Sense of Belonging

By Laura C. Olson, CPA

I walked away from CalCPA Council—a little dizzy from riding Space Mountain at Disneyland—but with a sense of belonging to a profession, rather than just having a job. As CPAs, we have a responsibility to our clients, our firms, employees and employers, as well as to our profession. It is amazing what CalCPA does for us as a profession.

Andrea Cope left after an incredible year as CalCPA chair. Her term included many accomplishments, including:

• The launch of the CalCPA Emerging Leaders Certificate Program
• A bigger CalCPA presence on LinkedIn and Facebook
• A new Quest magazine

Four bills were signed into law last year that may hold CPAs to a higher level of responsibility, as well as help us elevate the title of CPA:

• 150-hour education requirement: Makes California a substantially equivalent state in terms of the Uniform Accountancy Act.
• Mandatory peer review: Effective Jan. 1, 2010, for firms and sole practitioners providing audits, reviews and compilations.
• Mandatory license status disclosure: Effective Jan. 1, 2010, CPAs with inactive licenses must disclose their license status whenever they use the CPA designation.
• Taxpayer privilege reinstated: Effective immediately, this realigns California with federal provisions.

CalCPA is continuing its grass-roots program to foster our relationships with our legislators. Please do what you can to seek and enhance your relationships with our local legislators so when such issues as sales tax on services and mobility come to the forefront, we can get a head start on the issues because of those relationships. Please set aside Jan. 19—our next CPA Day at the Capitol.

Did you know that there is a shortage of accounting doctorates in our universities and colleges? At the projected rate of retirement of the existing accounting professors, we will not have enough professors to educate future accounting students and CPAs. Therefore creating a shortage in available staff and future CPAs for our profession. This is just one of the issues that Greg Burke, chair of the CalCPA Scholarship Task Force, is addressing with its focus on best practices for our chapters. Two of the recommendations are:

• Broaden chapter scholarship activities to include supporting accounting education in ways other than student scholarships (fund doctoral candidates, research grants, graduate assistants)
• Encourage students to go into the accounting field at younger ages (high school and middle school), so we can attract enough accounting professors to educate them!