If you’re a professional in the field of accounting or tax preparation, you know how important it is to keep up with changes in the occupation from year to year. Whether it’s a multi-day seminar on a big topic like tax reform legislation, or a quick CPE webinar with a small scope, you’ll need to obtain a certain number of CPE hours in order to keep up with licensure.

continuing professional educationWhile every state is different, many states require a certain number of CPE ethics hours in order to fulfill annual (or biennial, or triennial) licensure guidelines. Unfortunately, depending on your location, it can be hard to find an in-person continuing education seminar that meets your needs when it comes to ethics. A lot of ethics seminars put forth content that can be both dry and irrelevant for many accounting professionals.

At Basics & Beyond™, we offer real-life ethics continuing education for accountants. This means that the information we present in our seminars and webinars will be highly relevant to your everyday life as an accounting professional. You’ll be able to take what you’ve learned about ethics and apply that knowledge as part of your practice.

Seminars and Webinars for Everyone

There are many different kinds of professionals in the field of personal accounting and tax preparation. However, we’ve made sure that our webinar and seminar content is designed to meet the needs of people with a wide variety of professional backgrounds.

Are you a Certified Public Account? If so, our CPE ethics webinars are perfect for you. Similarly, tax attorneys find that they benefit enormously from our educational content. If you’re an Enrolled Agent, you too can get a lot out of our CPE ethics courses. Lastly, if you participate in the IRS Annual Filing Season Program, you’ll need 2 hours of ethics CPE hours per year, and you can get those hours here at Basics & Beyond.

What is Accounting Ethics?

At first glance, ethics can seem like a minor consideration in accounting. Upon further examination, though, it’s easy to see why it’s such an important and integral part of any accounting and/or tax preparation practice. The stakes are often quite high. Investors will use annual financial reports that you prepare to determine whether or not they ought to put their money in a company. Tax returns and other forms submitted to the IRS must, of course, be complete and truthful to the best of the preparer’s knowledge. And, in some instances, a savvy and ethical accountant will catch a company committing fraud, and save potential investors and other stakeholders a significant amount of potential financial loss later on by reporting such activity immediately.

Acting ethically as an accounting professional can take a number of forms, depending on the particularities of a given situation with a client. You’ll want to remain objective at all times, providing your client with an unbiased look at their finances that’s uncolored by beliefs or opinions. You’ll need to be thorough with your work, ensuring that nothing is omitted that could cause a client to make a poor financial decision. Maintaining confidentiality is essential, and in some cases is particularly vital to the success of a company’s financial dealings. And, you’ll want to act professionally at all times, ensuring your client knows that they can trust you to behave competently and act appropriately when it really counts.

Of course, this is only a general outline of what real-life ethics for accountants looks like. A big part of acting ethically means keeping up to date with changes in the expectations surrounding what an accounting professional should and should not do for their clients, and keeping abreast of any changes to federal law, state law, or the standards of professionalism maintained by various state boards and licensing bodies. That’s where a tax ethics webinar or seminar from Basics & Beyond comes in.

Sample Ethics Webinar and Seminar Topics

At Basics & Beyond, we pride ourselves on offering content that’s engaging, interesting, and relevant. When it comes to our ethics CPE webinars and seminars, we hold ourselves to the highest possible standards.

Here are some of the CPE ethics classes that we’re currently offering (you can register for them here):

“Do the Right Thing”: Ethics for the Tax Professional

In 2018 and the years to come, tax professionals find themselves presented with an increasing number of ethical responsibilities. More and more courts, governmental agencies, and other forms of authority at the state and federal level are reshaping what is and is not acceptable when it comes to the relationship between a tax preparer and their client. In this webinar, Basics & Beyond will exam the way that licensing boards, professional associations, and other bodies are changing so-called professional standards, and how these changes in standards can affect you when it comes to tax planning and preparation. In particular, we’ll focus on the role of disciplinary standards. Additionally, this webinar will look at what both Congress and the IRS have recently put forth in terms of shifting tax professionals’ focus further in the direction of maintaining compliance for clients, along with the ways in which these changes can affect tax avoidance planning. This will include

Ethics and the Tax Client

In recent years, a whole host of new rules and regulations have been suggested (and, in many cases, adopted) that can change the way that accounting professionals interact with clients. In this segment of our fall topical income tax update, we’ll examine the ways in which new IRS regulations are changing the standards of professionalism in tax preparation. We’ll also go over the newly approved ethical standards for Enrolled Agents; new standards for professional conduct for CPAs; and other updates to ethical standards for tax preparers in general. Lastly, we’ll also cover specifics ethical topics that crop up in your daily practice, such as communication, billing, conflicts of interest, and more.

Basics & Beyond: Your Choice for CPE Webinars and Seminars

If you’re looking for real-life ethics CPE hours for accountants, look no further than Basics & Beyond. To learn more about our tax and accounting webinars, including our competitive pricing, click here.