A Membership at the Crossroads of Disenfranchisement

As you read this, the AICPA Council is meeting in Miami. Its most important agenda item is whether to submit the proposal on a new global business credential—commonly called XYZ—to a vote of all of the Institute’s 340,000 members.

Here in New York, doing our part to follow through on a resolution passed by the AICPA Council, the NYSSCPA has held forums on the credential in 13 of our 17 chapters, the last one on September 20 in Elmira and Newburgh. These forums were open meetings where members could ask questions and express their opinions, and AICPA representatives made presentations at many of them. We learned a lot from these sessions and the more than 500 members that attended them. Although our richly diverse membership can disagree on many things, on the subject of the credential they were almost uniformly both well informed and strongly opposed. They proved wrong the people who’ve said that the credential’s opponents just don’t know enough about the concept.

What came across more strongly at the forums than in the Society’s spring membership survey (see the April 2001 Journal) was the depth of the members’ anger—that’s the only word for it. They seem to feel that their national organization, the AICPA, doesn’t share their own profound respect for the CPA credential. Most of them are adamant that they are already successfully providing the services that the AICPA claims for the XYZ. And they feel injured, even betrayed, at the AICPA telling them that the CPA certification—which most of our members are proud of having earned—cannot expand and grow. That it has hit a glass ceiling. They don’t understand why their national organization wants to set up a competing credential, and they feel enormously alienated and disempowered at the apparent lack of similar outcry from CPAs elsewhere.

The AICPA resolution for holding member forums called for balanced presentations by the AICPA. But members attending the forums said they didn’t feel the presentations were balanced at all. Instead, they said that the presentations were highly promotional, quasi-infomercials that only perfunctorily met the original agreement to directly address criticisms and tough questions—if the questions or criticisms were addressed at all.

This critical moment for in the XYZ proposal occurs while members are getting their first bills from CPA2Biz (www.cpa2biz.com), the new for-profit website portal enterprise, owned jointly by the AICPA, Microsoft, Thomson Publishing, and ADN, which the NYSSCPA also opposed in concept and declines to support in execution. Many members see a pattern forming, and they don’t like it. They object to their dues being spent on programs that, if they don’t at least indirectly hurt them, certainly don’t help them. They’d rather see the resources spent to recruit more young people into the profession or enhance the public’s perception of the CPA—two objectives that can hardly be called shortsighted.

A longstanding bond between the AICPA and its members is being broken, one that will be difficult to repair, regardless of the AICPA Council’s action on the global credential proposal or the success of CPA2Biz. The wounds are deep and the damage is grave.

If the AICPA Council approves a membership vote on the global credential, I hope all of you who are AICPA members exercise your right to vote. Whichever way you feel about the proposal, you should vote your conscience and principles. Nearly 10% of the AICPA membership comes from New York, so you will have an significant influence on the outcome of a membership vote.

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