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    In December 2023, NASBA’s CPE Audit Service onboarded its 15th state board, the South Carolina Board of Accountancy. The Audit Service offers a platform designed to assist Boards of Accountancy with conducting periodic audits for compliance with continuing professional education requirements.   

    The service also allows CPAs to report CPE hours and documentation, electronically, to their respective state board. Offering a turnkey solution for Boards of Accountancy to more efficiently and effectively manage their overall CPE audit process, the Audit Service application is considered a benefit of NASBA membership. Additionally, state board staff have access to the application to conduct audits of their licensees’ CPE compliance.  

    Last month, the Audit Service delivered three webinars for the Utah Board of Accountancy regarding CPE credit entry and Utah Ethics rules. They plan to offer similar webinars to the Oregon and South Carolina boards of accountancy this quarter.  

    The overall goal of the Audit Service is to assist member boards in performing their licensee audits by making the data collection more efficient and by providing tools to manage the audit process online. Below, are a few examples of how that is accomplished:     

    • Licensees are provided a standard entry process to enter their coursework and add their documentation to the courses, which organizes their transcript by completion date and with its documentation on the audit report. The credit entry process is built so that a course entered once could be applied across any jurisdiction, so if a CPA is licensed in more than one participating jurisdiction, they only have to enter it one time.
    • The board can select their audit pool, create notifications to the auditees, track submissions, and conduct the audit all within the application.
    • While accounts are created for all active licensees in the ALD for a board, the board can opt to only send communications to log in for those selected for audit.  Most boards allow any of their CPAs to track their CPE compliance, whether they are selected for audit or not.
    • Help topics are available along with help videos for the functions the licensee will engage in most often (Credit Entry, for example) within the application. 

      For more information on the CPE Audit Service, visit:  https://nasba.org/cpeaudit/.