|
Letter
to the Editor
CPAs
in China
In
the article “CPAs in China: Fascinating Similarities
and Differences” (August 2005), author Edwin Kliegman
said that more than 500,000 candidates sit for the uniform
CPA exam each year. Is there verification for that statistic?
It simply astounds me, unless there are no educational requirements
to sit for the CPA in China. If that number is correct,
I would expect that the current shortage of CPAs in the
United States will quickly disappear.
Tom
Tyson, PhD, CMA
Chair, Department of Accounting,
Finance and MIS
St. John Fisher College
Rochester, N.Y.
The
author responds:
The
number of 500,000 CPA exam candidates in China each year
was provided to me by more than one source. I was also told
that the exam in China has a very high failure rate, and
that a college degree is the only requirement to sit for
the exam. I should also note that the large population in
China makes it difficult to draw comparisons to the corresponding
figures in the United States. [According to the 2005 World
Almanac, the population of the United States is over
290 million; China’s population is approximately
1.3 billion.]
Edwin
J. Kliegman, CPA |