ALD & CPAverify – Current. Accurate. Reliable.

Enforcement Newsletter

May 2015

We love getting requests for topics to cover in the Enforcement Newsletter! Thanks to Monica Petersen, Executive Director of the Arizona Board of Accountancy for the following suggested topic.

In the last few years, we have certainly focused on achieving 100% participation, and we are nearly there! But one objective that was just as important as participation was quality of data. Various processes were put in place such as weekly audits, annual audits, creating records associated with each of our board accounts to keep track of any data issues spotted, collaborating with boards to resolve those issues and fix any discrepancies, daily automated processes, and report functionality.

Eighty-four percent of feeds arrive daily! Check out the graph below that shows the breakdown. To participate on CPAverify.org, Boards send in a data feed at least as often as it updates its own licensing lookup tool. If a board updates their lookup tool, we need just one feed daily. That way, there is less risk of having discrepancies between the data that cause confusion for users or customer service calls to board and NASBA offices.

Each day, as many of you know firsthand, Elizabeth monitors the feeds and reaches out about missing feeds. Depending on if you send a manual feed or an automated feed, the messaging differs. She may just be sending a friendly reminder to please send in the feed or she is alerting you that the automated job failed to deliver the file. You won’t hear from her if your feed didn’t arrive one day but you’ve already sent in a new one. Thanks to receipt logs when a file is dropped on your sFTP site, she can tell when a new file has been received.

Other processes that Elizabeth uses to ensure that the data is current and accurate include the processing report and error reports. In addition to percentage of processing success, the processing reports also show how many more records were included in today’s feed as compared to yesterday’s feed. This is great because at a glance, we can ensure that the feeds we are receiving are increasing in size slightly over time and capturing the day to day operations of licensing new CPAs.

We strive for each feed to achieve processing success of at least 95%. Feeds below that success rate have been notified about the large number of errors in their feed. The errors represent data that was included in the feed but that wouldn’t process properly and therefore, were rejected; it does not indicate errors that are present in the ALD and CPAverify, but it does represent missed opportunity for data to be included. If a practitioner cannot find him or herself in CPAverify.org, these error reports are one of the first places to look.

The ALD and CPAverify are only as good as the inputs from the boards and the Boards of Accountancy are obviously dedicated to making this the best tool possible.