CA Sri Lanka Cites IFAC’s Own Standard as Its CPD Instrument

Most professional accountancy bodies ground their continuing development requirement in their own instrument — an act, a regulation, a by-law, a council directive. CA Sri Lanka does something we have not seen anywhere else in this programme. It grounds the requirement in IFAC's standard, and cites that standard as its own CPD instrument.

The Act does not mention CPD, and neither do the Regulations

We read the consolidated Act of Incorporation and Regulations of the Institute — Act No. 23 of 1959 with amendments up to Act No. 15 of 1998, around 124,000 characters, in full. Searching it for "continuing professional development", "CPD" and "professional development" returns no matches at all.

The nearest statutory hooks create no duty. Section 3A(ii) states as an object "to enroll, educate and train members who are desirous of learning or improving their skills and knowledge". Section 9(2)(g) gives the Council the duty "to secure the maintenance of professional standards among members of the Institute". Section 12(1) is a general regulation-making power. The Regulations in the same document, including Institute Regulations No. 1 of 1975, deal with students, articled clerks and examinations only.

So the obligation is Council or Institute policy. That much is unremarkable — Malaysia's Accountants Act is silent too, and the duty there is a council by-law. What is unusual is what CA Sri Lanka points at instead.

It cites IES 7 as its instrument

The Institute's own page explaining the requirement puts it this way: "IFAC requires all member bodies, to ensure that their members develop and maintain competence … Therefore CPD is compulsory for all members of the Institute."

And its "My Guide to Regulations" page lists, as the governing document for continuing development, IFAC's IES 7, Continuing Professional Development — hosting the standard's own PDF.

That is a genuinely different posture. IES 7 is addressed to member bodies, not to individual accountants; it tells a body what to require, not a member what to do. Every other body we have documented translates it into something of their own and enforces that. CA Sri Lanka presents the international standard itself as the member's reference point.

We could not find any named, numbered, dated CA Sri Lanka continuing development instrument. The Institute's "Our Guide to CPD" PDF has no machine-readable text, so we could not read it. The Members Guide Book is undated, with internal references pointing to 2014 and 2015. So the accurate description is: Council or Institute policy, with no instrument number or edition date published.

Twenty hours a year, 120 over three, split evenly

The figures are consistent across two independent primary sources — the Institute's own pages and its audited Integrated Annual Report 2024, which states at page 42 that "all members are required to undertake a minimum of 20 CPD hours annually and a minimum of 120 CPD hours every 3 years."

The split is an even one, which is itself distinctive: 10 verifiable and 10 non-verifiable each year, and 60 of each across the rolling three-year period. Most bodies that use a verifiable quota set it at half or more of the total and let the rest fall where it may; CA Sri Lanka specifies both halves. The vocabulary is verifiable and non-verifiable, with verifiable defined as activities "that can be verified with the reference to external sources" — participation records, course materials, certificates of attendance.

The cycle is rolling rather than a fixed triennium, and the CPD year is the calendar year: "the CPD year will be the Calendar Year and will run from 1st January to 31st December."

Fellowship is where compliance actually gets checked

There is no audit programme described anywhere we could reach. What exists instead is attendance capture and a single review at a career milestone.

Attendance at Institute events is recorded by swiping an NFC-enabled membership card at a kiosk, or manually at the registration desk, and those hours are updated by the Institute's own division, so members do not submit them. For non-Institute events, members submit evidence to the Member Relations Division, which is responsible for promoting and assuring compliance.

The real check comes at Fellowship. The Institute states that "the assessment process for Fellowship will include a review of compliance with CPD requirements" covering "the preceding five year period", and the Annual Report 2024 sets out the Fellowship scheme as eight years' uninterrupted membership "together with 120 hours of CPD for the preceding five (5) years."

So the design is effectively a deferred review at the point a member seeks advancement, rather than an annual sampling exercise. No sample rate and no compliance statistics are published. The Annual Report reports supply-side activity only — 92 programmes and 373 CPD hours delivered in 2024 — never member compliance rates.

Exemptions, where the detail is unusually clear

The Institute's frequently asked questions answer the cases directly, and the answers are tighter than most:

A member who is fully retired with no employment or self-employment using their CA status: "There is no necessity for you to comply with the CPD requirement." A member who is retired but occasionally does CA-related professional work: must comply. A full-time parent or carer with no professional or employment work: not required. A member in their first year of membership: required — no first-year grace, which several bodies do give. And members working overseas get no exemption at all, on the reasoning that "CPD learning activities can be undertaken from any part of the world."

That last one is worth noting. Kenya's ICPAK grants a foreign-residency exemption where no institute and no opportunities exist locally. ICAI in India reduces hours for members abroad. CA Sri Lanka does neither.

What is not published, and one claim we will not repeat

Several things we would normally report are simply absent from everything we could retrieve, and we are listing them as absences of publication rather than as absences of rules.

No mandatory subject and no ethics hours. The Members Guide Book describes continuing development as covering "skills, values, ethics and attitudes" without attaching a figure to any of it. No record retention period anywhere. And — most strikingly — no consequence of non-compliance at all. We found no sanction, no escalation ladder and no disciplinary link to continuing development in any page or document. The only removal mechanism in the Members Guide Book is for failure to renew membership, which is a subscription matter.

The declaration position is weakly sourced and we would rather flag it than state it cleanly. "Declaration of CPD compliance is required at the time of renewal" comes only from the undated Members Guide Book, which also gives membership as "annually renewable by 1st March" and practising certificates as renewable by 31 December. The current frequently asked questions state the CPD year but give no declaration deadline.

One claim we are deliberately not repeating: IFAC's page on the Institute says it "introduced mandatory relevant CPD hours for practicing members", which implies a separate quantum for practitioners. CA Sri Lanka publishes no such figure, and its own frequently asked questions say practising members have no extra hours — only different required activities, "as identified during the CPD planning process". So we are not publishing a practising-member hours figure for Sri Lanka, and nor should anyone else working from the IFAC page alone.

CA Sri Lanka has been an IFAC member since 1978. Its definitions and exemption answers are in the Institute's CPD frequently asked questions.