Pages

Wednesday 24 April 2013

CA/CGA/CMA = CPA?

The other day I received an e-mail from the Alberta Institute of Chartered Accountants regarding the amalgamation of the CA, CMA, and CGA designations in Alberta into the newly formed CPA designation. That was surprising because the last I heard, the Alberta CAs had opted out of discussions to join into one designation. Not that I was closely keeping up-to-date on the situation or anything. From what I understand, this decision is now in the voting stage and aside from Quebec, Alberta will be one of the first provinces to implement the unification strategy.

Do I agree? I'm not sure. I think CASB was pretty torturous and would have found the CGA program a lot more manageable. I hate group projects because you always have the one slacker/freeloader in the group who never does any work and that's what I heard the CMA program involves (group projects, not slackers/freeloaders) so that wouldn't have been appealing to me anyway. Not that I'm saying that CGAs are any less qualified than CAs, but since I already had a University degree, I would have only needed to take a few more courses in order to obtain that designation. Granted, I will be given the option to still add "CA" after my name for 10 years once the unification goes into effect. I'm not sure how that affects how CAs will be linked to other CA organizations in the world either. Obviously I have some more researching to do.

Another thing that mildly annoys me is the acronym that they chose: CPA, which stands for Chartered Professional Accountant. Wait, doesn't CPA stand for Certified Public Accountant? No, silly. That's CPAs in the United States! Couldn't we have selected one that was different?

In the end, I guess we are all accountants and not everyone knows or cares about the difference anyway. Here's to hoping for lower professional fees and lower costs for continuing education courses!!

No comments:

Post a Comment