Confident & expecting change: California CPAs weigh in on what's important and how it's going.

• Author: Waters, Susan B.
• Position: From The CEO

CALCPA serves 28,000 CPA, associate, CPA candidate and student members. While we often have the opportunity to hear from members in leadership, we value the benefit of checking in regularly with all California CPAs--members and nonmembers--to ask these simple, yet critical, questions: "What's important to you and your business?" "How is your business doing?" and "What can we do to help?"

In July, Voter/Consumer Research conducted a telephone survey of California CPAs-both CalCPA members and nonmembers. The survey was weighted toward nonmembers, who represented 403 of 706 respondents. The survey firm reports a margin of error for the results of +/- 3.7 percent.

As expected in this post-Enron environment of increased legislation and regulation, virtually all CPAs expect changes to the profession, but there are differences of opinion about how major those changes will be.

CPAs in public practice and industry viewed the possibility of change similarly, with 61.4 percent in industry and 62.3 percent in public practice expecting major changes. However, within public practice the perception of change varied by firm size.

Of the Big Four CPAs, 71.4 percent expect major change, as compared with the 61 percent of regional firm members. And although large local firm members expect major change to a lesser degree (56 percent), 62.5 percent of local firm CPAs anticipate major changes for the profession.

It's not surprising that those who practice in the largest four firms have the greatest expectation of change, given that they continue to be in the spotlight as a result of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act and the new regulatory environment it created.

IN YOUR OWN WORDS

It was important to us to know what you and other California CPAs perceive as the major issues or problems facing the profession. While you might expect the responses to such an openended question to be quite varied, some trends emerged that provide us with a clear mandate.

CPAs said the major issues facing the profession are credibility (25.8 percent), ethics (21.5 percent), independence (15.4 percent), regulations (15.3 percent) and auditing and accounting standards (12.2 percent).

The order of concern remained fairly consistent between members and nonmembers, with members placing slightly higher importance on auditing and accounting standards (14.5 percent), than regulations (13.5 percent). Additionally, while 27 percent industry CPAs still named the profession's credibility as their top...