Oman Has No Auditor CPD Requirement

Across every jurisdiction in this series, the answer to "what is the continuing education requirement?" has been a number, or an obligation without a number, or at minimum a rule somebody could point at. Oman is the first case where the answer appears to be that there is no requirement at all.

We want to be precise about what that claim does and does not mean, because a verified negative is only useful if its scope is stated.

Who regulates the profession — and the answer has changed

Oman's accounting and auditing profession is regulated by the Financial Services Authority, formerly the Capital Market Authority. The Authority operates an Accounting and Auditing Profession Sector and publishes the registers of external auditors, internal auditors, and authorised accounting and auditing offices. Oman's official government services catalogue names the Financial Services Authority as the issuing entity for both new and renewed accounting-and-auditing office licences.

This is worth stating because it is the thing most international summaries of Oman get wrong, or simply omit: regulation of the profession was transferred to the Authority from the Ministry of Commerce, Industry and Investment Promotion. The transfer is recorded in a 2024 Royal Decree whose text we could only reach through a compilation that expressly disclaims official status, so we rely for the regulator's role on the Authority's own published pages rather than on that text.

The two instruments, named by the regulator itself

The Authority states its own legal basis for accrediting auditors:

• Law 77/86, organising the practice of the accounting and auditing profession
• Administrative Decision No. 8/2018, which sets the accreditation requirements

A firm licensed by the Ministry may apply to the Authority for accreditation once it meets Decision 8/2018's requirements. Accreditation is what permits the audit of Authority-regulated companies — the Omani equivalent of the registers that, in Egypt, turned out to carry the binding continuing-education condition.

What the accreditation conditions actually require

From the Authority's own announcement of Decision 8/2018, accreditation is granted for two years on payment of the fee, with renewal applications due within 30 days before expiry. The conditions are:

• Five years' audit experience
• Sound reputation
• Five qualified employees, including a professional partner
• Three of them, including the partner, with ten years' post-qualification audit experience
• Independence restrictions
• A penalty ladder running from warning to suspension or deregistration

There is no training requirement and no continuing-education condition anywhere in that list.

The same is true of the practice licence itself. Oman's official services portal sets out the documents for renewing an accounting-and-auditing office licence — commercial register, municipal licence, office documents, certificate of employment, a fee of 50 Omani rials — and for a new licence, which asks for home-country certification where a partner is foreign, experience certificates, an Omani partner with not less than two years' experience in accounting and auditing, a statement of approved academic subjects, optional membership of an international body, a written pledge of full-time devotion to the profession, and police clearance.

Neither list contains a continuing-education requirement, an hours figure, or a reference to any instrument that would impose one.

How competence is maintained instead: experience and headcount

This is the structural point, and it is a coherent regulatory design rather than an oversight.

Registration under Law 77/86 runs for three years, renewable. Authority accreditation runs for two years, renewable. At each renewal the regulator re-tests experience thresholds, staffing levels and independence — but not learning.

So Oman assures audit quality through periodic re-registration without continuing education: who you are, how long you have practised, how many qualified people you employ and how senior they are. Competence is inferred from experience and firm composition rather than evidenced by training.

That is a genuinely different answer from Switzerland, which is the other jurisdiction here with no state hours figure. Switzerland's federal regulator deliberately defers to professional associations that impose real, enforced requirements — 32 structured hours a year in one case. The obligation exists; it has simply been relocated. In Oman we could locate no association rule at all, because no Omani professional body website surfaced across repeated searches.

It is also the mirror image of Kuwait and Qatar, its immediate neighbours, which both impose binding training obligations whose quantity is simply not published. Three Gulf states, three different positions.

The scope of this negative, stated honestly

A claim that something does not exist is harder to support than a claim that it does, so here is exactly what was checked. Nine distinct retrieval routes, across four separate licensing and accreditation instruments:

• The Authority's Accounting and Auditing Profession Sector pages
• The Authority's auditors subsection, which identified Law 77/86 and Decision 8/2018
• The Authority's own announcement setting out Decision 8/2018's conditions in full
• The Authority's decisions and circulars listing
• The official government services pages for both new and renewal office licences
• Recent sectoral decisions of the Authority — covering the Rising Companies Market, the securities law executive regulation, insurance loss adjusters, actuarial services offices and the adoption of international reporting and sustainability standards — none of which imposes auditor continuing education; the closest provisions are generic duties on licensed firms to train their staff

What we could not do is read the official text of Law 77/86, the 2024 Royal Decree or Decision 8/2018 on an official full-text host. Oman does not expose these where an automated reader can reach them: the Authority's legislations tab did not render, and the state news agency refuses automated access. The statutory text we saw rests on a compilation that states on its own pages that it is not an official source. The Authority's own announcement is what carries Decision 8/2018's substance at primary level, and that announcement contains no CPD.

We also found a reference to an Omani Ministry of Labour professional-classification certificate for accounting occupations, but only in secondary sources. It reads as an occupational-classification and work-permit condition rather than a continuing-education cycle, and we did not verify it at a primary source, so we are not presenting it as either.

The Authority publishes its registers, decisions and accreditation requirements at fsa.gov.om.

In short

Oman has no continuing professional development requirement for licensed auditors that we could locate at either level — not in the practice licence, new or renewed, and not in the accreditation that permits auditing regulated companies. Registration runs three years and accreditation two, both renewable on experience, staffing and independence conditions alone. For the wider question of why national requirements differ this much, see where accountant CPD requirements come from.