S2E20 - Jennifer Briggs | Indiana’s Competency-Based CPA License Renewal Law, One Year Later

Welcome to Change Your Mindset (formerly known as Improv Is No Joke) where it is all about believing that strong communication skills are the best way in delivering your technical accounting knowledge and growing your business. The way of building stronger communication skills is by embracing the principles of applied improvisation. Your host is Peter Margaritis, CPA a.k.a. The Accidental Accountant, will interview financial professionals and business leaders to find their secret in building stronger relationships with their clients, customers, associates, and peers, all the while, growing their businesses.

S2E20 – Jennifer Briggs | Indiana’s Competency-Based CPA License Renewal Law, One Year Later

Jennifer Briggs is the CEO of the Indiana CPA Society, and we talked about a year ago about the State of Indiana’s House Bill 1467, which allows competency-based learning through professional development opportunities to qualify accountants for accountant certificate renewal.

Today, we follow up on that conversation to check in on the progress that they have made, learn about any unforeseen challenges that they may have faced, and how they handle these challenges.

To recap, in 2010, the Indiana Society created a board-level task force on knowledge management. Jennifer worked with the task force on competency to examine how things have changed in education and everything snowballed from there.

Then, on July 1, 2017, the State of Indiana signed House Bill 1467 into law.

Following that, the Indiana CPA society created an all-online ethics course. It’s interactive, and you have to actively participate in it by including comments or replying to other people’s comments. Initially, it did count for a waiver of four hours, but if you take that course now, the certificate says you meet the ethics requirement in Indiana.

There’s no test, but, “the part of it that makes it more interactive and kind of tests, if you will, the competency gained is the questions and commentary that the learners have to include.” For example, there might be a case study that you read, and then it would ask what the learner would have done in this particular part of the situation.

So, how’s it going so far?

“We find that it tends to be people just get it right away and really liked the idea, or really people struggle with anything that’s different, which I find so interesting because it has been around a long time,” Jennifer says. “We’re 104 years old, almost, as an organization, but CPE, the credit hours system, is only 40 something years old… Sometimes, I don’t understand that challenge to change.”

I’m so happy the folks in Indiana are working on this because we live in, to some degree, an la carte world. People learn in different ways, and being able to provide the opportunity to learn in the way that fits them best will only make them more successful.

Appropriately, the competency rule in Indiana is an option. It’s not mandatory.

Jennifer also shares a story about her son and his friend that really hits home with me, and explains why this approach will only be more important as our profession moves forward:

Jennifer’s friend visited, and both of their kids were running around the house like maniacs playing hide and seek. At one point, they sat down and Jennifer’s friend said, “Oh, I can count this for her PE class.”

Over the break, there was some incentive for students to be active for four hours per week. It didn’t have to involve going to the gym or working out, it just had to involve being active. “And I just thought, gosh, if we can do that for sixth grade PE, we should be able to figure it out.”

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