Alternate Path to Be a Licensed CPA Has Wide-Ranging Benefits

Anyone who has worked intimately with numbers can tell you that accountancy is a language. And for the last 27 years, the profession has stood by the “three E’s” to determine a certified public accountant’s fluency: education, experience, and an exam.

The accounting profession continues to evolve. Demographic changes suggest fewer high school graduates over the next decade. The industry is now focusing on flexibility and greater access to the economically disadvantaged while enhancing public protection.

The education and experience elements to become a CPA are achieved in one of two ways: a combination of a bachelor’s and master’s degree with one year of experience, or a bachelor’s degree alone, with 30 credits of additional education and one year of experience.

More than a year ago, an array of experts from my organization, which represents regulators in accounting for the 55 US jurisdictions, alongside its professional counterpart—the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants—began exploring a question that had been percolating on both sides: Was this model keeping pace with the modern marketplace?

After months of intense, back-and-forth work, these groups and their stakeholders arrived in September at what we feel is a balanced solution that incorporates an additional route to “fluency” but observes the same timeless know-how we’ve come to expect of a CPA. We’re calling this additional route a competency-based experience pathway.

It still requires a bachelor’s degree and one year of general experience. But it now allows for a year of work experience to function as a means by which accountants achieve the seven competencies long associated with the profession: ethical behavior; critical thinking and professional skepticism; communication; collaboration, teamwork, and leadership; self-management and continuous learning; business acumen; and a technology mindset. Passage of the CPA Exam, as with all our pathways, remains a benchmark.

This pathway preserves the rigor needed for any candidate to achieve competency as a CPA. As the profession responsible for the financial infrastructure on which our individual and collective lives depend, the public must feel safe in trusting our expertise and the work it produces.

It also addresses a contemporary reevaluation of how aspiring CPAs can achieve competency. Consider midlife career changers. Would they pursue a CPA license if the education requirements—from which they might be far removed—were too onerous? What about students who yearn for real-world exposure over additional coursework?

The proposed pathway is currently in a comment period lasting until Dec. 30. If it gets adopted within our Uniform Accountancy Act, what accountants call mobility will be preserved. Mobility, in this case, refers to an individual CPA’s ability to live in one state but work freely in another because both states abide by the concepts in this Act.

The UAA’s establishment and the mobility framework that’s incorporated remain unique among the professions and one of the accounting profession’s signature achievements affording CPAs this hard-won privilege among professions—one that the Federal Trade Commission has recognized as an exemplar.

Regulators aren’t a much-heard-from segment in our society. But as the segment designated to serve and protect the public, we represent the largest demographic within any given profession. There are more consumers in an industry than those who study to join, teach, and practice it.

Contrary to what some government critics may think, regulators want every profession they regulate to thrive. The only thing we want more is for all those in that workforce to be qualified so everyone they serve—rich, poor; urban, rural; red state, blue state—has the same access to the same expertise and ethical standards.

You might even say that regulators are job protectors—we can see how by looking back to the early 2000s, when we saw the demise of accounting firm Arthur Andersen resulting from the Enron debacle. Both companies were here today, gone tomorrow, ultimately laying off tens of thousands of workers.

The profession is practiced in accordance with professional standards in addition to an ethical code of conduct. At the federal level, the US Securities and Exchange Commission and the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board regulate the auditors of publicly traded companies. Any disciplinary actions taken at the federal level against a CPA or a CPA firm may result in referrals of a complaint to a state Board of Accountancy, which licenses and regulates CPAs and CPA firms.

Access and trust are each vital principles, and the former without the latter isn’t meaningful. This new competency-based experience pathway honors both while also serving the ultimate objective of any language: that those who know it use their fluency to look out for those who need it.

This article does not necessarily reflect the opinion of Bloomberg Industry Group, Inc., the publisher of Bloomberg Law and Bloomberg Tax, or its owners.

Author Information

Daniel J. Dustin is the CEO of the National Association of State Boards of Accountancy.

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