[3] In May 2011 fourteen candidates from LICPA sat an international accounting exam at Cuttington University in Congo Town.
Successful students would be eligible for admission as professional members of the Institute of Chartered Accountants of Ghana (ICAG).
However, for reasons that are not clear, the Institute became and remained inactive and dormant for many years until the early 1980s, when a group of Liberian accountants (principal among them Sam D. Monbo Sr., Edwin Sambola, Emmanuel Shaw, Francis B. S. Johnson, John Bestman, and Wreh Dargbe) took steps to revive the dormant Institute.
However, the efforts to modernize the act of LICPA in so to become an effective PAO of consequence were shortly aborted at the beginning of the 13-year Liberian civil war that started in 1989.
Up to 2011 LICPA leadership led efforts to establish the Institute as an effective, binding PAO supported by government.
Accounting Education in Liberian Universities Under funding provided by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) under its Governance Economic Management Support (GEMS) program to Liberia, the Liberian Institute has, starting September 2013, launched a program, called Syllabi Integration Program (SIP), which aims to raise the standards of accounting education in Liberia to a global level within five years, and in the process also correct a number of ills that are endemic in the educational system of Liberia.
The syllabi integration is such that students in participating schools are expected to qualify as professional accountants by the time they meet standard academic requirements for graduation or be close to doing so by then.
The Institute expects that this way, it will substantially increase number of Liberian professional accountants, who are currently in very short supply.
Thus under funding provided for the purpose by the USAID, the two Liberian capacity building institutes hire the services of experienced expatriate professional accountants who teach at participating universities as full-time instructors whose specific brief includes coaching students in each participating university to pass the LICPA's semi-professional and its full professional exams.
Although GEMS pays the expatriate instructors hired under the Program as outlined above, participating schools are allowed to collect tuition from students, with the specific understanding that each school will then use the tuition collected to sponsor as many of its regular accounting instructors, who so desire, to take the professional exams of the LICPA.
Starting February, 2014, the Institute has commenced a series of CPD courses some of which are targeted for LICPA members in practice while others are intended and designed for nonmembers as well.