Saturday, February 11, 2023

Accounting: How to Wreck (and Rescue) a Profession

In my earlier life, becoming a CPA was, in a sense, easy.  To be sure, the two-day exam itself was very tough.  Unlike state bar exams which sometimes have an 80% first-time pass rate, the November 1996 CPA exam, for example, had a 17% pass rate for first-time test takers.  But the process of becoming a CPA was very simple.  Just get a B.S. or B.B.A. in accounting, sign up for and pass the CPA exam, and then wait for your certificate to arrive in the U.S. mail.  Granted, it wasn’t that way in every state, but that’s the way it was in my neighboring state of Illinois where I got my CPA certificate.  The certification allowed you to use “CPA” after your name, and, as the accompanying letter from the Illinois Board of Examiners informed me: “The certificate is good for life and does not need to be renewed.”  Congratulations and welcome to the profession!

Today, there are many articles about the declining number of CPAs and, especially, of accounting majors in the CPA pipeline.  The latest such article is here, in today’s WSJ (subscription required).  That article’s title indicates its proposed solution to the problem: How can we make accounting cool?  And there are many articles like this one, angsting about how to replenish the numbers within the profession.  But I doubt people are now avoiding accounting because it’s un-cool.  It has always been un-cool (which, in some circles, can be cool).