CPE Sponsors

Home » CPE Sponsors

The Texas State Board of Public Accountancy (the Board) has adopted new rules to improve the Continuing Professional Education (CPE) program in Texas. The Board will periodically review companies' programs to evaluate their content. A CPE Sponsor should recognize that a CPA already possesses certain educational and technical skills. The sponsor's objective in presenting acceptable CPE programs should be to increase those skills and to increase the level of professional competence expected of a CPA.

Sponsor Review Program Overview

The TSBPA Sponsor Review Program (SRP), a review program for organizations offering CPE courses, ensures the availability of high-quality Continuing Professional Education (CPE) for Texas CPAs. The program provides the means by which the Board can evaluate courses and enforce standards.

Momentum for the program began to build in the early to mid-1990s, but embarking on an initiative of this scope as a full-fledged state agency operating under the state Appropriations Act was not feasible. That changed when the 78th Legislature (Regular Session) amended the underlying statute, granting the Board status as a Self-Directed, Semi-Independent (SDSI) agency, which allows it to operate with the funds it collects and to have greater discretion over how those funds are used.

Setting Up the Program

To establish the program, members of the Board and the CPE Committee, along with members of the staff, considered existing review systems before deciding to design an original program and create a procedures manual to meet the Texas Board’s requirements. Under the SRP, the Board contracts with CPA reviewers to perform the actual reviews of coursework. The program uses a flexible approach sensitive to the concerns of both commercial and noncommercial sponsors. The Board also established a fee structure with three “tiers” based on the number of courses a sponsor conducts each year. Sponsors now pay between $400 and $1,250 per year.

The Board recruited a pool of qualified CPA reviewers from all over Texas with various areas of experience and expertise. Each reviewer must be a Texas licensee in good standing, with no record of disciplinary action and at least five years of experience in the field of their expertise, either as a practitioner or as a faculty member. The Board’s SRP staff assists in the evaluation of completed sponsor reviews to ensure that the reviews are conducted in a manner consistent with Board rules. Training sessions are held as needed for new reviewers and when review procedures are revised as the program evolves.

The Procedure

Sponsors are systematically selected each month from each of the tiers of providers and required to submit course materials to the Board for evaluation. These include promotional material that reflects learning objectives, program level and content, prerequisites, delivery method, and amount of CPE credit earned upon completion. Sponsors undergoing review must provide a resume for each instructor and a copy of the instructor’s guide, a list of materials used in the course, summaries of feedback from participants, and a copy of the final exam, if applicable.

When the Board receives the requested documentation, the SRP staff examines the material for completeness before it is assigned to a CPA reviewer. This allows the CPA reviewer to concentrate on the content and structure of the course. Courses are assigned to individual CPA reviewers depending on their level of expertise in a particular area of study.

The review involves six basic sections. The standards by which courses are evaluated require sponsors to:

state the purpose and proposed audience in course materials/advertising;
provide a course overview outlining what the participant can expect to learn by taking the course;
state learning objectives and develop course materials to achieve these objectives;
engage qualified instructors or speakers;
include an evaluation of the course by the attendees; and
course content is also reviewed for CPE worthiness and for meeting the stated learning objectives in the advance notification. The content must enhance the professional competency. The documentation should be sufficient enough to support the number of CPE credits granted.

When the reviewer completes each section, he/she makes written comments on strong points or deficiencies in the course material. The reviewer then prepares a final review of the course and submits a report to the Board. At this time, the SRP staff considers in detail the comments made during the review. The sponsor review program is not intended to be punitive, but rather to address deficiencies of a particular sponsor’s course and to direct that corrective action be taken to ensure that all CPE available to Texas CPAs is of the highest quality. The SRP staff works closely with sponsors to explain areas of deficiency and to bring the courses up to the established standards.

Once a course has gone through the process, sponsors are notified that the review is complete. Subsequent reviews are scheduled at three-year intervals. After the first three years of the program, 99% of the sponsors had complied with Board-recommended changes, and sponsors have been proactive in contributing to the effort to continually improve the program.