Guides

Applying for a U.S. CPA as a Canadian CPA via the MRA

This is an update to Eric Fong's post on his experience getting his CPA(IL). Unfortunately Eric's post is about 5 years out of date (as of the writing of this post) so I've included some updates based on my experience. Unfortunately his guide is much prettier than mine as I do not have his developed aesthetic taste.

Background: I went to the University of Waterloo and completed the MAcc Program. I did not do the audit PEP equivalent, nor did I write the Audit role for the CFE. As a result, have a post-merger CPA without a public accounting license (PAL). I also have approximately zero hours of audit experience. 

The good news is that to be eligible for the Mutual Recognition Agreement (MRA), you do not need audit experience, you just need to pass the Post Designation Public Accounting (PDPA) module.

Costs

PDPA Program $1,496.00

Letter of Good Standing from CPAO        $28.25

NASBA Eligibility Assessment     $351.87

Total costs incurred to date $1,849.12

I've still not paid for the IQEX exam itself and study materials related to that.

Application Process

Phase 1 - PDPA (April - December)

Since I didn't have an audit background, I had to sign up for the PDPA. It is run once a year, and you need to first request an eligibility assessment. Be careful about the dates as you may end up delayed a whole year. I submitted my eligibility assessment late, but lucky for me the kind folks at CPAO still permitted me to write the exam.

Exam covers a bunch of content, but the focus is audit and accounting. You also need breadth in tax. It is a mix of MC and cases.

Tax: I did all the practice questions in probably half  a day without reading the content. Benefits of having worked in Tax for 7 years. I averaged a score of roughly 90%. Tip: If you're in tax, don't overthink it. Some of the content is technically wrong in edge scenarios, but generally correct. They don't test you for a depth requirement, just meet the basic knowledge requirement.

Audit and FR: Admittedly I was out of practice  (in the case of audit I was never in practice) in these fields so I had to do some revisions. Overall there was no content I didn't know at all, just stuff that I had to refresh. I studied for roughly a month using the CPA provided materials. I did not spring for any external resources. My average on the practice cases was 60% in Audit, and 80% in FR. I eventually got them both up to high 80%.

Exam: I finished the MC is about an hour, and the remaining time I used for the case. Partway through writing the case I realized that the name of the game is competency, not to exceed competency. I realized I was putting too much time and effort into a technically correct discussion of consolidation practices, and very quickly running out of time for the audit questions.

I still passed through. Results came out in December. I had actually totally forgotten I had written the test until I got the exam results.

Phase 2 - NASBA Application (December - Jan, approximately 2 weeks)

This phase is administratively excessively burdensome and unclear as a lot of it is directed to Americans.

1. Go to https://dashboard.nasba.org/ and the CPA Portal to make a profile.

2. When you select a jurisdiction, do not select the state you intend to apply to. There is an option specifically for IQEX - Canada.

3. Application questions:

   • Education: If you're like me, your university will not be an option as you had your schooling outside of the U.S. There is an option for "Canadian University".

• Evaluation Questions: I've never taking the Uniform CPA Examination, but there is a specific options to select IQEX - Canada when asking about your credentials

• Evaluation (Continued): There's a section of the evaluation which asks you about transcripts. You do not need to submit transcripts if you're applying for the IQEX under the MRA, which I verified with a NASBA staff.  The system may prompt you for transcripts. What I did was when I submitted my Letter of Good Standing (LOGS, see more detail below), I called up NASBA and they were able to manually note that my transcript or equivalent was received.