The Fight to Save the CPA License: Inside FICPA's Two-Year Battle

Shelly, when I heard about this, what was going on in Florida, I was really surprised because it hasn't made it out into the, the national press.

Um, it's been very quiet, but this is a big deal, this legislation that you've been dealing with in Florida.

Hmm.

And over these past months, you haven't given any interviews.

You've turned down reporters, and I'm, I'm curious why.

[laughs]

Uh, it's an honor to have you here on the show, and I'm just curious why you have stayed quiet about this for so long, and why is now the right time to talk about it?

No, thanks for asking that question.

It's certainly not because we didn't wanna talk about it, right? But I think the answer to that question is twofold.

First and foremost, we were head down working as hard as we could to make sure that we protected the profession.

I mean, months and weeks of no sleep, time away from family, the whole thing.

And so at the end of the day, as you know, Blake, there's so many, so many hours in the day, you gotta be able to prioritize time.

We were, um, working with the political trade press media, especially, uh, those that were based in Tallahassee, where legislators were the audience.

Uh, so a lot of the trade press journals for legislative purposes, we were, we were heavily involved in making sure we got our message out there.

But to your point, to the general public, we were very careful because, um, we didn't wanna create a panic, um, amongst the profession, and we certainly didn't wanna present in any capacity anything that would not be fully unified messaging, uh, to be able to effectively defeat the proposal that had been laid on the table in Florida.

So I've been eager to chat about it.

I get the question all the time, why, what's going on, all those things.

So I'm looking forward to today.

And I am happy to have you on to talk about this.

This bill would've had devastating consequences for the CPA, for the accounting profession.