During the spring AICPA Council meeting, a gathering of the AICPA’s governing body comprised of 265 members and representatives from every state and U.S. territory, we celebrated the fact that so many member states and territories have successfully brought forward new pathways to certified public accountant (CPA) licensure and reimagined CPA practice mobility in a very short amount of time.
Notably, state CPA societies, like your Illinois CPA Society, played an integral role in stewarding important legislative initiatives into action and are now actively involved in the administrative rulemaking processes and general change management across the ecosystem, allowing CPAs’ voices to be truly heard and accounted for.
The point of introducing new pathways to licensure is obvious— we’re working to ensure a robust and sustainable talent pipeline of next-generation leaders to support the future of the profession. Collectively, we’re now focused on:
As someone who’s been involved in this movement from the early stages, I feel very confident in our collective abilities to support each of these stakeholder groups as we shepherd new CPA candidates toward licensure.
Admittedly, reimagining the practice mobility framework across all 55 jurisdictions is a more complicated process. The stakeholder groups are different. The level of risk to practitioners and their organizations are different. The focus of regulators can also be different across jurisdictions. As the new mobility model was being developed, one thing was abundantly clear to us: CPAs and CPA firms would need resources and compliance tools to help them navigate the new regulatory framework.
We’ve previously seen how many firms managed their licensure and practice privilege eligibility in a variety of ad hoc ways. Picture spreadsheets and notes on what “special” requirements may exist across the jurisdictions they served clients in. Decisions were often made about where they could perform work without fully understanding all the regulations. While this was a risky approach by CPAs and their firms before, it’s become far too risky to continue in this manner.
It was my hope that one of the profession’s many stakeholders would step up and develop the tools needed to address this critical gap and bring to market a meaningful solution. As the primary steward of the profession in Illinois, we knew this was an important time to show up for our constituents and advocate for their needs. We scoured the professional licensure landscape to find solutions that could help CPAs and their firms navigate the coming regulatory shifts both in Illinois and beyond our borders.
While there are many state-based licensed professions, none of them have the same practice mobility structure of the CPA profession, which meant a unique solution was needed. Enter CPA QualityPro, a start-up whose founders knew firsthand the challenges CPA firms were sure to face in the future. CPA firms need visibility into each jurisdiction’s regulations, must carefully validate the licensure credentials of their teams, and then they must map all that against the practice privilege and firm registration requirements in each jurisdiction they intend to practice in. After meeting the CPA QualityPro team and participating in a product demo, it became clear they had the tool we need today.
I’m pleased to share that we’re proud to partner with the CPA QualityPro team to help modernize practice mobility compliance. We bring an important and influential voice to the table and represent the collective voice of Illinois’ tens of thousands of CPAs and CPA firms asking for scalable, practical compliance tools. CPA QualityPro’s roadmap includes features that’ll help firms stay current and compliant without juggling spreadsheets, inconsistent workflows, and limited or misunderstood views of the regulations they must adhere to. I’m also excited that we’ll be joined by the Georgia, Florida, and Washington CPA societies in advancing this profession-first solution within our states and beyond.
