Editor's note: the scholarship application is now available and can be accessed here! Applications are due February 15, 2016.

During this past legislative session, the Legislature passed substitute Senate Bill 5534 which created the Certified Public Accounting Scholarship Program. This bill was unanimously approved in the House (98-0) and in the Senate (46-0, with two Senators not voting). Governor Inslee signed the bill on May 8, 2015 to be effective July 24, 2015. The final State Operating Budget for 2015-17 allocated a total of $3.3 million to this program. This is a tremendous achievement for Washington CPAs and future CPAs in our state. Here is a bit of the back story on this accomplishment.

Through good fiscal management, the Washington State Board of Accountancy (WBOA) had created a sizeable reserve, approximately $4.5 million. As is common in our state, and most others, any reserve balances that are considered excessive are transferred by the Legislature into the state’s General Fund. In fact, the Washington Senate proposed such a transfer from the WBOA of approximately $3 million in the 2013-15 budget proposals. Through grassroots efforts by more than 150 of our members, along with our staff and lobbyist, we were able to have this proposal dropped from consideration. Our reasoning was that since the entire reserve came from individual and firm license fees paid by CPAs and CPA firms (i.e., none of the money came from state general funds), then transferring these funds to the General Fund would be tantamount to a double tax on CPAs and firms that created these reserves. We won that battle, but we all knew we would face it again in subsequent years. 

In this year’s budget negotiations a sweep from the WBOA to the General Fund was proposed twice, once for $2 million and once for $3.3 million. This time we were ready. We introduced legislation that would create a scholarship fund to provide scholarships to qualified students who are enrolled at an accredited Washington-based college or university with a declared major in accounting and entering his or her junior year or higher. The actual bill did not specify where the funding for this program would come from, although it was clearly understood by legislators that the scholarship program would only be funded to the extent funds were transferred from the WBOA. So even though the bill passed the legislature unanimously, it would only be funded if the final budget negotiations provided for a sweep of funds from the WBOA into the scholarship program, which is exactly what happened. We believe this is the only time a sweep of funds from a state board of accountancy has been transferred to an effort to benefit the profession rather than into the General Fund. We are very proud of this accomplishment.

Now that this scholarship program has been approved and funded, we are busy executing on this project. Our existing foundation, the Washington CPA Foundation, will be responsible for this scholarship program since they are a qualified Section 501(c)(3) charitable organization. However, since the Foundation has no employees, the actual work of executing this program will be performed by the WSCPA in accordance with agreements between the two entities. We have met numerous times with our attorney, investment advisors, not-for-profit accounting specialists, WBOA staff, Foundation Trustees, members of the WSCPA Board of Directors and others to identify all of the actions that need to be taken to create and operate this scholarship program. During the next six months we will be communicating with college financial aid officers, accounting faculty and accounting students to publicize this new scholarship program and are now accepting scholarship applications. We intend to select our first group of scholarship recipients under this program in spring 2016. These scholarship recipients will be in addition to those that we will select under the Washington CPA Foundation’s existing scholarship program. We will continue to provide scholarships under our existing program since this new scholarship program is designed to eventually be depleted and we want to be able to continue to provide scholarships for generations to come. To learn more about this and how you can get involved, click here.

I would like to thank everyone who helped make this vision become a reality, including our Legislature, our Governor, the Executive Director and members of the WBOA, the Trustees of the Washington CPA Foundation, the WSCPA Board of Directors, our lobbyist Lisa Thatcher, Kimberly Scott—VP of Government and Member Relations, and most importantly, our members.  This was a great team win.