 In this presentation, we will discuss the act's discredible rule with regards to public accounting firms, CPA firms, and audit or attestation engagements. Act's discredible rule. A member shall not commit an act. First, a word from our sponsor. Well, actually, these are just items that we picked from the YouTube Shopping Affiliate Program, but that's actually good for you. Because these aren't things that we're just given to us from some large corporation which we don't even use in exchange for us selling them to you. These are things that we actually researched, purchased, and used ourselves. Here we have a Western Digital WD Elements 20TB USB 3.0 Desktop External Hard Drive. We use as part of our backup system, noting that if you lower the number of terabytes of storage, the price will lower dramatically as well. When you're thinking about a backup system, you're usually thinking about an online system or an external hard drive system like this, or ideally some combination between the two, giving you some redundancy. You can also work directly from an external hard drive like this, but there are some drawbacks to doing that. One being, if you use this as your primary drive you're working from, it's no longer a backup drive and you're going to need a backup system, possibly another external hard drive and or some kind of cloud backup system. And if you're working on something that takes up a lot of short term memory, a lot of RAM as you're working on it, such as video editing, the external hard drive can slow up the system. So you might want to come up with some kind of system where you download the project you're working on to your computer, to your C drive, or possibly to a solid state drive, which is a much more expensive external hard drive as you do the work. Once the work is done, then save the project to an external hard drive such as this. If you would like a commercial free experience, consider subscribing to our website at accountinginstruction.com or accountinginstruction.thinkific.com, where we have many different courses. You can purchase one at a time or have a subscription model, giving you access to all the courses. Courses which are well organized have other resources like Excel files and PDF files to download and no commercials. Discredible to the profession. Acts Dispredible could include discrimination and harassment in employment practices, solicitation or disclosure of CPA examination questions and answers, failure to file a tax return or pay tax liability, negligence in the preparation of financial statements or records, failure to follow requirements of governmental bodies, commissions or other regulatory agencies, confidential information obtained from employment or volunteer activities, false misleading or deceptive acts in promoting or marketing professional services, improper use of the CPA credential and failure to comply with records requested, Advertising in other forms of solicitation rules related to advertising in other forms of solicitation. A member in public practice shall not seek to obtain clients by advertising or other forms of solicitation in a manner that is false, misleading or deceptive. Solicitation by the use of coercion, overreaching or harassing conduct is prohibited. So we want to make sure that when we do go through the advertising process that it's not in a deceptive type of format. So obviously we want to make sure that there's nothing like misleading within the advertisement. Oftentimes this comes down to basically the naming conventions as well. Once again, you want to be careful with the naming. Obviously a lot of CPA firms will use the name of the owners of the partners of the CPA firm, which is fairly straightforward. If there's some other type of name that's being used for the organization, you just want to make sure and be careful that the naming convention isn't implying something that isn't true or factual. Obviously we don't want to have overreaching or harassing type of conduct within the advertisement as well. Although advertising is kind of, seems like a mild form of harassment and so to some degree, but you know, we want to keep within the regulations for, you know, general advertisement type of rules, mainly making sure that it's not a misleading form of advertisement. Prohibited advertising includes creating false or unjustified expectations of favorable results. So if we're making like promises like we're going to guarantee the audit result is going to be good or we're going to guarantee that we have results with regards to tax preparation, refunds, or things like that, we don't want to create unjustified expectations within the advertisement process. Implying an ability to influence any court, tribunal, regulatory agency, or similar body official. So if we're trying to get clients by saying, hey, we have influence over over the these types of organizations, that isn't a good way to advertise either that's prohibited format of advertising claiming that specific professional services and current or future periods will be performed for a stated fee, an estimated fee or fee range when it is likely at the time of representation that such fee will be substantially increased and the prospect entity is not advised of that likelihood. So if we say, if we start to promise, hey, something might happen in the future, the fee will probably be this, in essence, or lead them to believe that the fee will be this fee or could be this fear within this range when in actuality it may be different. So in other words, once we start the process, once we go down the road, and they're already doing business with us, they may feel kind of locked in at the point in time down in the future, when the fee comes down to actually pay at which point it's higher. And that would be unexpected that would be an unfair form of advertisement as well, making any other representations that would be likely to cause a reasonable person to misunderstand or be deceived. So that's going to be our general kind of catch off clause here. If there's anything that's intentional that's going to cause some kind of deceit or deceptive practice within the advertising, it is prohibited. Now we have the form of the organization and name. A member may practice public accounting only in a form of organization permitted by law or regulation whose characteristics conform to resolutions of counsel. A member shall not practice public accounting under a firm name that is misleading. Names of one or more past partners may be included in the firm name of a successful organization. So again, typically the convention is to have the names of the partners in the organization. Now if someone has deceased, obviously they may want a legacy kind of thing and have their name still on the organization. That's permitted. But once you deviate from that kind of standard practice, that kind of standard rule, if you just pick some other kind of names, you got to be very careful with the naming convention if you're planning on doing public accounting, public practice type of activities such as attestation engagements. A firm may not designate itself as members of the American Institute of Certified Public Accounts, AICPA, unless every CPA owner are members of the institution.