LCvista recently hosted our first webinar with the National Association of State Boards of Accountancy (NASBA). The goal of this webinar was to answer the audience’s audit-related questions, offer insights into frequent NASBA findings, and show how LCvista helps facilitate a desk audit as a NASBA sponsor.

In this blog post, we’ll provide an overview of what we covered, plus answers to attendee questions asked during the Q&A section.

The audit experts

Our AMA with NASBA was run by the following speakers, who provided a peek behind the audit curtain and some much-needed insight.

Common NASBA findings (and how to avoid them)

Getting audited can feel scary, but Lindsay Lane, NASBA’s Desk Audit Manager, hopes to help lessen that fear. If you’re going through an audit, she says, you should assume that there will be findings from NASBA. “It’s not a bad thing,” she says. “Findings do not mean you failed the audit.”

Having said that, there are several common findings that can be avoided by following best practices.

Promotional material omissions

The most common findings regarding promotional materials include:

• Omission of the program knowledge level
• Omission of prerequisites for programs with knowledge levels of intermediate, advanced, or update
• Omission of required topics in the evaluation form
• Missing required elements or showing incorrect fields of study on certificates of completion

Ensuring that promotional materials requirements are fulfilled is a great way to reduce NASBA findings in the event of an audit.

Failing to note elements of engagement

One of the newest additions to Group Live requirements is the element of engagement. It’s also a common item in NASBA audits.

As Lindsay describes, NASBA wants to see documentation that you’ve added some sort of element of engagement in your 50 minute Group Live class. This could be as simple as noting an element of engagement in your speaker notes, listing it in your agenda, or including a slide that says “Case Study” or “Instructor Post Question.” As Lindsay explains, documentation is essential. “We get a lot of explanations that an element of engagement was included, but there’s no documentation for it. That’s all we need.”

Incomplete attendance monitoring

Live Attendance Monitoring and Documentation is one of the biggest areas that NASBA writes findings in, both for Group Live and Group Internet Based programs. This often falls into one of the following scenarios:

• Supporting documentation does not match attendance monitoring procedures
• Supporting documentation is incomplete—no indication of check in/out times or how late arrivals, early departures, and extended breaks are handled
• Sponsors allowing CPAs to self-report CPE credits
• Written attendance policy lacks sufficient detail

Lindsay has a great rule of thumb to avoid these specific findings: If you’re in charge of the CPE programs for your company, imagine that you’re no longer with the company in three years, and someone reaches out to the company needing a certificate for a course they took with you. Is your documentation good enough that a new person in your job could go back and see that that person attended and issue them a certificate confidently so that they can get the right amount of CPE credits? In other words, could a stranger come in and make the same inferences that you are from your material?

Sponsors should always be aiming to capture this level of detail, and this information should always be sponsor-documented. Self-reporting from CPAs alone is not allowed.

Incorrect credit increments

In 2024, NASBA revised their standards to state that sponsors should select to use either 0.2 or 0.5 credit increments for a session. This means that there should not be both 0.2 and 0.5 rounding used within a single program; sponsors must choose one or the other.

Mismatched qualified assessments in self study

A qualified assessment in a self study program should directly tie back to a program’s learning objective. For example, if the learning objective states that participants should be able to calculate something, the qualified assessment should include the calculation of that thing.

Alternatively, if the learning objective of a self study is for its participant to be able to categorize something, the qualified assessment should have them categorize that thing. Overall, participants should carefully write and review the learning objectives for a self study program.

How LCvista helps facilitate a desk audit as a NASBA sponsor

Audits can be stressful, but knowing where to find the information you need makes it much easier. For each delivery method selected for audit, you need:

• Attendance monitoring policy and supporting documentation
• Certificate of completion
• Evaluation form or summary of evaluation results
• Course announcement or promotional materials
• Instructor/author/developer bio
• Reviewer bio
• Documentation per S24 for specific delivery method

In this portion of the webinar, LCvista product experts John, Danielle, and Brooke offered an overview of the ways in which LCvista makes each of these elements easier.

Acing attendance monitoring

No matter how you use Conferences i/o, it’s going to make sure you have all the NASBA-compliant documentation you need for attendance monitoring. For example, it gives you the exact check-in and check-out times for each attendee and shows you how long they were there for.

Sponsors can also export this data to an Excel file and save it there as well. You can always go back in the event of an audit and make sure it’s all there, compiled in a NASBA-friendly way. You can even look at the full history of an attendee’s check-ins and check-outs, which is helpful for long, more complicated programs with more breaks.

In the event of exceptions, such as an attendee’s technology failure, you can make a note within “Adjust Credits & Note” in the “Credits” column of Conferences i/o. For example, if an attendee’s phone died, you could go in and make a note explaining that exception.

Capturing an element of engagement in Group Live

There are many ways to introduce an element of engagement, as we discussed earlier. Conferences i/o also provides a number of options, such as its Q&A feature or its polling feature. Documenting this is as simple as putting a slide at the end that says “Q&A”, and Conferences i/o provides all the data you need to prove it.

Attendance monitoring for Group Internet

For Group Internet based programs, there’s an attention check requirement of three attention checks per credit hour. You can capture this with polling, CPE codes or code words.

A caveat that John points out is that if it’s a single field of study but more than one hour, just seeing the total number of polls someone responded to isn’t necessarily enough.

As John explains, “Let’s say it’s a two-hour session. The first hour is tax and the second hour is auditing. You would have to do a total of six polls. How do you know which polls the attendee answered and can get credit for? Just knowing the total amount isn’t enough. In that case, NASBA wants to see the poll questions and attendee answers.”

Thankfully, you can tie polls or code words to a field of study with Conferences i/o to clear up this issue.

Accessing remaining required elements in LCvista

There are a number of ways to capture the remaining required elements in LCvista. Here’s a brief overview.

Course announcement/promotional materials

Within LCvista, you can find the landing page you’re looking for in the Learning & Compliance portal. From here, you can view additional program details or choose to enroll in or launch a session. You can also get to the landing page from your dashboard calendar or from an assignment.

Instructor bios

Users can preview instructor bios from the session summary of any program. An admin can add and edit bios in the “Manage Training” section of the Learning & Compliance portal. This can also be done at the session level.

Certificate of completion

As an admin, you can collect everyone’s certificates by doing an export. If you’re in “Manage Attendees”, you can view certificates directly for each attendee, which will take you to your chosen template. That template will be pre-populated with the credits and field of study that were given to you.

Evaluation form/summary

As a participant, you will receive an email that you got an evaluation for a training you attended. Within LCvista, the user can fill out and submit their evaluation.

As an admin, you can pull a number of reports on evaluation responses in the “Reports” section, depending on what data you’re looking for.

#20 questions for NASBA, answered

We told our webinar participants they could ask us anything, and they didn’t hold back. Here are #20 questions we received for NASBA (and their answers).