4-Hour Ethics for Accountants

NOTE: this course has an updated version titled "4-Hour Ethics for Accountants 2023" available on LearnFormula.

In this new 4-hour course we’ll cover all the basics regarding ethics for accountants. That will include a review of the oversight and disciplinary process, as well as the Code of Conduct for CPA Ontario, BC and Alberta.

We’ll also conduct a deep dive into violations by rules of professional conduct for the province of Ontario because Ontario has the most CPAs, and therefore cases, and provides a significant amount of detail about each one, as well as the cases for BC and Alberta.

We’ll cover the top seven broken rules in Ontario since 1987 from a summary I have created by downloading all 828 publicly available discipline cases since then. We’ll see that these seven rules account for just over 90% of all discipline cases.

We’ll also explore ten separate actual Ontario disciplinary cases in detail. This will include a look at the Livent fraud, including what happened to the four CPAs that worked for the company and the four partners at the company’s auditing firm.

We’ll also look at the case of the Sino-Forest Corporation disaster with its CFO that abdicated his professional responsibility, as well as cases of CPAs that have committed criminal acts including running a marijuana grow up, stealing from a condo corporation, refusing a practice inspection, manipulating expense reports and more.

We’ll go through the circumstances that led the CPAs to do what they did and the reasons the Discipline Committees gave for the sanctions imposed in each case.

We’ll also explore 20 BC disciplinary cases going back to 2015 and five Alberta cases.

This course has been created to give you a good understanding of what the rules are, what is and what is not acceptable behaviour and therefore arm you with the information you’ll need to stay onside.