ICAN Nigeria Publishes Three Different CPD Figures on Its Own Site

ICAN requires Nigerian chartered accountants to obtain 40 credit hours a year and 120 over three years. Documents currently live on ICAN's own website say 90. One of the documents saying 90 is titled "Updated". None of them carries a date, so there is no way to tell from the documents themselves which is current.

Three figures, one website

ICAN's Members' Professional Development page states the requirement: "Every member of the Institute is required to obtain a minimum of forty (40) credit hours in a year" and "a total of 120 credit hours over a three year period". That page carries no date and cites no rule number.

Its conditions and procedures documents for a fresh practice licence and for renewal, both marked "Latest 2026", each require a minimum of 120 credit hours in the last three years.

But a document titled "Updated Conditions and Procedures for Application for Fresh Practice Licence" requires 90 hours in the last three consecutive years. And ICAN's member portal licence details document also says 90, using the older label MCPE.

IFAC's member profile for ICAN, last updated in April 2026, resolves which is which: ICAN "increased its Mandatory Professional Development (MPD) requirement from 90 credit hours to 120 credit hours" and "now requires members to obtain 40 credit hours annually", phased over three years and effective 1 January 2024. IFAC records that ICAN thereby fully aligned its requirements with International Education Standard 7, and assesses it as Sustain on that obligation.

So 90 is the pre-2024 figure and 120 is current. The practical problem is that a Nigerian member checking ICAN's own site has a better than even chance of landing on a document with the wrong number, and no way to date it.

The name is also unsettled

The scheme is Mandatory Continuing Professional Development. ICAN's 2026 training schedule confirms it: "MCPD means Mandatory Continuing Professional Development" and "EMCPD means Executive Mandatory Continuing Professional Development".

But ICAN's own estate uses four labels concurrently. Its professional development directorate page uses MPD and MCPD interchangeably. Its member portal uses MCPE. IFAC's profile calls it Mandatory Professional Development. Anyone citing MCPE is using ICAN's own legacy label rather than making an error.

The obligation has no statutory basis

This is the structural finding, and it is a clean contrast with India.

The Institute of Chartered Accountants of Nigeria Act, which commenced on 1 September 1965, contains no continuing professional development provision. Its education provisions concern trainees and pre-qualification: section 15(1)(a) allows rules for the training with chartered accountants of suitable persons, and section 15(2)(e) concerns the period of practical training. Section 15(2)(b) allows rules prescribing the form of the annual practising licence, and section 15(2)(c) lets the Council restrict the right to practise in default of payment of the annual subscription — a statutory sanction for unpaid fees, with no equivalent for unmet continuing development.

So the scheme rests on Council policy, enforced through the annual practising licence conditions rather than on the Act.

Contrast ICAI in India, whose obligation has sat since January 2024 in a named instrument expressly made under section 15(2)(fa) of the Chartered Accountants Act 1949, with a published four-level sanctions ladder ending in disciplinary referral — and which nonetheless does not gate the Certificate of Practice. ICAN has no statutory basis and no published sanctions ladder, and does hard-gate the licence. Opposite architectures reaching a similar place, as our piece on ICAI's 2026 CPE changes sets out.

One trap to avoid if you go looking for the rule. The document on ICAN's site titled "Constitution and By-Laws" is the constitution of the ICAN Association of Accounting Technicians, not the Institute's members' by-laws, and it contains no continuing development rule. Its object of promoting "the continuing education and intellectual growth of its members" is an aspiration relating to accounting technicians. It should not be cited as ICAN's CPD rule.

Where it does bite: the practising licence

The requirement is a hard condition of the practice licence, on first application and on renewal.

The renewal conditions require that the member "must have obtained a minimum of 120 MCPD credit hours in the last three (3) years", as one of seven conditions, alongside being financially up to date at district and institute level and having paid the annual licence fee.

The fresh application conditions require the same of the applicant — and, notably, of the sponsor: a member sponsoring another's application must themselves hold a minimum of 120 credit hours in the last three consecutive years.

Credit is attendance-based. The older portal document describes the hours as obtained "through attendance of MCPE and other Institute's activities", and credits post automatically to the member's online profile when they register and pay for a programme. A standard two-day programme carries 15 credit points, executive programmes 17, and the Annual Accountant Conference 18; the published range is a minimum of 2 and a maximum of 18. Members can also earn hours through invigilation, marking, district meetings, pool setting and syllabus review.

What ICAN does not publish, which is most of it

We set out to answer eight questions about the scheme. Six are not publicly answerable from ICAN's own sources, and saying so is more useful than guessing.

There is no published structured or verifiable split. The professional development page says credit "is obtainable both for structured and unstructured activities" and stops. Any article quoting a structured proportion for ICAN has invented it.

There are no published mandatory subjects. The 2026 schedule lists topics from audit and tax practice through information technology, Islamic finance and sustainability reporting, but designates none compulsory. ICAN publishes no equivalent of ICAI's mandatory ethics, auditing and digital technology hours.

There are no published exemptions — no age, health, first-year or non-resident exemption anywhere we could find. The right statement is that ICAN publishes no exemption policy, not that none exists; the Council may operate one unpublished. Note also that references to exemption on ICAN's professional development pages concern examination exemptions for students, which is an easy misreading since the links sit on the same page.

There is no published member-level monitoring or audit process. What ICAN does publish is programme monitoring — its guidance notes that an organiser outside Lagos provides transport, accommodation and feeding for ICAN's monitor, which is oversight of accredited providers rather than verification of members' claimed hours. A separate requirement that a practitioner "must have been monitored during the three years of the previous licence" is practice review, not development verification.

There is no published sanctions schedule. No levels, no penalty hours, no fines, no referral process. The only published consequence is operational: without 120 hours over three years you cannot obtain or renew a practice licence, so it lapses. For a non-practising member, who is formally bound — the scheme is "Compulsory for EVERY QUALIFIED MEMBER, of the Institute whose membership is current" — no published consequence exists at all.

And it is not documented how unstructured hours are claimed or evidenced, which sits oddly with the statement that they count. We found no self-declaration mechanism of the kind ICAI operates.

Why this matters beyond Nigeria

Two reasons. The first is practical: if you are advising, recruiting or selling into this market, the only figure you can safely rely on is 40 a year and 120 over three, and everything else about the scheme should be checked with ICAN directly rather than taken from any document on its site, including the ones marked Latest 2026.

The second is methodological. A body can be fully assessed by IFAC as aligned with the international standard while publishing contradictory figures, no instrument, no split, no subjects, no exemptions, no monitoring and no sanctions. Alignment with a standard is a statement about the requirement's shape, not about how discoverable it is to the member who has to meet it.

One final note on searching for any of this. ICAN is also the abbreviation of the Institute of Chartered Accountants of Nepal, which runs its own tiered scheme, so results mix the two. And ICAN Nigeria's official domain is icanig.org rather than the ican.org.ng that appears in its email addresses.

For a body where the obligation is in by-laws rather than statute, with the same institute-versus-regulator question resolving the other way, see our piece on Malaysia's requirement not being in the Accountants Act. For why none of these schemes resemble each other, see our explainer on IES 7. ICAN's own statement of the requirement is on its professional development page.