Ethics for Wyoming CPAs – 4 Hours

Wyoming sets a higher bar than most states for its ethics requirement, and this four-hour course is built to it. Under Board Rule Chapter 5, a Wyoming licensee must complete four credits of regulatory and professional ethics at least once every three-year continuing education period, all four in the same calendar year; the course must include a Wyoming statutes and rules element alongside ethical reasoning and standards of professional conduct; and a passing score of eighty per cent is required where the requirement is met by self-study. A newly certified CPA must complete an approved course within six months of the month-end of the initial certificate date.

The Wyoming material is covered chapter by chapter. Chapter 6, the Rules of Professional Conduct, runs from the preamble through independence, integrity and objectivity, the commissions, contingent fees and referral fees rules and the written disclosure they require in advance of accepting an engagement; competence and the technical standards rules governing auditing, accounting principles, accounting and review services, attestation and other professional services; responsibility to clients, including confidential client information and the records rule, with its forty-five day deadline for delivering or providing access to records, the distinction between client records and the holder's working papers, and the retention periods of five years for assurance and attest engagements and three years for everything else; and other responsibilities and practices, covering discreditable acts, acting through others, advertising, form of practice, firm names, communications and the prohibited activities that apply to inactive and retired certificate holders.

Chapter 4 on permits covers firm registration, the designated certificate holder's responsibilities, annual renewal and activation, non-certificate holder ownership and the sixty-day window to correct a firm that falls out of compliance, and non-resident firms. Chapter 5 on continuing professional education covers the one hundred and twenty credit three-year requirement and the sixty-credit second renewal, the sixty-six per cent technical floor, the treatment of nano learning, instruction, authorship, university courses and independent study, evidence of completion and the four-year retention rule, activation, reporting, extensions and the additional credits imposed when a deadline is missed, and the Board's verification and audit process. Chapter 9 on peer review covers enrolment, the three-and-a-half year cycle, the eighteen-month initial due date, administering entities, what must be reported to the Board and within what deadlines for each peer review rating, and the corrective actions available where a firm receives a rating of pass with deficiencies or fail. The course also reviews the Certified Public Accountant's Act of 2005 as it relates to discipline, including the grounds for action, the conduct of proceedings, and reinstatement.

Alongside the Wyoming rules, the course covers the AICPA Code of Professional Conduct across all three of its parts — members in public practice, members in business, and other members — including integrity and objectivity, preparing and reporting information, responding to noncompliance with laws and regulations, independence, the general standards, compliance with standards and accounting principles rules, acts discreditable, contingent fees, commissions and referral fees, advertising, confidential client information, and form of organization and name.

The reasoning behind the rules gets equal weight. The course separates morals from ethics and shows where the two diverge, using Prohibition and the Nike contract manufacturing controversy of the 1990s as cases where prevailing moral views pulled ethical standards above what the law required, offers the Publicity Standard and the Person Looking Over Your Shoulder Standard as practical tests, and sets out the five core foundations of independence, integrity, objectivity, public interest and due care.

What sets this course apart from other state ethics courses is that it teaches from real Wyoming Board disciplinary actions rather than hypotheticals alone. Among them: a CPA who resubmitted a rejected return without telling his clients, then failed to respond to the successor accountant's repeated requests for records, and was formally reprimanded; and a CPA selected for a random continuing education audit who was ultimately found to have overreported her credits by eighteen. Alongside these sit worked case studies on independence and a mortgage obtained from an audit client, integrity and objectivity where a bad debt adjustment would breach a loan covenant, contingent fees quoted as a percentage of a tax refund, competence where a tax practitioner wants to start performing audits, the return of client records to an unpaid auditor, advertising under the name Audit Experts, and responding to a Board complaint from a client you have just resigned.

Learning objectives

Upon completion of this course, participants will be able to:

1. Define ethics from an overall and professional perspective.
2. Identify the ethical standards contained in the Wyoming Rules of Professional Conduct.
3. Recognize the Peer Review rules contained in the Wyoming Board Rules and Regulations.
4. Identify the ethical standards contained in the AICPA Code of Professional Conduct.