By Kate Prouty

Eighty percent [of 632 employed American adults polled recently] rated their mothers’ ethics stronger than or about the same as those of their companies’ chief executives,” a survey compiled by Vivian Marino revealed in the May 11 edition of The New York Times.

While the poll was printed on Mother’s Day in tribute to the moms of America, it addresses an important, albeit belabored, issue currently affecting CPAs. Particularly after corporate America’s recent episodes of unreliable ethics, accountants are now more than ever responsible to reacquaint themselves with the ethical essentials of their profession.

The Foundation for Accounting Education (FAE) this season is making extraordinary efforts to help members of the New York State Society of CPAs fulfill such a responsibility. Over the past few years, since the Dec.15, 2000, New York State Board of Regents’ changes to Continuing Professional Education (CPE) requirements, FAE has strived to make its ethics course offerings as widespread and as frequent as possible.

This summer the fundamental ethics course, “FAE’s Ethics Update 2003,” is offered in nine different locations reaching from the Buffalo Chapter to the Suffolk Chapter. This course provides a foundation in ethics and is recommended to all practitioners to satisfy their four-hour New York state ethics requirement.

As of Sept. 1, 2001, CPAs need to take four hours of ethics CPE every three years. One of the most misunderstood aspects of this requirement is that the four hours need to fall within a CPA’s three-year registration cycle. Even if you took four hours of ethics in 2001, when the change was made effective, if your registration cycle places you between the years 2002 and 2005, for example, then you still need another four hours of ethics during that designated period.

Moreover, the ethics requirement applies differently to CPAs who choose the 24-hour field of concentration track (in one of three areas of study: audit, accounting or taxation) rather than the 40-hour general requirements. Those CPAs are required to take an ethics course that is related to their field of concentration; a CPA taking 24 hours of taxation would need to take the tax ethics course, “FAE’s Tax Ethics and Tax Practice in the 21st Century.” Even though these CPAs are required to take an ethics course specific to their field of concentration, they also are required to first take a foundation course, like “FAE’s Ethics Update 2003.”

Having covered tax ethics, FAE is now developing ethics courses for other subjects as well. Director of FAE Operations Alan Schmelkin expects that programs to cover these areas will be established within the next year.

In addition to these CPE credit courses, FAE has gone so far as to offer three half-day sessions of ethics training as part of the FAE study conferences taking place in Long Island, New Paltz and Syracuse this summer. FAE’s decision to include ethics education in these conferences in addition to all its regular programming is testament to FAE’s prioritization of this area of education.

Details about course registration may be found online by going to the NYSSCPA’s website, www.nysscpa.org, and clicking on the Continuing Education link at the top of the page.