Certified Public Accountant (CPA)

The Certified Public Accountant, or CPA, is the principal licensed accounting credential in the United States, granted by individual state boards to practitioners who may then offer accounting services to the public. New York issued the first CPA licences in 1896, and candidates today must complete 150 semester units of college education, pass the four-part Uniform CPA Exam and accumulate a year of accounting-related work experience, after which continuing professional education, typically around forty hours a year, is required to keep the licence active. Similar designations exist in other English-speaking countries under their own professional accounting institutes. This description is adapted from Wikipedia contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0; changes were made. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/