Have any CA's (ICAEW or ICAS in particular) had any experience of becoming a CPA in the US? Specifically, satisfying the educational requirements to sit the Uniform CPA Exam (150 Credit Hours)
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I haven't got to the point of taking CPA yet but I did look into the possibility of being able to sit about a year ago. The best thing I did was to sign up to ACAUS - the association of CAs in the USA. If you drop them an email saying you are interested in moving to USA and getting your cpa they will let you join, they have a very active group on LinkedIn. If you join you can see my previous conversation threads and get additional targeted support - in particular one gentleman by the name of Chee Kin Tang was an enormous help.
Overall assuming you have UK qualifications you should be able to get your a levels assessed as the first year of college, so that plus a 3 year undergrad equates to 120 credits. If you have a masters you have 150 there, if not a handful of states will treat your ACA or CA as equivalent to a masters and worth 30 credits but the majority see it as a professional not academic qualification so won't give you any credits.
The biggest point I would make is to not apply for an evaluation from NASBA. They offer an open evaluation that will steer you towards the best state, but my evaluator turned out to be hugely unhelpful. They assessed by Scottish CA as 30 credits getting me 150 total, but only a handful of credits for accounting. This meant that I would have to take basic accounting classes to meet the minimum requirements even with 150 credits.
Following advice from Chee Kin I got a second evaluation from ECE who assessed my ca as adequate to give me 150 credits plus all business and accounting requirements for any of the states that would accept the CA towards my requirements.
Are you any closer to taking the CPA exams? And out of curiosity, which states accept the CA qualification towards their requirements?
Hi, I'm still in London at the moment so haven't progressed this yet. The states I was told would accept the CA towards the education requirements were Virginia, Alaska and Oregan, and of these Virginia seemed the most accommodating - for example they don't require your experience has to be signed by a us CPA so it may be possible to get your uk work experience counted.
That said it would be worth waiting and seeing the result of the consultation currently ongoing- it seems NASBA and AICPA have recognised it is far too hard for experienced professionals to gain the CPA and this hopefully will lead to a much simpler path in the near future
https://www.accountingweb.com/practice/practice-excellence/aicpa-nasba-p...