Texas CPA Board Weighs 517 License Revocations and Suspensions on One Agenda

The board that licenses Texas accountants takes up 517 disciplinary cases Sept. 17. Not one of them involves an allegation about bad audit work: they are licensees who did not pay fees, did not report required training, or did not send back a renewal form.

They come in three groups. About 216 are for not paying licensing and late fees across three consecutive periods; staff recommends revoking the certificate without prejudice, and the licensee gets it back by paying what is owed. About 272 are continuing-education shortfalls, where staff recommends a three-year suspension or until the licensee catches up, plus $100 for each year out of compliance. The remaining 29 did not complete a renewal notice, and face the same revocation without prejudice until they do. The board’s minutes from past dockets record the same finding each time: the licensees were told of the proposed action and of their right to a hearing, and did not ask for one. The board decides them without a committee reviewing them first.

Those numbers are the routine machinery of a licensing board and dwarf its contested work. Alongside them the board considers six agreed settlements and a handful of dismissals from its two enforcement committees — the complaint-driven cases, several of which staff wants closed for insufficient evidence.

The board also votes to adopt two rule changes. One fixes a mis-worded cross-reference in the rule setting which accounting courses qualify a candidate to sit for the CPA exam — part of a package the board adopted in May to carry out a 2025 law that opened a second route to a Texas CPA license, a bachelor’s degree plus two years of work instead of 150 credit hours. The other abolishes a three-member committee that oversaw continuing-education sponsors, because staff has been doing the work directly. Separately, the rules committee will discuss the student scholarship program, funded by a $10 add-on that CPAs pay at renewal and budgeted at $650,000 for next year; no proposal for those changes has been published, so what the board has in mind is not yet public.

One more thread runs through the agenda. A 2025 law created a regulatory efficiency office inside the governor’s office and told agencies to cut rules, required training hours, forms and fees; the accountancy board posted two batches of proposed cuts in August, one from the office’s review team and one from its own staff, covering dozens of rules. The board gets an update. It does all of this a member short: one of its fifteen seats, a non-CPA seat, has sat empty since mid-2025.

Meeting at a glance

Board members

• Jeannette P. Smith — presiding officer; Mission; partner, Carr, Riggs & Ingram.
• Susan M. Warren — assistant presiding officer; Georgetown; partner, KPMG.
• Olivia Espinoza-Riley — treasurer; Addison; accounting supervisor, CBRE.
• Renee D. Foshee — secretary; San Marcos; assistant professor, Angelo State University.
• Susan I. Adams — Colleyville; shareholder, Huselton Morgan & Maultsby.
• Christopher “Grant” Coates — Fort Worth; chief executive, The Miles Foundation.
• Kimberly D. Crawford — Arlington; partner, Sutton Frost Cary.
• Ray R. Garcia — Houston; longtime partner, PricewaterhouseCoopers.
• Jill A. Holup — Austin; operating and finance chief, CenterGate Capital.
• Sherri B. Merket — Midland; executive assistant, Hillander School.
• Thomas M. Neuhoff — Tyler; chief financial officer, Herd Family Office.
• Kenneth E. Omoruyi — Sugar Land; managing partner, CKO CPAs and Advisors.
• James M. Trippon — Houston; president, JM Trippon & Company.
• Sheila M. Vallés-Pankratz — Mission; executive vice president, Hollis Rutledge and Associates.

Roster from the board’s membership page, cross-checked against the governor’s appointment releases. Fourteen of fifteen seats are filled; the vacant one is a non-CPA seat last held by Jamie D. Grant of Arlington, who appears on the board roster in the May 2025 minutes and is off it from July 2025 onward, though his name continued on a committee roster into that November. The minutes record no reason for the departure, the governor’s office has announced no replacement, and the Dispatch found no announcement in the Texas Register’s appointment notices for the twelve months through August 2026. Three small conflicts: the governor’s office lists Omoruyi in Bellaire rather than Sugar Land, and shows Coates and Trippon first appointed in September 2024 though the agency dates their service to March 2025; and the board’s own event page gives its suite number as 380 while the filed notice says 370. Where the agency and the governor’s office differ on a city, the article follows the agency. William Treacy is executive director. Staff contact: J. Randel Hill, general counsel, (512) 305-7866.