Full disclosure? The CBA's posting of pending disciplinary action.

• Author: Allen, Bruce C.
• Position: CapitolBeat

At an emergency meeting in April, the California Board of Accountancy voted to reconsider its position of not posting on its website the full text of accusations and pending disciplinary action involving specific licensees.

The meeting was held in light of threats by Brian Stiger, director of the Department of Consumer Affairs (DCA), to post the full text of accusations on the DCA's website.

In March the CBA voted to continue posting pending disciplinary action involving specific licensees and required anyone wanting to review the accusation's full text contact the CBA. This is the second time the CBA voted not to post the full text of pending accusations.

Under the guise of consumer protection and full transparency, Stiger objected to the CBA's action and threatened to post all pending accusations involving CPAs in full on the DCA's own website if the CBA did not reconsider its decision.

CalCPA believes that those with a legitimate interest in matters involving accused CPAs can easily obtain the information, and and the complete text does not need to be posted in full.

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Consumers investigating CPAs can find accusations two ways:

* Use the License Lookup feature at the CBA's website, www.dca.ca.gov/cba/lookup. Pending accusations or past discipline are listed with each licensee's name.

* Go to the consumer section of the CBA website, www.dca.ca.gov/cba/consumers/index, and click on "Accusations." Every CPA with a pending accusation is listed.

By taking the above steps, consumers looking to hire a CPA are adequately warned of any pending accusations or past disciplinary actions against a particular CPA.

Stiger cited the Schwarzenegger administration's commitment to full transparency as a justification for the DCA's demand. He said he anticipated posting the information for all licensing boards on the DCA's website, www.dca.ca.gov, within 30 to 90 days. As an example of what the CBA should do, Stiger pointed out that the DCA's own conflict of interest forms, travel reimbursements and contracts are posted on public websites.

However, it should be noted that the public postings resulted from past misbehavior and abuse by former DCA employees. is the reason for those postings. The DCA hopes that the postings will sanitize behavior. This is not the case with the CBA, and there are no allegations that the CBA has engaged in improper behavior.

In fact, the CBA was one of the first boards to post pending and past disciplinary...