AICPA is headquartered in Durham, North Carolina, and maintains additional offices in New York City, Washington, D.C., and Ewing, New Jersey.
Following this, it retained its standards setting function in areas such as financial statement auditing, professional ethics, attest services, CPA firm quality control, CPA tax practice, business valuation, and financial planning practice.
Before passage of the Sarbanes-Oxley law, AICPA standards in these areas were considered "generally accepted" for all CPA practitioners.
In the early 2000s, in response to events such as Enron's announcement that its financial statements couldn't be relied on and WorldCom's bankruptcy filing, Congress passed the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 (SOX).
[20] Based on global quality standards for ethics and performance, CGMA designees are considered experts with credibility of advanced proficiency in finance, operations, strategy and management.
[24][25] Feed the Pig, a national public service campaign sponsored by the AICPA and the Ad Council, provides personal finance resources for young Americans.
[31] WebTrust is a family of e-commerce assurance and auditing programs co-developed by the AICPA with the Canadian Institute of Chartered Accountants (CICA).
[37] A 2009 academic paper which chronicled in some depth the adoption followed by the abandonment of the WebTrust seal at a large US telecom company, noted that the management did not find the cost-benefit tradeoff worthwhile: the $100,000 per year cost for WebTrust being about twenty times higher than that of a TrustE seal.
Whether serving as an information resource or offering recommendations, the AICPA represents the profession while protecting the public interest.
[42] As the COVID-19 pandemic has strained the U.S. economy and put millions out of work, Americans have experienced the biggest drop in their personal financial satisfaction in more than a decade.
The AICPA's Q1 2020 Personal Financial Satisfaction index (PFSi) measures 32.9, a 20 percent (8.29 point) decrease from the previous quarter.