Utah State University introduces new accounting certification
Utah State University will soon offer a certificate in United States Generally Accepted Accounting Principles, or US GAAP. USU announced that it will team up with international accounting seminars, or IAseminars, which is a global finance training company based in London, to do the certification.
“They do accounting seminars all over the world, this is where they are really helpful to us. We’ve got the Utah network all figured out, we’ve got all of our students here that can do this exam, but we don’t necessarily have that network around the world,” said Dr. Chris Skousen, an assistant professor at USU. “So IAseminars has approximately forty thousand clients that they’ve had so that natural distribution of potential individuals out there in the world that we can connect to USU and allow them to do this certificate.”
The curriculum will still be put together by USU accounting professors like Dr. Timothy Seidel, an assistant accounting professor.
“At this point we are in the phase of, we’ve put together most of those online materials with the assessment test and things like that,” Seidel said. “I believe that coming up in the future, next few months to the next year, we’ll probably start seeing if we can identify people sign up for the course essentially and going out and teaching during those seminars.”
The process involves an online curriculum followed by a four-day seminar and a final exam on the content.
The certification does not come with any college credit and the program will be available to both those enrolled at USU and not enrolled. However it is free for USU students and costs $4,495 otherwise.
“If a USU student wants to do it, we offer it to them for free,” Skousen said. “They are going to have to have a certain skill-set beforehand. So if you look at an accounting student, they are going to take the classes that they need to be able to pass that exam by the time they graduate.”
US GAAP is the most commonly used financial reporting system in the U.S. It is also frequently used worldwide for companies that have ties to the U.S.
“What we find, is that you have global companies all over the world that have divisions throughout the world, have subsidiaries throughout the world and even international companies throughout the world that use US GAAP,” Skousen said. “If you are somewhere in the world and you work for a company that needs to prepare financial statements following these U.S. standards, it’s beneficial for you to be able to demonstrate that you have knowledge of that, wherever you are.”
Seidel hopes that the certificate and the cooperation with IAseminars will bolster USU’s presence both nationally and internationally.
“It not only gives us an opportunity to get out and meet with and mingle with practitioners and others who want to learn more about US GAAP, but it also gives us an opportunity to get Utah State’s name out there and increase it’s brand reputation,” Seidel said. “Being an earlier kind of first mover in this will kind of help I think with building up that reputation and that brand.”
The program is also expected to help students, not just by providing them with the education on a widely used financial reporting system, but by gaining connections.
“For most of our students that are going to go on and try to be certified public accountants, or CPA’s, that covers the US GAAP certificate, plus it covers tax law, business law, IRS standards, all of those other areas as well,” Skousen said. “It’s potentially a great benefit for our students as well.”