Pursue License in California or Virginia?

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    Anonymous
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    Help! Should I pursue the CPA exam and licensing in California or Virginia?

    Any advice is greatly appreciated. Here are details on my situation…

    I currently live in California and work in wealth management (i.e. investments and financial planning) – not in accounting.

    So if I don’t work in accounting, why am I interested in getting a CPA license? Two reasons:

    1) Perhaps the biggest reason is personal – I always regretted not getting the CPA earlier in my career. I had studied accounting in college and started my career in private accounting, but I moved into the investments field after 20 months doing accounting. Thus I did the CFA and CFP, and even managed to squeeze in the CMA, but the CPA is the one I’m still missing.

    2) If I get licensed in California, it may be helpful in my field. A lot of my clients and prospective clients have complex tax situations, so my advice on tax matters could be more credible to them if they know I am a licensed CPA.

    So why am I considering getting licensed in Virginia instead of California?

    In a nutshell, I will likely have a hard time ***proving*** my past work experience in accounting. While I have carefully examined California’s education requirements and am confident that I am in good shape there, I don’t know if I can get all the signatures I need for the work experience. Here are the issues:

    1) My work experience in accounting was over 20 years ago, which complicates things given the issues below.

    2) The work experience was in New York, not California.

    3) I might need a lot of signatures. It was my first job out of a college – an accounting training program at a large New York bank. They rotated us to different accounting groups at the bank every 4 months, so we had a lot of different supervisors.

    4) I don’t know if I can find any of my former supervisors and get their signatures. And even if I did find them, I don’t even know if they would remember me since the assignments were so long ago and so short (believe it or not, I did actually run into one of my supervisors at a college alumni event, and she had no clue who I was!).

    So why am I considering Virginia?

    If I can’t get the signatures I need for California, then I would still like to get a CPA license somewhere. Virginia accepts the NASBA experience verification, and fortunately, I saved lots of documentation that proves my accounting work experience. Most notably, I saved all of my performance reviews from my accounting job, and they list my job responsibilities, accomplishments and the names of my supervisors. If I can use this documentation to get licensed in Virginia, then I suppose there is hope that at some point there could be changes which would allow me to transfer my license to California.

    Thanks for any advice, perspectives or tips you might have.

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