serving individuals and closely held businesses in Shreveport, Louisiana, and across the United States.
Where the Standard Gets Tested
The moments Todd Muslow describes as tests are ordinary ones. A lender reviewing a covenant calculation. A buyer building a data room. An insurance adjuster substantiating a claim after a storm. A partner asking how an allocation between wells was determined.
None of those parties were present when the entry was made. Each evaluates the business through whatever the file contains, and each treats an absence as an answer rather than as an oversight.
Muslow argues this is why documentation cannot be understood as a compliance function. Compliance describes an obligation to an authority. The file, in his framing, is what the business is able to prove about itself to anyone who asks, which is a broader and more consequential thing.
The standard is not a burden he imposes on clients from outside. It is the one he was trained into and then had to live with on the other side of the table.
“Every number in this industry is somebody’s judgment about something they cannot see,” Muslow says. “That is not a reason to distrust it. It is a reason to write down how you got there. Strip away the estimates and the elections and the treatment, and what is left is the file. The records are the asset.”
