So, as part of the requirements to maintain my CPA license, I’m required to take continuing professional education (CPE) classes. As is typical of ANYTHING developed and maintained by the State of New York, the manditory continuing education requirements are unnecessarily confusing. I think they may darn near require a legal degree to understand.
After spending hours trying to figure this out, I’ve managed to determine the following.
You have to take:
-40 hours in a year over 5 different fields of interest, OR
-24 hours in a year in the areas of auditing, accounting or taxation.
AND:
-in your “triennial registration period”, you must complete 4 hours of ethics training
-if you do the concentrated 24 hours CPE route, the ethics course has to be in one of the 3 areas (auditing, accounting or taxation)
Since this baby is on the cusp of being born, I’m in a tough spot:
-Due to the timing of my “triennial registration period”, the ethics course I took less than 3 years ago isn’t going to cut it and I need to retake it. My regististration period runs 11/05-10/08 and the damn class I took was in August 2005. How bad does that stink?
-The classes that would work best to effectively and efficiently get me my 24 hours of education are either (1) on/near my due date, (2) during the July close or dangerously close to the August close and/or (3) are in Rochester. This is lovely on so many levels….
-My CPE requirements must be fullfilled by the end of the CPE period which runs 9/1/07-8/31/08. So no matter what, by the end of August, I need to either get 40 hours or 24 hours of classes in…..
When you consider the fact that I have no idea when this baby is going to arrive, when I’m going to be out of work, or when I’m going to be back to work, you can clearly see my dilemma. I don’t want to plan CPE during my maternity leave for obvious reasons. I don’t want to schedule a class the second I’m back to work. I don’t want to schedule classes that are going to conflict with close. And I sure as hell don’t want to schedule classes in Rochester when gas is quickly approaching $4.50 a gallon.
What to do? What to do?
The answer, unfortunately, is that I’m going to be scheduling the classes in August. Hopefully I’ll be done with my maternity leave at that point but I’m pretty much going to HAVE to have the baby very soon for that to happen. AND I’m going to have to take 28 hour of CPE because I can’t get a 4 hour class to work with my ethics class (24 hours of CPE classes + 4 hours of ethics). AND I have to drive to Rochester for 3 full days of CPE. AND I’m going to have 2 full days in Rochester the last week of fiscal August which is going to be a major pain in the rump for me when preparing for the August close.
Lovely, huh?
Hopefully I can get my boss to buy off on this….I’m afraid they’re going to wig out at the suggestion of me missing 28 hours of work in August. 🙂
The good news is, I received the paperwork to renew my registration. Guess who’s planning to mark the form as being exempt from the CPE requirements as a result of “will not be in public practice in NYS”????? This will relieve me from the CPE requirements going forward……