The Internal Revenue Service doesn’t have the authority to independently verify that recipients of Low Income Taxpayer Clinic grants are eligible to receive them, according to a new report.

The report, released Tuesday by the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration, found the IRS’s LITC Program Office is restricted by the White House Office of Management and Budget regulations from viewing LITC client information. TIGTA reviewed a sample of grant applications along with interim and year-end review summary reports for 15 out of 130 LITCs from the 2022 grant year and found the Program Office mainly relied on self-certified information from the LITCs. The Program Office is able to administer and monitor the LITC Program, but it lacks the ability to independently validate client information to ensure the terms of the grants are being followed.  

The LITC Program is a federal grant program administered through the Taxpayer Advocate Service that provides matching grants up to $100,000 per year to qualifying organizations. The goal of the program is to provide low-income taxpayers who are involved in tax controversies with the IRS with free or nominal cost legal assistance to ensure that they have access to representation and to provide Limited English Proficiency taxpayers with education on their taxpayer rights and responsibilities.  For an organization to qualify for an LITC grant, it needs to meet the requirements specified in Section 7526 of the Tax Code. The LITC Program had the authority to grant up to $26 million and $28 million to qualified LITCs in calendar years 2023 and 2024, respectively. 

Nevertheless, for the 2023 grant year, over 75% of the LITCs were subject to an independent audit. The auditor has to determine whether the entity has complied with federal statutes, regulations, and the terms and conditions of federal awards, which includes grants. The Treasury Department could subject the LITC Program to more focused oversight by including it in a supplementary audit guide prepared annually. This guide directs the external auditor’s testing to the compliance requirements most likely to cause improper payments, fraud, waste, or abuse, or generate audit findings for which the IRS would impose sanctions. Lastly, we determined that the Program Office’s workflow lacks a consolidated centralized system; therefore, reviews of LITC data are a manual and labor-intensive process, making the process vulnerable to human error. 

TIGTA recommended the National Taxpayer Advocate should add an attestation on forms where data about taxpayers whose income exceeds the 250% of the poverty level limitation is reported, affirming accuracy, and acknowledging the penalty for making a false statement. The report also suggested the Taxpayer Advocate Service should work with the Treasury Department to request that LITC grant requirements be included within the Treasury Department’s Compliance Supplement to ensure that grant recipients are abiding by the rules. The Taxpayer Advocate should also develop a centralized system to administer the LITC grant program.  The Taxpayer Advocate Service management agreed with all of TITA’s recommendations and stated that they have started to take or plan to take corrective actions. 

National Taxpayer Advocate Erin Collin said in response to the report that the Taxpayer Advocate Service has entered into an agreement with the Treasury’s Chief Information Officer to develop a new grants management system for the LITC program office that will “streamline processes by centralizing operations, reducing manual tasks and minimizing reliance on other systems.”

She also noted that the LITC review process for current grantees includes evaluating their history of performance derived from report, site visits and interactions. Application evaluations are not solely based upon applicant-provided information but also includes observations of grantees by staff.

The American Institute of CPAs is asking the Treasury Department and the Internal Revenue Service to increase the safe harbor for companies to avoid determining whether the corporate alternative minimum tax would apply to them.

In a comment letter to the Treasury and the IRS on their proposed regulations, the AICPA asked them to increase the $500 million safe harbor for purposes of determining applicable corporation status. The AICPA also requested a simplified methodology that would be available to non-applicable corporations and/or applicable corporations with high effective federal tax rates. The Institute also suggested an irrevocable election to use pretax book income as adjusted applicable financial statement income for CAMT liability purposes.

The Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 created the CAMT, which imposes a 15% minimum tax on the adjusted financial statement income, or AFSI, of large corporations for tax years starting after Dec. 31, 2022. The CAMT generally applies to large corporations with average annual financial statement income exceeding $1 billion. However, the proposed regulations require far smaller companies to determine whether the tax applies to them, and the AICPA pointed out this could be burdensome to them. The IRS and the Treasury released the proposed regulations last September.

“The proposed regulations impose a massive compliance burden on all U.S. taxpayers that do not meet the $500 million AFSI safe harbor while only a small group, approximately 100 of those taxpayers, will pay the CAMT liability,” said Reema Patel, senior manager of AICPA tax advocacy and policy, in a statement Thursday. “The AICPA’s comment letter provides a non-exhaustive list of items in the proposed regulations with a high compliance burden for the taxpayers.”

The AICPA’s comments also discuss other aspects of the proposed regulations, including general concepts and methods and periods, international tax, passthrough, and mergers and acquisitions issues. The latest comments from the AICPA come after previously submitted letters to Congress in 2021 and 2022 asking for immediate guidance on the CAMT rules along with letters submitted to the Treasury and the IRS on interim guidance issued on CAMT in 2023 and 2024. 

The CPA Success Index was created in 2020 as a more comprehensive metric to evaluate how well collegiate accounting programs prepare students to pass all four sections of the CPA exam within the critical 18-month window. Unlike NASBA’s single-section pass rate, the CPA Success Index estimates students’ likelihood of completing the entire exam based on first-time section pass rates, adjusted for the 18-month timeframe. The CPA Success Index is computed using the number of sections candidates passed on the first attempt in the preceding 12 months, grossing up that value to 18 months using the school’s average first-time pass rate, and then dividing that value by the total number of sections, four.

Over the years, this index has become a trusted benchmark for identifying programs that consistently produce CPA-ready graduates. This updated ranking incorporates data from the 2023 edition of NASBA’s Candidate Performance on the Uniform CPA Examination book, which was released in late 2024. As with previous rankings, our analysis only reviews programs with greater than 20 candidates to ensure enough data points to adequately evaluate program performance. 

Current top 10 CPA Success Index rankings

Based on NASBA’s most recently reported data from 2023, the top 10 accounting programs in the CPA Success Index are:

1. University of Northern Iowa – Success Index: 1.000 (51 candidates)
2. Texas A&M University – Success Index: 0.802 (369 candidates)
3. University of Texas – Austin – Success Index: 0.722 (340 candidates)
4. University of Virginia – Success Index: 0.718 (71 candidates)
5. Brigham Young University – Success Index: 0.716 (285 candidates)
6. Washington and Lee University – Success Index: 0.716 (22 candidates)
7. University of Wisconsin – Madison – Success Index: 0.688 (187 candidates)
8. Baylor University – Success Index: 0.686 (240 candidates)
9. University of Kansas – Success Index: 0.680 (134 candidates)
10. Georgetown University – Success Index: 0.653 (27 candidates)

Programs with consistent success over time

When comparing the latest rankings to previous reports, several programs stand out for their consistent performance. These four programs appear in the Top 10 in each of our CPA Success Rankings: 

• Texas A&M University: A recurring top performer, Texas A&M benefits from its five-year integrated Professional Program in Accounting. 
• University of Texas – Austin: This program has consistently ranked among the top schools, reflecting its robust accounting curriculum and exam preparation. 
• University of Northern Iowa: Northern Iowa offers a unique and integrated faculty-led and for-credit CPA review program. 
• University of Kansas: Kansas demonstrates sustained excellence through integrated coursework and focused CPA exam strategies.

The CPA Success Index continues to highlight institutions that not only prepare students academically but also provide the necessary support to ensure they succeed in passing the CPA exam. These institutions serve as examples of how academic structure, focused preparation and student support can bridge the CPA gap and help graduates successfully navigate the CPA exam. The average CPA Success Index for the 529 universities with greater than 20 candidates is .33 (the index is .30 for all schools in the NASBA report). For prospective accounting students and employers, these rankings offer valuable insights into programs that deliver on their promise of CPA readiness. As the accounting profession continues to face workforce shortages, the success of candidates remains essential for addressing the CPA pipeline challenges of the future.

The top 40

To be consistent with NASBA’s annual ranking of the top 40 universities on the single-part pass rate, we list the top 40 schools for CPA success in the table for all programs with greater than 20 candidates and split by program size, medium and large.