This week is the first week of on-campus interviews with accounting firms. Good luck to everyone! Interviews will be going on for a few weeks. Luckily, as a grad student I don’t have midterms in that time (except for Tax, which is run like an undergrad class), but the undergrads have both to worry about.

We all need to practice prioritizing this week, so here I am at 7 am, watching Roger CPA Videos (for REG part 4). I still have to do the multiple choice for REG 3, but it’s nice to switch it up between the types of studying. I am almost, not quite halfway through, after 7 weeks of studying, but I only have a month to go now! It’s also great to go from a section covering tax to one covering law, because it is so much easier for me to understand and remember law than tax. Go figure?

Tonight, I’ll be using this handy “Complete List of Behavioral Interview Questions,” from Emurse.com.

One of the big topics on the Regulation section of the CPA exam is Legal Liability. The legal liability section discusses under which circumstances an auditor can be sued for misstatements in a client’s financial statements.

Following GAAS (Generally Accepted Auditing Standards) is a good defense against any of these charges, so Regulation also tests CPA candidates on GAAS.

The Securities Act of 1933 regulates original issuance of stock, and governs auditors responsibilities as participants in that process.

The Securities and Exchange Act of 1934 regulates the subsequent trading of stock (ie, the financial statements companies issue to stockholders) and matters relating to fraud.

Conveniently, my audit class has been complementing my Roger CPA preparation, and we’ve been reading some cases about auditors getting sued for negligence (and losing). It’s a cool way to review legal liability, and the burden of proof for negligence. It’s also interesting to see cases where auditors got duped by clever clients, but the auditors were still held accountable because they could have found the fraud if they took their audit one step further. It’s a good reminder to maintain healthy professional skepticism.

Some interesting reading to relate Regulation studying to the real world is this article on Re: The Auditors that addresses a case faced by PWC and the auditor’s responsibility to find fraud under the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (2002) rules.

What is the hardest section of the CPA? According to Roger CPA Review, the average student finds the FAR section to be the most difficult part of the CPA exam.

I tried to schedule my CPA exam sections so I would go from hardest to easiest, so that if I passed the first one or two, I wouldn’t have to worry quite so much about passing the next two.

I judged that FAR would be the hardest, because it seemed like it covered the most information. However, once I started studying for it, I realized that even though I didn’t really remember much from my intermediate accounting classes, the fact that I had at least seen the material before made the review a little easier.

Now that I’ve safely passed FAR and I’m working on REG, REG seems like the most difficult section of the CPA exam. There are so many details they can test, and I’m not sure I’ve learned as much of this in school.

Sometimes I’m suprised about how much I already do know, despite not taking one course that specifically covers this exam. I’m working on part 2 of 6 parts in the Roger CPA review study plan. Part one was individual tax, which I actually did have a class on, and I think most accounting students have seen this in class. Part two is about the legal environment of accounting, which I never had  a class on, but I know a lot of the information already from different classes, such as audit class.

Some of the information is still new to me, such as the regulations about when you need to register with the SEC, but I’m hoping as I go through the book, I’ll know more than I think about the different topics on the REG exam.