Q & A CBA President & CalCPA Member George Famalett.

Congratulations on being elected president of the California Board of Accountancy for 2019. What are some of things CPAs will see from the CBA this year?

Thank you very much; it's such an honor to lead this agency. I'm proud that our board members and staff arc focused each day on protecting consumers and helping ensure the public has confidence in the services they receive i'rom the public accounting profession.

Each year, the CBA has a full agenda, and that's especially true in 2019. This year, we arc working closely with the California Legislature on our sunset review. This process happens once every four years to review, from top to bottom, the operations of every occupational licensing board and bureau including the CBA--within the California Department of Consumer Affairs. One of the first steps in the process is to publish a report of our key activities of the past four years, which is available cba.ca.gov.

Through the sunset review process, we're working to accelerate our transition to a mainly electronic distribution of our newsletter, UPDATE. One of the key elements of that will be to require licensees to provide the CBA with their email address. That one change alone will enable us to distribute UPDATE more quickly and at a greatly reduced cost. Those who still wish to receive a paper copy of the UPDATEby mail will have that option.

Further, we are exploring adopting continuing education reciprocity. About half of the licensing jurisdictions have CE reciprocity, but not California. In short, those jurisdictions allow their licensees, generally, to satisfy their own CE requirements by meeting the CE requirements of the state where they mainly conduct business.

In addition, the CBA is planning an increase to its initial licensure and renewal fees to more closely align revenues and expenditures and build a prudent reserve balance. Those fees are currently S120 and the board previously approved an increase of those amounts to S250. However, the board is considering placing those fees at a higher rate.

We held our first discussion on CE. reciprocity at our March CBA meeting and continued the dialogue at our May meeting.

The board has discussed business modernization efforts to streamline some of the CBA processes for licensure and renewals. What are some of the biggest changes CPAs will see? We're revamping the technology behind the CBAs licensure and renewal processes in two key ways. The first is that we're working to maximize the...