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How to build CPA career paths that keep up with new licensure, mobility, and AI changes

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New Jersey opened another route to CPA licensure, adding new opportunities for firm hiring..

Don Meyer, Chief Growth Officer at the New Jersey Society of CPAs, explains what the new pathway means for students and firms and how some firms are approaching hiring practices in the new environment.  

The new pathway  framed Earmark’s webinar, Navigating the New CPA Pipeline: Licensure, Mobility, STEM, and AI. Julia Woislaw of LCvista joined Don and Susan Dyer, Director, Member and Market Growth at the New Jersey Society of CPAs, to discuss how opening access matters only if firms build a career path behind it.

Match hiring policies to the new pathways

Susan compared the traditional route, which generally combines 150 credits, one year of qualifying experience, and the CPA exam, to the alternative that generally pairs a bachelor’s degree with two years of qualifying experience and the same exam.

New Jersey’s additional pathway took effect in February 2026. While students now have an option with fewer total credit hours, candidates still need 24 accounting credits and 24 business credits. 

For some students, the new route means earning a salary instead of paying for 30 more credits. For others, graduate study still supports their goals.

Your firm’s policies should reflect both choices. Two strong entry-level hires may have different licensing timelines. If a promotion or pay increase requires a license, explain how that milestone works under each route.

Check effective dates, too. A state may pass legislation without making the new route available yet. Recruiting teams need to know the rules, not just a map of enacted laws.

Once you hire someone, the next question is whether the job supports the license.

Plan qualifying experience, not just time on payroll

“Two years on the payroll doesn’t automatically mean two years of qualifying experience,” Susan warned.

In New Jersey, qualifying experience requires direction from an appropriately licensed CPA with an active license. The assignments and documentation must meet board requirements. Repetitive work deserves a closer look. Does it provide qualifying experience and meaningful development?

Build a plan that identifies:

  • The intended licensing state and required coursework
  • Assignments that meet the board’s experience requirements
  • Who directs the work and documents the experience
  • Exam preparation, fees, reimbursement, and realistic study time

Compare assignments with the state board’s experience form. Revisit the plan when departments, supervisors, or employers change. And remember, being eligible to sit for the exam doesn’t necessarily mean someone is eligible to receive a license.

Those original qualifications also matter after licensure, when a CPA serves clients across state lines.

Mobility requires knowing how each CPA qualified

Julia separated three concepts:

  • Substantial equivalency: a board’s determination that another state’s licensing qualifications are equivalent to its own
  • Mobility: temporary practice across state lines without obtaining another license, when permitted
  • Reciprocity: obtaining an additional license based on an existing one

Many states moved away from state-based substantial equivalency and toward individual-based mobility. Instead of relying mainly on the licensing state’s requirements, they look at how the person qualified. Some add conditions tied to education, experience, or the exam. Good standing alone may not answer every question.

Julia recommended tracking six items for each CPA: initial licensing jurisdiction and year, other licenses, residence, principal place of business, original education pathway, and prelicensure experience pathway.

The original licensing date can make a difference for grandfathering provisions. Remote work adds additional complexity because residence and principal place of business may trigger different obligations. HR should share remote-work decisions with whoever manages licensing compliance. 

Show students the technology they can create

Don recalled discussing a New Jersey student-loan assistance program that seemed ideal for accounting graduates. The catch was it required a STEM discipline, and accounting didn’t qualify.

The profession’s effort focuses on the “T” in STEM (technology) rather than mathematics. Don reported that Assemblyman Sterley Stanley’s legislation passed the Assembly on September 24, but Senate action was still pending at the time of recording. He described potential benefits, including eligibility for loan assistance and education funding opportunities.

For recruiting, he recommends firms show students how accountants create technology, not just use it. Firms developing proprietary AI solutions for clients is an example.

That promise needs a workplace where new hires can learn, and technology doesn’t crowd out human contact.

Use AI without losing the people

Don described AI recruiting as a balancing act. It can screen large applicant pools, but candidates can game keywords. He also questioned AI-agent interviews, especially when companies don’t disclose them.

Training presents another tension. A managing partner at a regional firm told Don he doesn’t have work for interns and first-year associates. AI and outsourcing handle tasks that once taught beginners.

Simulations and personalized, AI-supported learning could help staff practice, identify learning opportunities, and give managers more room to coach. 

Susan emphasized structured onboarding, accessible mentors, competitive pay, clear workload expectations, and coordinated hybrid schedules. Learning depends on access to experienced colleagues, not simply days in the office.

To connect these pieces, start with one employee’s experience.

Review the whole path

Trace one new hire’s journey from application through the first several months:

  • Do recruiting promises match assignments and advancement policies?
  • Are experience documentation and licensing records clear?
  • Does the employee receive consistent training and coaching?

Use state boards, NASBA, and state CPA societies to stay informed. As Don advised, emphasize accounting’s relevance and purpose rather than trying to make it “cool.”

Watch the on-demand webinar, Navigating the New CPA Pipeline: Licensure, Mobility, STEM, and AI to review what these changes mean for your firm.

The Monthly Marketing Playbook That Keeps Firms Visible All Year

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AI makes it easy to produce more marketing content. It also makes that content easier to ignore.

That creates a serious challenge for accounting firms. Business owners aren’t simply buying tax returns or financial reports. They want someone they can trust to help them understand risk, cash flow, and an uncertain future. Generic content rarely earns that level of confidence.

In the webinar Build a Year-Round Marketing System That Drives Consistent Growth, Micky Deming, founder of Full Stadium, explains how firms can build trust and attract clients year-round. After nearly 15 years in accounting firm marketing, Micky believes effective marketing must be:

  1. Focused
  2. Human
  3. Consistent

AI made content abundant and trust scarce

Micky calls the current environment an “AI slop situation.” So much content looks and sounds the same that readers begin to dismiss it before giving it a chance. “Anything I read, my filter automatically assumes it’s garbage and I don’t need it,” he says.

Accounting firms have more at stake than most businesses. In Micky’s view, risk and unpredictability are two of the hardest parts of owning a company. Both are “ten times worse” when an owner doesn’t understand their financial picture.

Accountants can ease that uncertainty through education. But to do that, their message must rise above the noise. That’s why Micky believes successful marketing combines those three elements mentioned above.

  • Focused: It speaks to a specific audience and its real problems
  • Human: It includes genuine expertise, experiences, stories, and personality
  • Consistent: It appears on a dependable schedule rather than in short bursts

Missing even one element weakens the system. Focused and consistent content can still feel artificial. Human content published only once or twice can’t build momentum. Frequent, personal content aimed at everyone may connect with no one.

That makes focus the natural place to begin.

A smaller audience creates a larger opportunity

For most accounting firms, focus involves either a local market or a vertical niche. Each path requires different tactics.

A locally focused firm might invest in its Google Business Profile, local listings, community events, and regional relationships. A niche firm might appear on industry podcasts and webinars, build software partnerships, attend specialized conferences, or contribute to newsletters its audience already reads.

Micky shared three examples:

  • Mire Group CPAs publishes short educational videos, blogs, social posts, and two newsletters each month. The firm increased traffic and its following, reached the top of local search results, stayed visible to referral partners, and helped some tax-preparation clients move into year-round tax planning.
  • Liguori Accounting focuses on med spas and teaches owners about issues such as sales tax, employees, and contractors. Founder Nick Liguori’s narrow focus led to interviews, partnerships, and speaking opportunities. The firm grew to $1 million in revenue while turning down work outside its niche.
  • The Charity CFO has served nonprofits for more than a decade. The firm has produced over 500 videos, a weekly podcast, monthly webinars, and a newsletter. Its website attracts about 20,000 organic visits per month for nonprofit accounting topics.

These firms don’t try to reach everyone. They chose a community, learned its problems, and kept showing up. That approach is becoming even more useful as people shift from short Google searches to detailed questions in tools like ChatGPT and Claude.

Once you know whom you serve, the next step is deciding what to teach them.

Your client conversations contain your best content ideas

Micky recommends starting with recent client experiences rather than keyword research. Look at the questions clients ask, including the repetitive or frustrating ones. Review common mistakes, recent wins, and problems you’ve solved more than once.

Then turn those experiences into useful content:

  1. Write down a real question in the client’s own words
  2. Answer it directly and without jargon
  3. Add an anonymized example from your experience
  4. Repurpose the answer into a video, blog post, newsletter, LinkedIn post, or Google Business Profile update

Case studies are especially valuable. When Micky’s team interviews clients, their description of the problem often differs from what the accountant expected. The client’s language reveals the stress they felt and the result they valued. That is the language future clients are likely to understand.

Your tone matters as much as your topic. Some business owners delay seeking help because they fear an accountant will make them feel foolish. Micky compares it to visiting a mechanic who might laugh at your questions. Helpful marketing shows prospects your firm will educate them without judgment.

Video communicates that attitude quickly. Prospects can see your face, hear your voice, and decide whether you seem trustworthy. A useful 60-second clip builds confidence more than polished but impersonal copy.

“I’d rather have a few ums and a few stutters,” Micky says. If editing is a roadblock, record the answer in one take. Low-cost tools like Descript and VEED can add captions and handle simple edits later.

Useful ideas, however, only produce results when you publish them consistently.

Deadlines turn expertise into a repeatable system

Micky previously worked in journalism, where deadlines ensured the newspaper went out. Marketing needs the same accountability. Firms often begin with enthusiasm, stop during a busy period, and lose the momentum they created.

His practical monthly playbook includes:

  • A 30-minute brainstorming session based on recent client interactions
  • Four videos of two to three minutes each
  • Two short clips of about 30 seconds from each video
  • An SEO-focused blog post with the video embedded
  • Distribution through social media and Google Business Profile
  • Two newsletters per month

Capturing the firm’s expertise may take only a few hours each month. Repurposing allows that work to appear across several channels.

This system also keeps the firm visible outside tax season. Clients may not think about taxes in July, but they still care about profit, cash flow, reports, and understanding their profit-and-loss statements.

Start small, then keep showing up

Micky recommends every firm begin with a newsletter and a strong client case study. From there, you can add short videos and a regular publishing schedule.

The central lesson is:

  • Choose a specific audience
  • Teach from real client questions and experiences
  • Use a helpful, human voice
  • Publish on a deadline
  • Repurpose each idea instead of constantly starting over

As AI-generated content becomes more common, real expertise becomes more valuable. Accountants already have that expertise. The opportunity is to share it in a focused and dependable way.

It may feel uncomfortable to narrow your audience, but as Micky reminds us, “You get bigger by going smaller.”

Watch the full webinar to hear more examples and Micky’s implementation advice.

How Accounting Firms Can Win Attention When AI Writes Everything Else

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Your firm can now use AI to produce 100 social posts in minutes. But if those posts sound like everything else in a prospect’s feed, no one reads them.

That’s the challenge Micky Deming sees across accounting firm marketing. Micky founded Full Stadium Marketing and has worked in the field for close to 15 years. In the webinar Human Marketing: Your Competitive Edge in the AI Era, he explains that more technology hasn’t necessarily made marketing easier. It’s created more distractions, content, and noise.

Prospective clients receive messages all day, and, as Micky puts it, “their default mode is to ignore it.” To earn their attention and trust, accounting firms need three things: focus, humanity, and consistency.

Focus on the problems your best clients face

Human marketing starts with a clear message for a clear audience. No tool can rescue a message aimed at everyone.

Micky reduces marketing to one unchanging principle: take a useful message to an ideal client and repeat it. The starting point isn’t a prompt but a real client with a real need. As he says, “You solve problems; you don’t sell services.”

Start by thinking about one to three clients you would happily serve again and again. Then ask:

  • How did they find your firm?
  • What problem did they have before they hired you?
  • How did you solve that problem?
  • What changed for them afterward?
  • What words do they use to describe the value?

That last question can reshape your message. When Full Stadium conducts case-study interviews, Micky says firms are surprised by the client’s answer more than half the time. The value clients describe may not be what the firm assumed it provided.

Use that language to speak to one defined person about their industry, software, financial concerns, and daily problems. “Everything should speak to one person, not to the world,” Micky says.

Once you know that person, the next step is to prove you can help.

Replace broad claims with human proof

In an AI-saturated market, anyone can publish polished claims. Prospective clients have good reason to be skeptical. Instead of telling people your firm is helpful or experienced, show them.

Micky recommends several practical forms of proof:

  • Client success stories: Ask three questions about the problem, your work, and the resulting change
  • Video testimonials: Invite a client to explain in one or two minutes how your firm helped
  • Google reviews: Build trust while supporting local search visibility
  • Educational content: Answer questions that arise in actual client meetings and discovery calls

Accounting firms already have powerful stories. They help clients move “from a place of chaos to understanding.” That may mean less anxiety about cash flow, clearer financial information, or greater confidence about the future. Those outcomes carry more weight than a list of services.

During the Q&A portion of the webinar, Micky clarified that video testimonials and Google reviews serve different purposes. Video builds trust on your website, social channels, and newsletter. Google reviews have a more direct effect on local search. When possible, ask clients for both.

That proof is even stronger when it travels through a trusted community.

Build around community and referrals

Micky sees two common paths for firm growth. One is a geographic community supported by local search, Google Maps, local events, and word of mouth. The other is a defined niche, such as dentists, law firms, or med spas. A niche allows you to build specialized expertise and relationships beyond your local market.

Relationships matter in either case. When firm leaders say, “We’re growing, but it’s all referrals,” Micky doesn’t see a problem. A referral means someone trusts your work enough to recommend you, which is especially meaningful when money is involved.

Study that referral activity:

  • Track who sends prospects to you
  • Ask why they recommend your firm
  • Learn what they say about you
  • Use that language in your marketing
  • Ask satisfied clients and partners for more introductions

Community relationships can also lead to podcast appearances, industry newsletters, software partnerships, and local presentations. An accountant might teach chamber members how to read a profit and loss statement or join a niche podcast to discuss how growth turns into profit and cash.

Of course, relationships and useful content only produce lasting results if your firm keeps showing up.

Create a schedule you can maintain

Consistency doesn’t mean posting generic content every day. It means choosing useful actions and completing them over time. Micky says consistently done, solid human marketing outperforms polished marketing that starts and stops.

Her sample schedule includes:

  • Record two one- to two-minute videos each month based on real client questions
  • Upload them to YouTube first, since it also works as a search engine
  • Embed each video in a short website recap and share it on social media
  • Publish one client case study each quarter
  • Pursue one community feature each month
  • Send one newsletter each month, even if the list only includes current clients

Put these actions on a calendar and assign someone on your team responsibility. Don’t abandon the plan after a month or two because it hasn’t produced an immediate return. You can’t predict which video, article, or conversation will lead to a referral or partnership.

A sustainable schedule is also where AI can be genuinely useful.

Use AI to organize real expertise

Micky isn’t against AI. He recommends using it to make human marketing easier, much as accounting firms use automation to spend more time listening and advising.

For example, you can record and transcribe client meetings, case-study interviews, and discovery calls. Across 20, 30, or 50 sales conversations, those transcripts contain valuable patterns. AI can help identify recurring questions, problems, and reasons prospects seek help.

It can also help you:

  • Summarize industry reports and extract key statistics
  • Compare recent content with client questions to find opportunities
  • Create outlines, video descriptions, and case studies from original material
  • Organize a growing knowledge base around the firm’s clients and expertise

The boundary is simple. Asking AI to create 100 generic posts adds to the noise. Asking it to organize lessons from your own conversations helps scale genuine expertise.

Start small. Choose one question a client asked this month, record a short answer, and publish it. Then watch the on-demand webinar to hear Micky explain how focus, humanity, and consistency can turn that first step into a repeatable marketing system.

Your AI Isn’t the Problem—Your Ledger Is

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You export a report from your accounting software, spend 20 minutes cleaning up the data in a spreadsheet, paste it into ChatGPT, and ask about vendor spending trends. The AI immediately asks for more context that wasn’t in your export. Back to the source system, pull another report, reformat, and upload again. The cycle repeats.

If this loop feels painfully familiar, you’re not alone.

In a recent Earmark webinar, Megan Reid, Product Specialist at Digits, demonstrated exactly why this workflow keeps breaking down and introduced a technology designed to eliminate it entirely. The webinar unpacks what’s really limiting AI’s usefulness in accounting and shows a fundamentally different approach.

The core message is that Model Context Protocol (MCP) eliminates the export-reformat-upload cycle, but only if your ledger is truly AI-ready. As Megan explained, your financial data architecture now determines whether AI delivers reliable insights or confidently wrong answers.

 

The traditional workflow is fundamentally broken

Let’s walk through what Megan calls the “bolt-on” AI workflow. Most accountants know this workflow far too well.

  1. You export a report. The moment you hit that button, your data freezes in time. You’re working with a snapshot, not live information.
  2. Manual cleanup begins. You’re renaming columns, adjusting formulas and reformatting data. Every manual touch introduces potential errors.
  3. You send the cleaned data to your AI tool. It analyzes what you’ve given it and generates an answer, but it can only see that specific export. No additional context or visibility beyond that snapshot.
  4. The AI needs more information. Maybe vendor history or prior period details that weren’t in your original report. You can’t answer without going back to start the entire process over.

“This isn’t a limitation on the AI,” Megan emphasized during the session. “It’s a limitation on the data pipeline feeding into the AI.”

Megan introduced a powerful concept when she explained that AI acts as a megaphone for your data. When the input signal is clean (i.e., real-time, well-structured, and consistently categorized), AI generates accurate analysis and trustworthy insights. When the signal is poor (i.e, outdated data, inconsistent vendor names, and incomplete transactions), the AI still produces an answer.

“A wrong answer delivered with confidence,” Megan noted, “is often worse than no answer at all.”

The accounting profession recognizes this shift. The Journal of Accountancy states that “the profession must pivot from doing to supervising when AI does the work.” As one industry publication put it, “The industry is shifting from manual data entry to automation, where the accountant’s job is less about performing repetitive tasks and more about defining the logic once and letting the system run it.”

But you can’t supervise what you don’t understand. And you can’t get reliable outputs from a broken data pipeline.

Enter Model Context Protocol

So what breaks the cycle? That’s where MCP comes in.

At its core, MCP is an open standard letting AI tools like Claude, ChatGPT, and Cursor connect directly to live data sources. Megan offered a perfect analogy: think of MCP as USB-C for AI. Before USB-C, every device needed a different cable. USB-C created one standardized connection. MCP does the same for AI and data.

The AI doesn’t change. It simply gains direct, permission-based access to your financial information through a standardized connection. No exports, uploads, or stale spreadsheets. The AI reads your live ledger in real time with full context.

But Megan stressed MCP is only as powerful as the ledger it connects to. A direct pipeline to messy data just delivers messy answers faster.

How do you know if your ledger is ready? Megan presented three diagnostic questions:

  1. Are transactions sitting in a queue? In traditional systems, bank feeds arrive uncategorized, waiting for manual review and posting. If your books take two weeks to close, your AI operates on two-week-old information. “It’s difficult for business owners to make real-time decisions using old data,” Megan explained.
  2. Does your system know “Uber” and “Uber Technologies Inc.” are the same vendor? To humans, it’s obvious. To traditional ledgers, they’re separate text strings. “This isn’t a data entry problem,” Megan clarified. “It’s a data architecture problem.”
  3. Is the tool itself a bottleneck? When slow page loads, endless clicking, and constant manual saves slow you down, data falls behind.

If you answered yes to any of these, your ledger isn’t AI-ready, regardless of how sophisticated your AI tools are.

The four pillars of an AI-ready ledger

Megan outlined what an AI-native ledger actually looks like through four pillars:

Real-time processing

Transactions are automatically categorized and posted as they arrive, not sitting in a queue. With Digits, for example, transactions are “continuously being posted, reviewed, reconciled, and reflected in your financials in real time.”

Object-oriented data

Every vendor, customer, and category is stored as a structured object. Variations from the same vendor are treated as a single entity, providing AI and accountants with a reliable foundation for analysis.

Autonomous bookkeeping

The system handles routine bookkeeping automatically, allowing accountants to focus on “reviewing, supervising, advising, rather than manually processing those transactions.”

Accessibility

Even the best technology has limited impact if firms face barriers to adoption. As Megan noted, firms shouldn’t have to “navigate complex pricing models, marketplace restrictions, and AI licensing costs just to take advantage of these modern tools.”

“AI readiness isn’t about having access to AI tools,” Megan summarized. “It’s about having a financial system that can provide accurate, structured, current information for those tools to work with.”

Seeing MCP in action

Theory is one thing. Watching it work is another.

During the live demo, Megan showed exactly what MCP-powered accounting looks like using Claude’s desktop app. Setup was surprisingly simple. You open Claude, navigate to connectors, search for Digits, and add it. No complex configuration needed.

With the connection live, Megan demonstrated real-world scenarios using a demo client:

  • Vendor spend analysis. She asked Claude to review which vendors grew most over three months and flag unusual spending. Within minutes, the AI identified that payroll scaled smoothly with headcount, spotted a November bonus spike, and highlighted fast-rising smaller vendors. No exports or reformatting. Just direct questions and detailed answers.
  • Budget creation. She requested a 2026 budget based on two years of historical data. The AI produced a complete budget showing prior actuals, year-over-year changes, and projections with adjustable assumptions, like testing a 40% revenue growth scenario. Everything was interactive and exportable to Excel.
  • Budget-to-actuals reporting. Building on that budget, she asked for Q1 comparisons. The AI generated monthly trends, variance analysis, and actionable recommendations. It didn’t just show that revenue was below budget and expenses were over. It identified specific areas to review, like legal costs and growth assumptions.
  • Expense optimization. When asked to identify potential cuts, the AI flagged a $1,600 charge for an HR tool that likely overlapped with the demo company’s payroll software. It also spotted a redundant AI bookkeeping subscription that duplicated Digits’ capabilities. These insights normally require hours of manual vendor analysis.

All of this happened in minutes through MCP’s direct, secure access to the live ledger.

The possibilities extend further. As Megan explained, you could connect MCP to multiple tools and ask cross-functional questions like, “Look at the last call I had with Megan’s demo client. What were the things they pointed out and compare that to the actual financials over the last three months? Help me identify what I should highlight with my client on our next call.”

The ledger is your constant. Everything else is variable.

“The best AI tool for your accounting is whatever you prefer,” Megan said in closing. “The best ledger for your AI tool is one that agents love most.”

AI tools will evolve and multiply. The ledger’s quality, structure, and accessibility are the constant determining whether any of them deliver value.

The shift isn’t just technological. As Tom Hood, Executive Vice President, Business Growth and Engagement at AICPA, noted, this is “an inflection point where finance leaders agree that people drive transformation success—mindset, skills, and leadership, not technology alone.”

Your role is evolving from data processor to financial supervisor and strategic advisor. Success means understanding the technology well enough to oversee it effectively.

Here’s where to start:

  • Audit your current workflow. How much time do you spend exporting and reformatting before AI can help? That’s your friction baseline.
  • Apply the three diagnostic questions. Check for queued bank feeds, unresolved vendor duplicates, and tool-created bottlenecks.
  • Evaluate against the four pillars. Real-time processing, object-oriented data, autonomous bookkeeping, accessibility. If your ledger can’t check these boxes, your AI outputs will always be limited.
  • Start experimenting. Connect an MCP-enabled tool and run some prompts. Even using a demo environment will shift your understanding of what’s possible.
  • Build your vocabulary and mindset. Understanding how to evaluate and supervise AI workflows is now a core professional skill.

The traditional export-reformat-upload workflow is broken because the data pipeline starves AI of the context it needs. MCP fixes the pipeline, but only if your ledger is truly AI-ready.

Watch the full on-demand webinar to see the live demos, walk through the diagnostic framework, and start building your firm’s AI-readiness roadmap.

The $15,000 Mistake That Could Happen to Your Firm Tomorrow

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A top-20 CPA firm in Minnesota got hit with a $15,000 fine. The fine didn’t stem from shoddy audit work, but from letting a license lapse. Worse, they had to reissue every single report completed during the lapsed period. Imagine making that call to your clients. And they’re far from alone.

In a recent Earmark webinar, Lindsay Patterson, co-founder and CEO of CPA QualityPro, and Julia Woislaw, the company’s VP of Strategic Partnerships and Regulatory Affairs, laid out the seismic changes reshaping CPA licensure and mobility laws across the country. Every day, their company works with firms, state societies, and state boards on compliance issues just like this. And what they’re seeing right now is unprecedented. As Lindsay put it, this isn’t just the biggest and fastest change in licensure they’ve seen in their careers.

The sweeping adoption of alternative CPA licensure pathways across nearly every U.S. jurisdiction has shattered the profession’s long-standing uniformity. What was once a simple, state-based mobility system is being replaced by a complex, individual-based model that demands every firm rethink how it tracks qualifications, verifies practice privileges, and engages with state boards. This affects every practicing professional. And firms that don’t adapt risk joining a growing list of practitioners facing fines, probation, and forced report reissuances for compliance failures they never saw coming.

During the webinar, we discussed what the new licensure pathways look like, why the loss of uniformity matters so much, how both individual and firm mobility rules are shifting and where the compliance gray zones are hiding, and the real disciplinary consequences firms are already facing. We also shared practical steps you can take to protect yourself.

The biggest licensure shake-up in decades, and why it affects you

For roughly two decades, becoming a CPA looked basically the same no matter where you lived. You passed the uniform CPA exam, logged one year of experience, and completed 150 credit hours of education that included a bachelor’s degree. Sure, there were minor variations and safe harbors between jurisdictions, but the core formula was consistent across all 55 U.S. jurisdictions. That uniformity was the foundation on which everything else rested, including mobility and reciprocity. A state board in Texas could look at a Washington-licensed CPA and say, “You’re good.”

That foundation is cracking.

States are now preserving the traditional 150-hour route while adding a second pathway to licensure. Under the new option, candidates still take the uniform CPA exam, but they can get licensed with a bachelor’s degree (approximately 120 credit hours) and two years of experience instead of 150 hours and one year. The intent is sound. It lowers the cost barrier to entry, potentially expands the pipeline, and gives aspiring CPAs more flexibility. Nearly every state has either passed this new pathway legislation or is actively pursuing it.

And it happened fast. As Lindsay noted, the original move to CPA mobility took about 20 years to roll out across jurisdictions. These recent changes swept through state legislatures in just the past couple of years. “This is the biggest change we’ve seen in licensure in my whole career,” Julia agreed.

It’s great news for the profession’s talent pipeline. But it gets complicated for everyone else.

Each of those 55 jurisdictions writes its own laws and rules. They have their own legislatures, their own boards of accountancy, and their own political dynamics. Nobody was going to pass identical language, even if they wanted to. The result is a growing web of state-specific discrepancies that practitioners need to understand.

Take something as seemingly straightforward as what “bachelor’s degree” means. New York has defined it as 120 credit hours. Washington state simply references “a bachelor’s degree” without specifying a number. That distinction might seem academic right now, but it won’t stay that way. Universities are already exploring accelerated degree programs, such as 90-hour bachelor’s degrees and three-year tracks. A CPA who earns one of those degrees and gets licensed in Washington could face a very different reception from the New York State Board of Accountancy.

Then there’s the experience requirement. Most states have moved to what’s called “verified” experience, meaning any CPA who’s familiar with your work. They don’t necessarily have to be your direct supervisor, but they can vouch for you to the state board. But New York and a handful of other states still require “supervised” experience, where your direct supervisor must be a CPA who personally signs off on your qualifications. If you got licensed under the verified model in one state, that distinction could matter enormously when you try to practice in a supervised-experience state.

Julia and Lindsay distilled the new-pathway landscape into three takeaways that every firm should internalize:

  • New talent opportunities are real. More pathways mean more people can become CPAs, which is genuinely positive for a profession facing serious workforce challenges. If your firm is thinking about recruiting, this opens doors.
  • States are moving out of uniformity, and we’re in a messy transition. We don’t yet know how every state board will respond to CPAs licensed under pathways that differ from their own. Some boards haven’t even begun to address it publicly. That ambiguity is itself a compliance risk.
  • These changes affect every CPA, not just new ones. Julia returned to this point several times because most practitioners miss it. Initial licensure isn’t just a historical footnote in your career. It’s the foundation regulators use to determine whether you have practice privileges in their state. How you got your license five, ten, or twenty years ago now matters in ways it never did before.

That last point deserves emphasis. If you’re a veteran CPA who earned your license under a pathway that no longer mirrors what another state requires, you could face questions about your right to practice there.

So if how you got licensed now determines where you can practice, what does that mean for the mobility privileges CPAs have long taken for granted?

From state-based to individual-based mobility: A new compliance equation

Under the old model, if you have an active license in Washington state, any other state can look at Washington’s licensure requirements, confirm they are “substantially equivalent” to their own, and waive you through. Your home state vouched for you. Simple.

That model is dying. In its place, states are building an individual-based system that asks a fundamentally different question: not where you got your license, but how you got it.

Most states adopting the new framework say that if you’re a CPA “in good standing,” you’re generally fine to practice across state lines. But (and this is a big but) some states are adding guardrails. They’re saying you have mobility privileges only if your initial licensure pathway matches one of their current pathways. And “in good standing” itself isn’t defined uniformly. A lapsed license in one state almost certainly kills your standing elsewhere, but beyond that, the definition can vary.

Consider Lindsay’s own situation. She’s licensed in Washington with verified experience. New York’s new mobility law grants mobility to CPAs whose qualifications match one of New York’s current licensure pathways. New York requires supervised experience. Will the New York board deny her practice privileges because her experience was verified rather than supervised? Nobody knows yet. The board hasn’t had to address the question publicly.

That uncertainty is the point. We’re in the gap between legislation and implementation, and that’s where compliance risk lives.

The map of states moving to individual-based mobility is already almost entirely purple, as Lindsay showed during the webinar. She anticipates 95% coverage within about 18 months. The notable holdout is Hawaii, which has no mobility and, as Lindsay bluntly put it, likely won’t anytime soon. “I would be shocked if they passed mobility any time soon,” she said. “You need to have a license in Hawaii.”

What you now need to know about every CPA in your firm

Lindsay and Julia said they haven’t found a single firm that already tracks the specific details of how each CPA in the firm got licensed. That means education (150 or 120 hours? bachelor’s or master’s?), experience (one year or two? supervised or verified?), and the states in which they hold licenses. Under the old model, none of this granularity mattered much. Under the new one, it determines who you can assign to which engagements in which states.

With these individual qualifications becoming so critical, firms face a new administrative burden that most aren’t prepared for. But individual mobility is only half the equation.

Firm mobility is a different animal entirely

Individual mobility is about people. Firm mobility is about entities and hinges heavily on the type of service you provide, especially attest services. Even in states that offer firm mobility with no notice and no fee, there are conditions. And those conditions have teeth.

The big ones include majority CPA ownership. This requirement is taking on new urgency as private equity investment reshapes firm structures. If a PE deal changes your ownership percentages, your firm’s mobility could evaporate in states you’re actively serving. Peer review enrollment is another trigger, and states don’t agree on which services require it. A compilation might not trigger peer review in your home state, even if it does in the state where your client sits. Change notification requirements also apply, sometimes even to notices of intent to practice that aren’t full licenses.

Julia walked through a scenario that makes this concrete. A firm with offices in Utah and Colorado picks up a new audit client in Florida. The good news is that Florida has firm mobility even for attest services. The bad news is that Florida’s conditions include majority CPA ownership, peer review enrollment, a requirement that non-licensed owners be principally engaged in the business, and compliance with Florida-specific rules on minimum capitalization, letters of credit, and liability insurance. “I don’t know any firm that checks that before they take on a client,” Julia admitted. While a state board might not look for these issues proactively, if something else triggers an investigation, suddenly every one of these conditions gets scrutinized.

Then there’s Mississippi, which requires the specific office providing attest services to hold a state license, not just the firm. If your Alabama office is licensed in Mississippi but you shift an engagement to your Arkansas team, that Arkansas office needs its own Mississippi license. That detail is easy to miss and expensive to get wrong.

And what happens when state law and board guidance don’t match? Maine passed legislation allowing firm mobility with no notice or fee for attest services. But the Maine Board of Accountancy still hasn’t updated its rules. Its guidance still says you need a license. Lindsay’s advice mirrors how you’d approach an audit: “Not documented, not done.” If you call a board and get a verbal okay from a staff member, that’s not enough. Staff change. Board members change. Interpretations shift. Get it in writing, at minimum via email, but a formal guidance document is best.

Two more compliance traps are worth flagging. First, what counts as an attest service varies by state. Compilations may or may not qualify depending on the jurisdiction, which affects everything from peer review requirements to firm registration. Second, remote employees working from a different state than their firm’s office creates real questions about the principal place of business. If your CPA lives in New Jersey but works for a New York firm, and they hold themselves out as a CPA in New Jersey (even just on LinkedIn or in an email signature), they likely need a New Jersey license.

Firms are already facing real consequences for compliance failures, and many of those failures are entirely preventable.

Real consequences and what you can do about it

State boards aren’t waiting for the dust to settle on these changes before enforcing compliance. They’re already sanctioning firms, and the violations they’re catching aren’t exotic edge cases. They’re the kinds of mistakes that happen when busy professionals lose track of deadlines or assume their existing setup is fine.

The most common violations Lindsay and Julia pulled from state board minutes and client conversations boil down to a surprisingly short list:

  • Not renewing licenses on time. This one tops the charts at both the individual and firm level. Different states renew on different timelines. Some annually, some biennially and even some triennially. And the trigger dates vary wildly. Some states renew in December. Some on the anniversary of your initial license. Some on your birthday. When you’re tracking licenses for dozens of CPAs across multiple states, missed deadlines become almost inevitable without a solid system.
  • Providing attest services without proper licensing or notification. Say a firm takes on a new engagement type for an existing out-of-state client, such as stepping up from tax work to an audit, without checking whether that triggers additional registration or notification requirements. It does in many states.
  • Failure to complete CPE. Self-explanatory, but still alarmingly common.
  • Not knowing which states require a license at all. Lindsay noted that most firms they speak to are inadvertently breaking at least one small rule. Nobody’s acting in bad faith; they just haven’t checked.
  • Individual CPAs lacking a license in their principal place of business. Post-COVID remote work has made this one pervasive.

The real disciplinary examples are sobering. Beyond the Minnesota top-20 firm that opened this article, there’s a Texas firm whose delinquent attest license was revoked entirely. A New York CPA received two years of probation and a $5,000 fine simply for holding out as a CPA with a lapsed license. And “holding out” doesn’t require anything dramatic. Your email signature or LinkedIn profile counts, as does your firm’s website listing you as “Jane Doe, CPA.”

North Carolina flagged four firms across three states that failed to file the required notice of attest when providing attest services in those states. None were trying to skirt the rules. They just didn’t know the requirement existed.

And a detail that surprised even Lindsay and Julia is that the people who most often let individual license renewals lapse are partners. They’re the busiest people in the firm, the ones signing audit reports, and the ones whose lapse carries the most consequences.

Building a compliance infrastructure that actually works

So what do you do with all of this? Lindsay and Julia laid out a practical framework that any firm can start implementing immediately.

  • Assess your current tracking system. How are you monitoring license renewal dates, CPA qualifications, and state-specific practice privilege requirements right now? Many firms are running on aging Excel spreadsheets that one person maintains. When that person goes on leave or leaves the firm, the entire system breaks down. If that sounds familiar, you’ve identified your first point of failure.
  • Map your full exposure. Identify every state where you have clients, what services you provide in each, how your firm advertises itself in those states, and whether your staff’s qualifications actually align with each state’s requirements. This exercise alone will likely uncover gaps you didn’t know existed.
  • Trust but verify. Don’t assume your CPAs’ licenses are active just because they say so. Use CPA Verify or individual state board websites to independently confirm license status. Renewal deadlines get missed during busy season. It happens, but catching it before a state board does is the difference between a quick fix and a public disciplinary notice.

Watch the full webinar for more takeaways.