Thailand CPD: 12 Hours a Year for Bookkeepers

Thailand has a clearly documented CPD requirement for bookkeepers, a genuinely obscure one for the chief financial officers of listed companies, and a requirement for licensed CPAs whose actual hours figure we could not establish from any primary source.

We are going to tell you all three things, including the last one, because a widely repeated number that nobody can point to a source for is worth flagging rather than repeating.

The unusual thing about Thailand: the bookkeeper rule is the state rule

In most jurisdictions, the state regulates auditors and the professional body regulates everyone else. Thailand inverts part of that.

The binding CPD rule for accounting preparers — the population most other countries would call bookkeepers — is set by the Department of Business Development (DBD), a department of the Ministry of Commerce. Not by the professional body.

Meanwhile the CPD rule for licensed CPAs is a by-law of the professional body, the Federation of Accounting Professions under the Royal Patronage of His Majesty the King (TFAC), subject to approval by an oversight commission.

So in Thailand the lower-qualified population is regulated by a ministry with a statutory record-retention rule, and the higher-qualified population is regulated by its own professional body. That is the reverse of the pattern we described for Indonesia, where the ministry regulates the licensed auditors.

The bookkeeper requirement, verified at source

The instrument is a DBD notification on the qualifications and conditions of being an accounting preparer, dated 30 July 2014. It requires:

• At least 12 hours per calendar year
• Of which at least 6 hours must be on accounting content as prescribed by TFAC
• Notification within 30 days of the end of each calendar year, filed through the DBD website with supporting evidence
• Records retained for at least 3 years from the end of each activity

Twelve hours a year is modest by international standards — roughly a third of what most European auditor regimes demand. But note the subject split: half the requirement is reserved for accounting content specified by the professional body, which means the ministry sets the quantity and the profession sets the syllabus.

The three-year retention rule is also worth noting because it is explicit. Many national CPD instruments say nothing at all about how long records must be kept, which leaves practitioners guessing. Thailand's does. If you want to know what a record that survives three years of scrutiny looks like, our post on CPD record examples works through the formats regulators accept.

The CPA figure: what we verified, and what we could not

Here is the honest position on licensed Thai CPAs.

What is established:

• The requirement exists and takes the form of a TFAC by-law on attending training or seminars, not a ministerial regulation
• A third amendment was approved for publication in the Royal Gazette at an oversight commission meeting on 6 June 2022
• A fourth amendment was sent back for revision at a commission meeting on 4 December 2024, with no commencement date recorded — so it is pending, not in force
• CPD is declared on a specific TFAC form filed through the body's e-service, and a CPA who has not completed the year's CPD must complete it and file a written explanation

What we could not establish: the number of hours. Also not the formal/informal split, the ethics quota, the declaration deadline, or any retention period for CPAs.

TFAC's own regulations index returned a site error on every attempt, the CPD page's address is too long for our retrieval tooling to fetch, and the pre-migration Royal Gazette links for the relevant instruments are dead.

A figure of 40 hours a year, of which at least 20 formal, circulates widely on Thai training-provider and accounting-software websites. We are not publishing it as fact, because every source we found for it is a commercial site summarising rather than quoting, and we hold national figures to a primary-source standard. We mention its existence only so that you know what you are looking at when you encounter it.

If you need the Thai CPA figure, take it from TFAC directly. This is one of a small number of cases in this series where we would rather leave a gap than fill it — the same position we took on one of the two Swiss professional bodies.

A genuinely under-covered obligation: the listed-company CFO

This one is not aimed at accountants in practice at all, and we have seen it almost nowhere in English-language commentary.

A notification of Thailand's Capital Market Supervisory Board, dated 30 September 2016, with a companion instrument of 23 March 2015 for foreign issuers, imposes continuing education duties on the finance function of listed issuers:

• An issuer's chief financial officer must complete an orientation course of at least 12 hours before the filing date
• And at least 6 hours of CPD per calendar year thereafter
• The accounting supervisor of a foreign issuer needs at least 6 hours per calendar year
• A Thai issuer's accounting supervisor satisfies the duty through the DBD regime described above
• In-house training must be approved by the audit committee

Two things make this interesting. First, it is a securities regulator imposing CPD on a role rather than on a licence — you acquire the obligation by becoming a listed company's CFO, not by holding a qualification. Second, the audit committee approval requirement puts governance oversight on the training itself.

If your job title is finance director rather than auditor, this is the kind of obligation that is easy to miss, and it belongs to the broader question we address in whether CPD applies when your job is not accounting.

A naming problem worth knowing about

The oversight commission that approves TFAC's by-laws has a settled full Thai name, but its abbreviation is not settled: the DBD's own published minutes use one short form while another is in common usage, and we could not reconcile the two from the documents we retrieved.

If you are citing the commission in anything formal, use the full name. It is a small thing, but it is the kind of detail that makes a Thai regulatory reference either checkable or not.

Where this leaves you

If you prepare accounts in Thailand without a CPA licence, your requirement is 12 hours a year, 6 of them on prescribed accounting content, notified within 30 days of year end, with records kept three years. That is firm.

If you are a Thai CPA, your requirement is set by a TFAC by-law currently under amendment, and you should take the number from the body rather than from any summary. If you are a listed company's CFO, you have a separate 6-hour annual duty from the securities regulator that has nothing to do with your professional qualification.

Three populations, three regulators, and only one of the three figures publicly verifiable to the standard we apply. The DBD publishes its notifications and the preparer notification system at dbd.go.th.

For the wider pattern of how differently these obligations are designed across jurisdictions, see why CPD hours do not convert between countries.