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Layne McDaniel, president of Noesis Data in Baton Rouge, started his career as a CPA in the early 1980s. “When I was in public accounting, you knew you would work an 80-hour week. That was a given,” he says.

McDaniel’s experience was typical. There was an abundance of young accountants then, he says, and everyone knew the job would dominate their lives, at least for the first several years until the big promotion. But today, CPAs are a scarce commodity, both locally and nationwide, and they can command lifestyle concessions along with higher salaries.

In 1997, Louisiana began requiring aspiring accountants to have 150 hours of college credit just to sit for the CPA exam, a move that’s been adopted by most states. The change requires an extra year of school for most students. In 2002, high-profile corporate scandals at Enron, WorldCom and other companies tarnished the accounting profession’s reputation.

“People were asking, ‘Where were the accountants?’” says Herbert Vessel, associate professor of accountancy at Southern University in Baton Rouge. “That was sort of a black eye [for the profession].”

Those factors, combined with the extreme time demands for CPAs, helped push many students away from accounting toward sexier fields like medicine or technology. At Southern, the number of accounting majors has declined every year since 2002, although they‘ve seen a significant increase this year, Vessel says.

And as the supply dwindles, demand is at an all-time high, according to Grady Hazel, executive director of the Society of Louisiana Certified Public Accountants. The scandals early in the decade led to a series of new regulations—most famously, the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, which specified 11 requirements for financial reporting.

“Accounting standards get more and more complex and more and more difficult to implement,” Hazel says, so corporations have had to hire more internal accountants and auditors. Sarbanes-Oxley only applies to public companies, but Hazel says the abundance of caution the legislation encourages has trickled down to private companies and nonprofits. Public accounting firms have to compete harder than ever to attract talent.

Hazel says many firms have started to hire college sophomores and juniors part time, sometimes paying for CPA exam prep courses and giving bonuses for passing in the hopes that the interns will stick around after graduation. And they’re finding that young CPAs are less willing to sacrifice time with their families and overall quality of life than their predecessors. So while long hours are still necessary at the height of tax season, many firms are offering a more flexible schedule and different career tracks for people who have no interest in working themselves to the bone to make partner.

“You have to change the way you approach that work-life balance,” Hazel says.

Mike Tham is the managing partner at L.A. Champagne & Co., a Baton Rouge public accounting firm with a professional staff of about 15. He says starting salaries at his company are up about 20% over the past two years in an effort to compete with corporations, government agencies and larger public accounting firms in places like Houston and Atlanta. They also started offering health insurance, although that perk hasn’t helped recruiting all that much, he says. Putting ads in the newspaper or on Monster.com hasn’t been very productive, either, but he says they’ve been successful attracting candidates from Southeastern Louisiana University.

Carrie Lewis is a CPA and a recruiting manger for Robert Half Finance & Accounting in New Orleans. She says she routinely gets calls from clients who say they’ve been in the accounting business for more than 20 years and never had to use a recruiting service until now. Most of those clients are small- and medium-sized firms; the big companies tend to have their own recruiters on staff, although they still use Robert Half to supplement their own efforts, she says.

A Robert Half survey this year found that 60% of accounting employees were willing to ask for more money from their bosses, twice the percentage the same survey found last year, Lewis says. Students are getting the message; accounting is now among the most popular majors on college campuses, reversing the trend that helped lead to the shortage in the first place.

But it will be years before those students can make a real impact on the work force, and they’ll be arriving just in time for the mass retirement of many baby boomers. By then, CPAs with experience might have even more bargaining power than they do now.

“It’s a great time to be an accountant,” Lewis says.