Greg Kyte expands the boundaries of things you aren’t supposed to discuss publicly in his post at Going Concern: If You Can’t Admit You’ve Committed CPE Fraud, Then You Need to Take Another Ethics Course.
He offers as an example of CPE fraud his ability to complete a one hour ethics course in 9 minutes.
He then mentions the type of CPE cheating I’ve seen at almost every live course I’ve attended:
Checking email, reading the news, or watching college football games on your laptop during a live class are commonplace, pedestrian forms of cheating.
If you hadn’t noticed that because you always sit in one of the first few rows like me, just check out the back row at your next class.
Here is a particularly depressing form of CPE fraud that I’ve heard about:
For the past three reporting cycles, a former-KPMG CPA has completed 80 hours of CPE during the week between Christmas and New Year. He orders self-study courses, goes directly to the exam, and uses the index to find answers to the questions he doesn’t know.
I’m nowhere near as efficient as Greg (he did a 50 minutes ethics class in 9 minutes). I stopped using the AICPA CPExpress courses when I completed a series of Single Audit and A-133 courses in 30 minutes for every 50 minute block. Instead of having one-third his efficiency, perhaps the difference was that I carefully read every slide, completed the self-study questions, and was trying to learn as much as I could. Even so, my 50 minute hours only took 30 minutes.
I’m not sure, but it might be an ethics violation for Mr. Kyte to discuss this publicly. Oops. If so, I’m in trouble too.
Mr. Kyte does, however, provide full disclose on his statistical research methodology. See his footnotes 1 & 2. Thus, he isn’t committing research fraud while he documents the ease of committing CPE fraud.