SAIPA Requires 40 CPD Hours a Year, With Two Ethics Hours for Every Designation

SAIPA members need forty continuing professional development hours a calendar year, split between structured and unstructured learning, and two of those hours must be ethics regardless of which designations the member holds. The whole of that requirement sits in a single board policy document, hung off one clause of the by-laws, and nothing in South African statute imposes it.

First, a disambiguation that matters, because the three bodies are routinely confused. The South African Institute of Professional Accountants is not the South African Institute of Chartered Accountants, and neither is the Independent Regulatory Board for Auditors. SAICA runs a different model with different vocabulary, and IRBA is a statutory audit regulator. Everything below is SAIPA's own, read from SAIPA's own documents. Nothing in it comes from SAICA or IRBA.

Forty hours a year, and no three-year cycle

Clause 8.3 of SAIPA's Continuous Professional Development Policy states that "the CPD requirement is a minimum of forty (40) CPD hours". Clause 8.2 fixes the cycle as "one calendar year, from 1 January to 31 December".

That is unusual. Most of the bodies we have documented run a multi-year block with an annual floor underneath it — 120 over three years with 20 a year in Canada and Hong Kong, 120 over three years in Nigeria, a rolling three-business-year total in Japan. SAIPA has no multi-year cycle at all. Each calendar year stands alone at forty hours, which means there is nothing to average across and no later year in which to make up a shortfall against the same requirement.

The split moves with the number of designations you hold

A member holding one designation needs, under clause 8.4, "twenty (20) structured CPD hours" and "twenty (20) unstructured CPD hours". A member holding two or more needs, under clause 8.5, "between twenty (20) and twenty-six (26) structured CPD hours" and "between fourteen (14) and twenty (20) unstructured CPD hours".

Note what that does. The total does not rise. It stays at forty however many designations you carry. What changes is the mix: the structured share increases and the unstructured share falls to match, reaching twenty-four to twenty-six structured hours at the four-designation combinations. Additional designations make the requirement harder to satisfy without making it larger.

On vocabulary, SAIPA is helpfully explicit where other bodies are not. Clauses 2.6 and 2.7 use "structured" and "verifiable" interchangeably, and "unstructured" and "non-verifiable" interchangeably. Its public requirements page labels the columns "Total Verifiable hours" and "Total Unstructured Hours" in the same tables. That saves a reader the guesswork, and it is worth contrasting with jurisdictions where "structured" and "verifiable" are two different tests that a single course may satisfy only one of.

Two ethics hours for every designation, without exception

SAIPA allocates structured hours by subject, in an annexure to the policy reproduced as the tables on its requirements page. Clause 10.1 requires that "CPD hours must be current for all mandatory CPD categories (Financial Reporting, Taxation, Ethics, etc.)".

The baseline Professional Accountant (SA) allocation is financial reporting four hours, taxation four, ethics two, technology two and other eight, making up the twenty structured hours. A Tax Practitioner (SA) sees taxation rise to ten and other fall to two. Adding Independent Reviewer adds four hours; Business Rescue Practitioner adds four; Business Advisory adds four.

Across every one of those combinations, ethics is two structured hours. It does not scale with the number of designations and it is never waived. That makes SAIPA's ethics requirement more uniform than most, and it is the one subject that behaves identically whatever the member's practice looks like.

It is also, and this is the structural point, in a board-policy annexure. Not in the by-laws, not in a regulation, not in an Act. It can be changed by the board adopting a new version of the annexure.

The by-laws contain exactly one CPD provision

SAIPA's by-laws, updated 25 March 2025, mention continuing development once. Clause 1.1.3.19.2 appears inside the definition of "good standing", requiring that the member has "complied with the Institute's Continuous Professional Development (CPD) requirements".

That is the whole of it. The by-laws state no hours, no split, no subject and no deadline, and they impose no continuing-development-specific disciplinary consequence. What they do is make compliance a component of good standing, which is then the hook everything else hangs from.

There is a loose end in that chain worth recording. Clause 23 of the by-laws empowers the board to make "Policies, Rules, Regulations and Other Provisions" — but it does not mention continuing professional development among them. So the authority for the policy is a general power rather than an express one, and the link from by-law to policy is implicit rather than stated. That is a weaker chain than, for instance, a Cabinet Office Ordinance made under a named section of a statute, and it is the same kind of question that makes the instrument a requirement sits in as important as the figure inside it.

The policy document has two defects on its own face

The governing document is "Continuous Professional Development Policy", document PO57, Version 6, approved and effective 24 July 2023, with a signature block dated 31 July 2023.

Two things about it are worth flagging to anyone relying on it. Its footer runs "PO57-V6" while its own internal document control table reads "PO57-V5", and nothing in the document explains the discrepancy. And its stated review date of 24 July 2025 has passed, with the August 2023 upload still the version linked from SAIPA's live requirements page and no version 7 published.

We treat it as the current policy, because SAIPA links it as such. But a member reading it today is reading a document that was due for review more than a year ago.

There is no declaration — recording is the reporting

This catches people out because almost every other body requires an annual attestation. SAIPA does not have one.

Clause 7.1.3 requires members to "regularly record their CPD hours, together with evidence and/or supporting documents, on the MYSAIPA portal", and clause 7.1.4 to do so "with the utmost honesty". There is no separate declaration or attestation clause anywhere in the policy. Recording on the portal is the reporting.

The dates everyone quotes come from SAIPA's frequently asked questions page rather than from the policy: members submit hours by 31 December each year, and compliance is checked and validated on 31 January of the following year. Those are real operational dates, but they are web-page facts, not policy clauses, and anyone citing a clause for them is citing something that does not exist. The policy itself does carry three date rules: new members' pro-rated hours are due by 31 December of their first year under clause 9.1, non-resident practitioners submit documents before 31 January under clause 13.2, and carry-over is adjusted only at year end under clause 10.5.

Monitoring: monthly audits, triggered by capacity

Clause 11 is headed "Compliance Auditing" and its framing is unlike anything else we have read. Clause 11.1 provides that SAIPA "will verify members' logged hours against the CPD requirements using a sample-based approach ... in which monthly audits are conducted on a sample of members' reported CPD hours", and then explains the trigger: "the audits will be conducted when the CPD evidence submitted exceeds the capacity of Compliance Unit to verify all CPD entries".

So sampling is the fallback, not the design. The stated default is verifying everything, with a sample used when volume outstrips the team. Clause 11.2 leaves selection "at the discretion of the CPD Committee", and no sample rate, no audit count and no compliance statistics are published anywhere.

Separately, hours claimed from non-SAIPA providers and from in-house training carry a "pending" status until manually reviewed and verified, under clause 8.17. Verification requires either a confirmation-of-attendance letter or an affidavit giving the date, topic, duration, presenter credentials and a content summary. A member cannot assume in-house training counts until someone at SAIPA has looked at it.

The consequences reach further than membership

Clause 12 sets out the ladder, and its later rungs are the widest-reaching of any body we have documented.

SAIPA first assists at-risk members with corrective-action recommendations. Then the member loses good-standing status, which is where the by-laws clause bites. The member must submit the cause of non-compliance and a recovery plan to the CPD Committee. On continued non-compliance, clause 12.4 provides for referral to the Disciplinary Committee, a fine, and suspension or striking off for up to one year at the board's discretion — and lists the collateral consequences: revocation of Recognised Controlling Body status, notification to the Companies and Intellectual Property Commission, and loss of B-BBEE certificate, annual financial statement sign-off and professional indemnity insurance privileges. Clause 12.5 adds that continued use of a designation after suspension or striking off may bring legal action, including a fraud case with the South African Police Service.

SAIPA's own frequently asked questions page puts the practical bite more plainly: a member who is short is non-compliant in professional status, and their professional indemnity cover "will therefore be at risk" until the shortfall is made up. For a practitioner signing financial statements, that is the consequence that matters long before any disciplinary hearing.

Exemptions and deferment

Clause 13.1 exempts "retired and non-practicing members" automatically. Clause 13.2 covers non-residents practising abroad and registered with an IFAC-accredited or SAIPA-recognised body, who submit a letter of good standing and a list of their continuing development hours before 31 January — a recognition route rather than a true exemption, since the member still reports, just against another body's standard.

Clause 14 provides for deferment for members in good standing, giving as examples an extended career break, extended illness and extended hospitalisation. Applications must be made within three months of the triggering event, or as soon as practicable with justification.

One thing the policy does not say at all

There is no record retention period. We looked for one specifically, in the policy, in the by-laws, and on all three of SAIPA's live continuing development pages. Nothing. The policy requires evidence to be uploaded to the portal, but never states how long a member must keep the underlying documents.

That may be a deliberate consequence of the portal design — if the evidence lives on SAIPA's system, the member's own retention duty is arguably moot. But it is not stated, and a member facing a query about a course from several years ago has no published rule telling them whether they were supposed to still have the certificate.

SAIPA has been an IFAC member since 1995 and is assessed as "Sustain" on the continuing development obligation. The subject tables are published at SAIPA's CPD requirements page.