The Illinois General Assembly amended the Illinois Public Accounting Act on May 22 to create additional pathways to certified public accountant licensure in Illinois.
In Illinois, the current requirements to become a CPA include earning 150 credit hours at the college level, passing scores on the CPA Exam and one year of relevant experience. This amendment created two additional pathways.
The first option is to earn a bachelor’s degree in accounting, pass the CPA Exam and complete two years of relevant work experience. The second is to earn a master’s degree in accounting, pass the CPA Exam and complete one year of relevant work experience.
The legislation was created with the help of the Illinois CPA Society, which worked with the Illinois Board of Examiners and the Illinois Department of Financial and Professional Regulation.
“ICPAS drafted this legislation to evolve the state’s CPA licensure model and address Illinois’ ongoing accounting talent shortage and growing need for CPAs to serve the business community and protect public interests,” ICPAS said in a statement.
Get The Daily Illini in your inbox!
Geoffrey Brown, CEO of ICPAS, explained the causes of the declining number of people entering the profession, a trend that prompted the legislation.
“We have less people studying at colleges, we have less people being born, and then we also have a number of CPAs that are going to be retiring in the next few years,” Brown said. “Right now, there’s not necessarily a shortage of people, but we could always use more, and we know that the down pipeline is not robust enough to support future demand.”
The accounting profession has lost about 340,000 workers from 2019 to 2024, according to Bloomberg. Meanwhile, the number of university accounting graduates fell by 17% from 2013 to 2022, according to the Journal of Accountancy.
A shortage of accounting professionals would have ramifications across both the public and private sectors.
“Whether you’re a publicly traded company and you need to have a financial statement audit, or a unit of local government that needs to have a compliance audit for funding or some other requirement, everybody needs access to people,” Brown said. “If there aren’t enough people to do the work, that means some entity is going to be left out.”
The 150 credit hour requirement is controversial among accounting professionals. While initially put in place to elevate the CPA position above unlicensed ones, CPA societies today recommend an end to it as an arbitrary barrier, with many states already tossing it aside.
Aspiring students also have their gripes with the 150 credit hour requirement, which essentially amounts to an extra year of education on top of a four-year bachelor’s degree, which typically requires around 120 hours.
“Most people can’t complete (150 credit hours) in four years of college, but because I have AP credit from high school, I can do it faster,” said Jayna Chua, rising junior in Business. “But I do think it can create a barrier for other people.”
Chua says that when students don’t have the credits, they have to turn towards studying for a master’s in accounting or have to take classes separately, which could be a financial burden.
However, whether the prerequisite to becoming a CPA is 120 hours or 150, passing the actual CPA Exam is a significant barrier. A 2021 report from ICPAS that surveyed more than 3,000 students found that the “most faced or anticipated barrier” to becoming a CPA was the time commitment needed to study for and pass the CPA Exam.
“Even if you are CPA eligible, that’s only the first step,” Chua said. “The actual exam to become a CPA is a series of four exams that are three hours long each, and they’re really, really difficult. So even though some people become CPA eligible, it still can take some people a lot of time to get their license, just because you have to study for those exams.”
After passing the General Assembly, the legislation awaits Gov. JB Pritzker’s signature. Brown says the ICPAS doesn’t foresee problems there but emphasizes that students shouldn’t start changing their college plans around this legislation.
“The new path to licensure doesn’t become effective until 2027 so I would say anybody who is just stepping foot on campus majoring in accounting, don’t stop your plans now,” Brown said. “Keep focusing on getting that degree in accounting and ultimately pursuing licensure.”
