New for 2021
NOTE: this course has an updated version titled "4-Hour Ethics for Accountants 2023" available on LearnFormula.
In this new 4-hour course we’ll cover all the basics regarding ethics for accountants. That will include a review of the oversight and disciplinary process, as well as the Code of Conduct for CPA Ontario, BC and Alberta.
We’ll also conduct a deep dive into violations by rules of professional conduct for the province of Ontario because Ontario has the most CPAs, and therefore cases, and provides a significant amount of detail about each one, as well as the cases for BC and Alberta.
We’ll cover the top seven broken rules in Ontario since 1987 from a summary I have created by downloading all 828 publicly available discipline cases since then. We’ll see that these seven rules account for just over 90% of all discipline cases.
We’ll also explore ten separate actual Ontario disciplinary cases in detail. This will include a look at the Livent fraud, including what happened to the four CPAs that worked for the company and the four partners at the company’s auditing firm.
We’ll also look at the case of the Sino-Forest Corporation disaster with its CFO that abdicated his professional responsibility, as well as cases of CPAs that have committed criminal acts including running a marijuana grow up, stealing from a condo corporation, refusing a practice inspection, manipulating expense reports and more.
We’ll go through the circumstances that led the CPAs to do what they did and the reasons the Discipline Committees gave for the sanctions imposed in each case.
We’ll also explore 20 BC disciplinary cases going back to 2015 and five Alberta cases.
This course has been created to give you a good understanding of what the rules are, what is and what is not acceptable behaviour and therefore arm you with the information you’ll need to stay onside.
5 activities • 4 videos • duration: 2h 57m

Acclaimed Author and On-demand Course Developer
David Trahair, CPA, CA, is an author and eLearning developer who creates on-demand video courses for CPAs across Canada. His courses cover topics including personal finance, ethics, AI, and Microsoft Excel. David is also the author of six personal finance books, three of which are national bestsellers. Through his firm, he helps CPAs build practical skills through engaging, self-paced learning.
Provincial regulators of CPAs in Canada do not require that independent providers of CPD be approved to offer courses. Instead, individual CPAs are responsible for assessing whether a CPD activity meets their requirements, and may take activities from any source provided those requirements are met.
Every course offered on LearnFormula is delivered by a qualified subject matter expert or learning organization, and advances learning objectives that are relevant to the responsibilities or professional competencies of Canadian CPAs. All activities on LearnFormula are quantifiable in terms of hours, and are also verifiable, in that users receive documented evidence of their attendance via a certificate of completion after finishing a course (and this certificate is stored by LearnFormula indefinitely). Nearly 100,000 Canadian CPAs successfully satisfy their CPD requirements via LearnFormula on an annual basis.
The topic is somewhat - not sure what I would recommend to improve that. The presentation was very professional in spite of the topic.
Yes it was a good course
It was a good match for an ethics course, but I had to split it up into multiple sessions since it was very dry.
Lack of analysis, excessive emphasis on cases with minimal relating of cases back to standards and analysis of best practice and ways to have avoided or navigated some of the scenarios covered.