Malaysia's CPE Requirement Is Not in the Accountants Act

You will find it written that the Accountants Act 1967 requires Malaysian accountants to complete continuing professional education. It does not. The Act is silent on the subject. MIA's requirement is a Council by-law, and knowing that changes what kind of obligation it is.

What the Act actually says about education

The Accountants Act 1967 does not mention continuing professional education or development anywhere. Its education provisions concern initial qualification only. Section 6(b) makes it a function of the Institute to provide for the training and education by the Institute or any other body, and section 7(1)(d) allows rules on the training or education of candidates for admission as members and the fees payable for it.

The enabling power for the CPE obligation is elsewhere. Section 10(a) permits the Council to make by-laws to provide for all matters not expressly reserved for the Institute in general meeting. Section 7(1) gives the Institute in general meeting a separate rule-making power, requiring Ministerial approval and publication in the Gazette under section 7(2).

Two further details worth knowing. The Act regulates practice through registration and a restriction on holding out — section 22 requires a person to be registered as a chartered accountant under the Act — and the Act does not use the term practising certificate at all. The most recent amendment listed is the Accountants (Amendment) Act 2001, in force 28 June 2001.

So MIA's CPE obligation is a Council by-law made under section 10(a). That is a binding obligation on members and breach is a disciplinary matter. It is not a statutory CPE duty, and it is not mere guidance either — both of those characterisations are in circulation and both are wrong.

Where the obligation lives

Section B110, Continuing Professional Education, in the By-Laws on Professional Ethics, Conduct and Practice. It runs from B110.1 to B110.13, with the CPE audit provisions at B110.6 to B110.13 and the exemption criteria at B110.9 to B110.12. Accredited structured activities are enumerated in Appendix V to the By-Laws.

The current edition is the November 2024 update, effective 15 December 2024. The revised By-Laws were issued 28 August 2023 and took effect 15 December 2023 unless otherwise stated.

A sourcing caveat we should state plainly. We were not able to read the text of Section B110. Both published By-Laws PDFs loaded but text extraction terminated around page 42, in the middle of Part A, and B110 sits at page 262. Every figure below comes from MIA's own web pages quoting B110, not from B110 itself. Two independent MIA pages agree word for word, which is good corroboration, but we cannot give sub-paragraph numbers for the hour requirements and nobody should publish one who has not read the section.

The requirement, and the thing that makes it distinctive

MIA requires members to complete at least 120 CPE credit hours of relevant CPE learning for every rolling three calendar year period, of which at least 60 CPE credit hours should be structured and verifiable, and at least twenty CPE credit hours of such structured and verifiable CPE learning should be obtained each calendar year. Participation must be in activities that are relevant to the member's current and future work.

And from 1 January 2026, a minimum of 2 structured and verifiable CPE hours which are related to professional ethics.

Now the architectural point. MIA's category is structured and verifiable, fused. It is not 60 structured hours of which some must be verifiable, and it is not two separate sub-quotas. An activity has to satisfy both tests to count toward the 60.

That is a genuinely different design from its neighbours. Singapore's ISCA requires verifiable hours only, with no structured concept at all in its membership policy. Hong Kong's HKICPA required verifiable hours only until 1 December 2026, when it adds a structured floor as a third tier beneath the verifiable one.

The fused test also gives MIA the strictest annual floor of the three. All three bodies require twenty hours a year, and the three obligations are not the same: HKICPA's twenty may be of any evidential quality, ISCA's must be verifiable, and MIA's must clear both the structured and the verifiable test. A member of all three could satisfy Hong Kong's annual minimum with technical reading and fail the other two.

Secondary sources frequently give MIA as 120 hours over three years with no annual minimum at all, or give the annual twenty as twenty hours of anything. Both are wrong.

The broadest scope of the three

MIA applies one number to everybody. Its CPE requirements apply to all professional accountants regardless of sector or size of business in which they operate, and members must comply regardless of their current job function.

There is no practising and non-practising distinction in the base obligation and no members-in-business carve-out. Where ISCA tiers by membership class at 30, 60 and 120 hours, and HKICPA exempts the genuinely inactive, MIA sets one requirement and handles the edge cases through discretionary exemption.

Those exemptions apply only to Chartered Accountants, which is a restriction we have not seen reported anywhere, and cover senior members aged 60 or above and retired, homemakers, long-term carers of a close family member for more than twelve months, and the long-term unemployed for more than twelve months. The Institute has sole discretion to grant them.

The only standalone CPE declaration of the three

MIA members must update their CPE event details online — date, course title, organiser, duration — and make a separate CPE compliance declaration, and both must be performed by 31 December of each calendar year.

That is a distinct, dated filing obligation. ISCA's declaration rides on the membership renewal professional declaration due 31 January, and HKICPA's rides on the Annual Return. MIA is the only one of the three where the CPE declaration is a thing you do on its own, and 31 December is the date.

Supporting documents are not required for externally obtained hours, though the Institute may request evidence. Members must maintain records of their compliance and tender appropriate evidence if called upon to do so — and MIA publishes no retention period at all. Not five years, not any number. ISCA requires five years and HKICPA requires five, so anyone writing that all three require five years' retention is wrong on Malaysia. Keep five anyway, but know that the obligation is to produce rather than to retain for a stated period.

Audit is conducted by the Institute on a sample of professional accountants who are selected at random, governed by B110.13. No sample size is published. The random basis is itself a contrast with HKICPA, which selects on risk and raises the probability for members with a history of non-compliance.

The sanction threshold is higher than it looks

MIA states that it will take disciplinary action against those members who wilfully fail to comply, and against members who fail to respond to its compliance inquiries.

Note the word wilfully. That is a higher threshold than ISCA's or HKICPA's, both of which treat a bare shortfall as actionable. On MIA's own wording the trigger is wilful failure rather than failure.

But the practical consequence can be severe, and it arrives indirectly. MIA notes that non-compliance could lead to difficulties renewing membership, and for practising certificate and audit licence holders could lead to failure in renewing the practising certificate or the audit licence.

The audit licence inversion

This is where Malaysia runs opposite to Singapore, and it is worth stating because conflating institute and regulator breaks differently in each country.

Malaysia's audit licence is not MIA's. Approval of company auditors rests on section 263 of the Companies Act 2016, with the Ministry of Finance having delegated its power to approve applications to the Accountant General, handled through the Committee for the Approval of Company Auditors. Approval is valid for two years and must be renewed. Applicants must be MIA members holding a practising certificate.

Neither MIA's audit licence page nor its public practice guidance states any CPE requirement for the licence itself. The additional CPE requirement for approved company auditors is imposed by MIA, not by the Ministry: for renewal as an approved company auditor, at least ten of the twenty annual structured hours must relate to ISQC 1, approved auditing standards, approved accounting standards or professional ethics, and certain non-technical activities in Appendix V cannot count toward it.

So in Singapore the statutory regulator writes the tougher CPE rule for auditors, as our piece on Singapore's two CPE regimes sets out. In Malaysia the statutory authority writes none and the institute supplies the auditor-specific rule.

And because MIA membership and a practising certificate are preconditions of audit approval, a CPE failure at the institute level can collapse a licence granted by the Minister of Finance. The practising certificate itself renews on 1 July annually, conditional on the preceding year's twenty hours.

One thing we could not reconcile and will not guess at: MIA's public practice guidance refers to a practising certificate being valid for six months while its practising certificate FAQ gives an annual 1 July renewal. Those probably describe different things, but we could not confirm it from a primary page, so we are not publishing a validity period.

Nor could we identify the amending instrument that inserted the 2026 ethics requirement into B110 — the current published edition predates it, so there is presumably a later amendment or Council pronouncement we did not locate.

For the neighbouring regime that changes this December, see HKICPA's CPD changes from 1 December 2026, and for why bodies are free to design these schemes so differently in the first place, our explainer on IES 7. MIA publishes the Act itself on its Accountants Act 1967 page, where its silence on CPD can be confirmed directly.