Vietnam CPD: 40 Hours a Year for Accountants

Vietnam's CPD rules contain a provision that most accountants in the region do not know about: hours earned with an international professional body count toward the Vietnamese requirement, provided you can document them.

That single sentence is worth more to a Vietnamese practitioner holding an ACCA or CPA Australia qualification than the rest of the regime put together, so we will come back to it.

Neither professional body sets the rule

Vietnam has two IFAC member bodies: VACPA for auditors and VAA for accountants. Neither writes the binding CPD requirement.

The rules are Ministry of Finance circulars. The ministry accredits CPD providers, approves the annual programme, and uses the reported CPD data to issue or withdraw practising certificates. The professional bodies support delivery; the ministry holds the authority.

That makes Vietnam a licensed-provider market rather than an open one. Accredited providers include the professional bodies themselves and the Big Four firms. If you are planning to deliver CPD in Vietnam, accreditation is the gate, and it is the ministry's gate.

It also means there is no CPD obligation on non-practising members of either body that we could evidence. The duty attaches to the practising certificate, not to membership — a cleaner line than in most of the jurisdictions covered in CPD for non-practising and retired accountants.

Practising accountants: the verified requirement

The instrument is Circular 292/2016/TT-BTC, signed in Hanoi on 15 November 2016 and effective 1 January 2017. It governs practising accountants and anyone registering to provide accounting services.

• Minimum 40 hours in the year immediately preceding the registration year
• Of which at least 20 hours on core subjects
• Core subjects are Vietnamese accounting and tax law, and the professional ethics standard for accounting
• Secondary subjects are related economic, financial and audit law
• Someone who has not practised for 24 consecutive months or more needs 80 hours across the two preceding years, including at least 40 on core subjects

Note how ethics is handled. It sits inside the 20-hour core block rather than carrying its own quota. So a Vietnamese accountant must do at least 20 hours on a list that includes ethics, but nothing forces any particular allocation to ethics within it. That is the common international design — the exceptions being Romania's two structured hours a year and Indonesia's four credits a year.

The counting year does not match the calendar year

This is the detail most likely to cause a genuine compliance failure, and it applies to both accountants and auditors.

Vietnamese CPD hours accrue from 16 August to 15 August, not from January to December.

An accountant who plans their training on a calendar-year basis, as almost everyone trained in a Western regime instinctively does, will attribute hours to the wrong period. Hours taken in October sit in the year that began the previous August.

Around that counting year sits a cluster of deadlines: providers notify the ministry of next year's plan and programme by 31 July, file consolidated class results by 25 August, and individual deferral requests are due by 31 August. The practising-certificate maintenance report is filed annually by 31 August.

If you are used to asking when your CPD cycle starts, Vietnam is the clearest case in this series where the answer is not "1 January".

Record retention sits on the provider, not on you

Circular 292/2016 requires CPD records to be kept for a minimum of five years from the year of delivery. Read the provision carefully, though: the obligation is drafted on the training organiser, not on the individual accountant.

We are stating that precisely because it is commonly misreported as a personal five-year duty. It is not what the circular says. Keeping your own records remains sensible — our CPD record examples assume you keep more than the law demands — but the five-year rule is the provider's.

Practising auditors: a strong rule with a figure we cannot confirm

The auditor instrument is Circular 150/2012/TT-BTC of 12 September 2012, amended by a 2015 circular and again by Circular 15/2024/TT-BTC, and consolidated twice.

We could not retrieve its text. Every route failed: the national legal database returned client errors on five different address forms, the ministry's own repository refuses automated access, and the Official Gazette page for the sister circular returned a server error. IFAC confirms the circular prescribes the credit-hours requirement but states no number.

A figure of 40 hours a year with 20 on core subjects circulates on Vietnamese commercial legal databases, mirroring the accountants' circular. It is structurally plausible. We are not publishing it, because we could not source it.

What we can state, from a circular we did retrieve — Circular 202/2012/TT-BTC, effective 1 March 2013 — is more consequential than the number anyway:

• Registration as a practising auditor requires sufficient CPD hours as prescribed by the Ministry of Finance; the circular deliberately does not restate the figure
• Insufficient annual CPD is an express statutory ground for suspending the right to practise
• The annual maintenance report covers the 16 August to 15 August period, and where hours fall short, the auditor must state the reasons in writing
• The reporting appendices require hours to be split between Vietnamese accounting and auditing law on one side and professional ethics on the other — so a two-bucket structure is confirmed even though the quantum is not

That second point is the one to take away. In many jurisdictions a CPD shortfall produces a warning or a fine. In Vietnam it is a named ground for losing the right to practise, written into the registration circular itself. For comparison across regimes, see what happens if you do not comply with CPD.

The provision worth knowing: overseas CPD counts

Circular 202/2012 contemplates auditors claiming CPD obtained at international professional bodies, and requires documentary proof of those hours as part of the registration file.

In practical terms: CPD completed through ACCA, CPA Australia or a comparable body is creditable in Vietnam, if evidenced. A Vietnamese auditor pursuing an international qualification is not doing that work alongside their local requirement; they are, with the right documentation, doing both at once.

Very few national regimes in this series make that allowance explicitly. Most are silent, which leaves practitioners to argue it case by case. Vietnam wrote it into the filing requirements.

What we are not stating

Three deliberate gaps. We are not publishing the auditor hours figure, for the reasons above. We are not describing what Circular 15/2024 changed, because we could not retrieve it — we can only say it is the most recent amendment and the thread to pull if you need current detail. And we are not printing the Vietnamese-language names of either professional body, because IFAC publishes English only and the commonly used forms are not verified.

IFAC's own description of the Vietnamese regulatory arrangement, including the ministry's role in accrediting providers, is published on its VACPA member page.

In short

Forty hours a year for practising accountants, half on Vietnamese accounting and tax law and professional ethics, counted from 16 August. For auditors, a requirement set by the ministry whose number is not publicly retrievable, enforced by a suspension power that is. And for anyone holding an international qualification, a documented route to making the same hours count twice.