Kuwait CPD: Mandatory, Enforced, Unquantified

Kuwait makes continuing professional education mandatory for every practising auditor, requires them to follow a training plan the Ministry approves, publishes an annual report on who complied, and takes action against those who did not.

It does not publish the number of hours. And the statute most commonly cited for the obligation was replaced seven years ago.

The obligation, stated by the Ministry itself

The source here is the Ministry of Commerce and Industry's own website, not a professional body and not a commentary. The Ministry requires practising auditors to register in the continuing education programme for auditors, and to adhere to the training plan it approves jointly with the Kuwait Accountants and Auditors Association.

Two features of that arrangement are worth separating.

First, the professional body is the delivery channel, not the source of the duty. Auditors are directed to the association to enrol, but the obligation and the approved plan come from the Ministry. That is the opposite of the pattern in Jordan, where the professional body publishes the rule and the hours.

Second, this is a jointly approved plan rather than a free market in qualifying activity. An auditor does not assemble their own CPD from whatever sources they prefer; they follow a programme the regulator has signed off.

The two instruments — and a correction

The Ministry names its own legal basis:

• Law No. 103 of 2019 on the Practice of the Auditing Profession
• Ministerial Resolution No. 159 of 2023, which the Ministry describes as covering the development of auditors' professional capabilities and the mechanism for qualification and continuous training

Law No. 103 of 2019 supersedes Decree Law No. 5 of 1981 on the practice of the auditing profession. That matters because IFAC's own country page for Kuwait still cites the 1981 decree law as the instrument establishing the CPD requirement. The obligation is real; the citation points at a replaced statute.

This is the third time in this series that the internationally repeated account of a jurisdiction has turned out to be out of date or misattributed — after Jordan, where the rule sits in a subordinate regulation rather than the law it is credited to, and Egypt, where a binding regulator requirement goes unmentioned entirely.

The enforcement design is the most transparent we have found

Most regimes keep compliance private between the regulator and the individual. Kuwait does not.

The Ministry states that it will publish an annual report on auditors' compliance with the approved training mechanism, and will take action against those who fail to follow the programme.

A published compliance report is a reputational mechanism as much as a regulatory one. In most jurisdictions an auditor who quietly falls short faces a private letter; in Kuwait the fact of non-compliance is intended to be public. Set against the enforcement ladders we survey in what happens if you do not comply with CPD, this is a different lever altogether — neither a fine nor a suspension, but disclosure.

The surrounding register architecture supports it. The Ministry operates the auditors' register, the practice licence and its renewal as three distinct services, and in 2025 constituted three statutory committees by ministerial decision: an auditors' registration committee, a permanent technical committee on accounting rules and audit evidence guides, and an investigation committee for auditors' violations.

The figure you may have seen is not an auditor figure

Kuwait's Capital Markets Authority is not the source of auditor continuing education, and conflating the two produces a wrong number.

The Capital Markets Law requires the Authority to set the rules and conditions auditors must meet to be recorded in its register, and requires licensed persons to appoint an Authority-approved auditor. Neither provision imposes continuing education.

What the Authority does run is a Professional Qualifications Programme covering registered employment positions at licensed persons, forming part of its fit-and-proper rules. That is a qualification and competence regime for people working at licensed financial firms. It is not an auditor CPD rule, and any hours figure attached to it must not be attributed to auditors.

Similarly, the Central Bank of Kuwait's instructions on external auditors of banks, insurance companies and financial companies set an experience threshold — a minimum of seven years — and no continuing-education requirement.

Why no hours figure

Twelve distinct retrieval routes were tried. The obligation is primary-sourced from the Ministry; the quantity is not reachable.

• Ministerial Resolution No. 159 of 2023 is not published on the Ministry's own site — its ministerial-decisions index carries only 2025 and 2026 — nor on any official gazette host we could reach. Only commercial law-firm compilations carry it, which is not a standard we publish national figures from.
• The text of Law No. 103 of 2019 has a dedicated Ministry page that returns a host error on every attempt.
• The Executive Regulation of the audit profession law is the single most likely home for the hours figure. We located its official PDF link from the Ministry's own page, and the fetch was blocked.

So the gap is a hosting and access problem, not evidence that no figure exists. We would rather say that than print a number from a law-firm summary.

What to do with this

If you practise as an auditor in Kuwait, the operative requirement is to be enrolled in the Ministry-approved continuing education programme and to follow the approved training plan, with the association as the route in. The hours are set in instruments you will need to obtain from the Ministry directly.

Kuwait sits alongside Qatar as a Gulf jurisdiction with a binding, primary-sourced training obligation and no publicly retrievable quantity — a combination that is more common than the international summaries suggest. For how the same obligation is expressed where the number is published, see where accountant CPD requirements come from, and for evidence you should keep regardless of the stated minimum, our CPD record examples.

The Ministry publishes its auditor services, register and announcements at moci.gov.kw.

In short

Continuing professional education is mandatory for practising Kuwaiti auditors under Law No. 103 of 2019 and Ministerial Resolution No. 159 of 2023, delivered through a Ministry-approved training plan, with an annual published compliance report and action against non-compliers. The hours are not publicly retrievable, and the 1981 decree law still cited internationally has been superseded.