Kenya Puts CPD in Subsidiary Legislation and Publishes Four Different Deadlines

Kenya is one of very few jurisdictions where an accountant's continuing development duty is created by subsidiary legislation rather than by a professional body's own policy. It is also one where the body's instruments give four different answers to the question of when you have to report.

Three layers, and the duty is created in the middle one

The Accountants Act, No. 15 of 2008, contains no express continuing development provision. What it supplies is authority and a sanction. Section 9(3) empowers the Council to issue standards of professional practice; section 9(4) allows by-laws, regulations and guidelines with the Minister's approval; section 8(a) gives the Institute the function of promoting standards of professional competence and practice. And section 30(1)(h) makes it professional misconduct where a member "fails to observe and apply professional, technical, ethical or other standards prescribed by the Council".

The duty itself is created by Legal Notice No. 147 of 2022 — the Accountants (Standards of Professional Practice and Ethical Conduct) Regulations, 2022, made by the Council under section 9(3) and (4) and gazetted on 30 September 2022. Regulation 7(2) requires a professional accountant to furnish the Institute with a report of their activity for the prior year. Regulation 7(3) requires a member who falls short to comply in the following calendar year. And Regulation 7(5) makes non-compliance professional misconduct under section 30(1)(h), with the member liable to disciplinary action.

Note what the regulations do not do. The Third Schedule, Part VII, paragraph 9 states only that "a member shall be required to attain the minimum continuous professional development hours each year". No number appears. The figure is left to the Council — so Kenya's structure is a statutory sanction attached to a figure set administratively.

That figure lives in the third layer, the ICPAK Continuing Professional Development Policy, approved by Council on 27 January 2015, amended in 2016 and implemented from January 2017. Worth knowing: the policy PDF itself carries no approval date or version statement — that chronology comes from the page describing it.

Forty units a year, and the structured share is the binding constraint

Clause 7.0 sets it out: "Each and every member of ICPAK shall have on average of at least 40 CPD Units per year", and "a total cumulative CPD point of 120 for the current three years". Then the split: "Of the 40 units in each annual cycle 25 units shall be structured and 15 unstructured CPD."

Forty a year is at the higher end internationally — most bodies that use a 120-over-three-years total pair it with a 20-hour annual floor. Kenya's annual figure is double that, and because it averages over the immediate past three years, there is some smoothing.

The real constraint is where the structured units have to come from. Clause 8.1 divides structured activity into three categories with caps. Category A covers ICPAK and other professional accountancy organisation courses, where "no single event shall exceed a total of 20 CPD Units". Category B covers other organisations, regulators, competent authorities, and virtual and in-house events, capped at 10 units a calendar year. Category C covers academic study, teaching, conference papers, publications and examining, capped at five units a year.

And then: at least 20 of the 25 structured units must come from Category A, with the remaining five from B or C. So four-fifths of a Kenyan accountant's structured requirement has to be met through the Institute or a peer body. That is a considerably tighter supply constraint than the verifiable requirements most bodies impose, which typically accept any provider that issues evidence.

Unstructured activity is self-improvement outside those categories — reading professional journals, self-study, trainings without certificates — with a single unstructured activity earning no more than five units a year.

No ethics quota, but mandatory training by licence category

ICPAK sets no ethics hours. Clause 3.0 quotes the Code of Ethics principle that "a professional accountant has a continuing duty to maintain professional knowledge and skill" without attaching a figure to it.

What is mandatory instead is competence-based training tied to the member's licence category — auditing and assurance, accounting and controls and management consultancy, taxation, or composite. That requirement is statutory: Legal Notice 147 of 2022, Third Schedule Part IX, paragraph 17 requires practising members and applicants for licences to complete Council-determined mandatory training, and Part VIII requires practising members to attend at least two competency-based trainings.

So Kenya prescribes by practice area rather than by subject. Compare South Africa's SAIPA, which also runs 40 hours a year but allocates them by subject and fixes two ethics hours for every designation. Same headline number, entirely different architecture.

Four deadlines, and we are not going to pick one

This is the finding most likely to catch out a Kenyan member, and it is a defect in the published rules rather than in anyone's understanding of them.

Clause 11.0 of the policy says a return form is sent to members by 31 December and returned to the secretariat by 31 January of the following year, adding that "CPD hours not filed with the Institute by 31st January of the subsequent year will not be recognized". Non-Institute events are to be reported within one month of year end.

Clause 5.0 of the same policy, citing Bylaw 34(i), says members must furnish the Institute with information "not later than three months after the end of that year". Regulation 7(2) of the Legal Notice says the same — three months.

And the Legal Notice's Third Schedule, Part IX, paragraph 24 gives a different set again: 31 March for a good-standing declaration, 30 June for total hours and a good-standing declaration, and 31 January for practising licence renewal. Paragraphs 22 and 23 refer to filing returns within six months of year end.

One month, three months, six months, and three specific dates — across two instruments, one of which is subsidiary legislation. We did not resolve which governs, and a member should not be guessing. The conservative reading is 31 January, because that is the date after which the policy says hours "will not be recognized".

Retention is five years, and the member carries the whole burden

Clause 11.0 requires each member to retain evidence of compliance "for a period of five years" — the longest of the three South Asian and East African bodies we looked at this week, and in line with most Canadian and US regimes.

But the policy contains no audit or sample-checking clause at all. Its position is that "members of the Institute bear the primary responsibility of documenting that they have complied". The statutory monitoring provision, Third Schedule Part IX paragraph 25, is a returns-confirmation cycle rather than an audit: the Institute issues annual returns by 31 December and members confirm them. ICPAK-hosted event hours are credited automatically; everything else the member enters.

No sample rate and no compliance statistics are published. IFAC's own page asserts that ICPAK "continues to audit compliance", without a rate or figures, and ICPAK's action plan document would not extract, so we cannot corroborate it either way.

Nine sanctions, listed but not ranked

Clause 10.0 lists nine measures, and the policy presents them as unranked bullets rather than an escalation ladder. They include non-renewal of practising certificates, notifying the member's employer, referral for disciplinary action, disqualification from contesting elective Institute posts, disqualification from committees and working groups — and, unusually, disqualification from Fellowship consideration together with withdrawal of a Fellowship already awarded.

The Legal Notice does escalate properly, in Third Schedule Part IX: a grace period on an undertaking to comply the following year, then sanctions including withholding a practising licence and notifying the employer, then suspension with the member's name removed from the active register, then deregistration under sections 29(1) and (8), with reinstatement on proof of compliance.

The two sets do not map onto each other, and we did not establish which governs where they differ.

Exemptions, and one you should not cite

Clause 12.0 allows written application to the Member Services Division on three grounds: foreign residency where there is no professional institute in the country of residence and no continuing development opportunities there; health, supported by a medical certificate from a qualified medical doctor; and other similar hardship acceptable under the international education standards. An Exemption Committee decides and communicates within five working days, and exempt members must provide at least semi-annual status updates.

The superseded 2014 guidelines had a narrower and quite different ground — members over 60 not in practice could apply for exemption. That document is superseded and the age-60 rule should not be cited as current, which is the same trap we found on CA ANZ's site with an abolished age exemption still publicly downloadable.

Two other things worth correcting while we are here, because they appear in secondary writing about Kenya. The examining body is the Kenya Accountants and Secretaries National Examinations Board, established by section 14(1), with its functions at section 17(1); ICPAK's role is only advisory, under section 8(d). And the "Registration of Accountants Board" is not a current Kenyan registration authority — the 2008 Act establishes no such body. Registration sits with the Registration and Quality Assurance Committee under section 13. The older name appears in the Act only in the Seventh Schedule, as a transitional reference to the predecessor body.

ICPAK has been an IFAC member since 1980. The regulations are published at Kenya Law.