Breaking New Ground in Accounting CPE & CPD with a Decentralised Application - Part 1
By leveraging Bitcoin and open blockchain technologies, accountants can establish trust in their competency, prove their value, and ensure transparency and integrity in the profession.
During a recent Institute of Professional Accountants Town Hall Webinar, it was revealed that many professional accountants are not fulfilling their Continuous Professional Education and Development (CPE/CPD) requirements due to reasons like lack of time and the cost of training.
To address this issue, I proposed the idea of publicly displaying CPE/CPD achievements and logged hours to encourage compliance and prioritise continuous learning. By leveraging public blockchain technologies, accountants can establish trust, prove their value, and ensure transparency and integrity in the profession.
Publicly Visible CPE/CPD Achievements:
It is crucial for accountants to prioritise their CPE/CPD training to stay up-to-date with industry changes and maintain their professional competence. By publicly displaying achievements and completed hours, we can inspire fellow accountants to prioritise continuous learning, inspire public trust, and promote our expertise.
“What's that? You want privacy? We work in the knowledge economy! What is there to hide? The letters on the end of your name don’t mean much. Putting your CPD achievements on a public blockchain for all to see is good marketing!”
- Electra Frost
The Accounting Profession <> The Digital Truth Engine
In a rapidly evolving world in which the public and government perceive our roles becoming diminished by automation and AI, we must prove our value in an undeniable way.
By leveraging Bitcoin and open blockchain technologies, the “Digital Truth Engine”, we can become part of a highly secure network that ensures transparency, trust, and integrity, and we can be rewarded for it.
In one of the world’s leading trusted professions, it makes sense for accountants to explore the Trust Machines mission and operate at the forefront of the most socially impactful technology this century.
Accountants, as business and taxpayer advocates, must acknowledge the role of Bitcoin and public blockchains in addressing various socio-economic challenges and their growing influence in the global financial landscape.
The best way to learn is by applying the technology to solve our own problems first!
An Open Blockchain Solution for Professional Credential Verification:
A most compelling blockchain use case for the accounting profession is a system that indisputably validates what they know. Verifiable Credentials (VCs) introduced by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) provide some background about cryptographically secure and machine-verifiable digital identities and credentialing.
A decentralised blockchain-based application would enable accountants and accounting bodies worldwide to contribute to the development, validation and recognition of professional qualifications and achievements. This approach facilitates sharing the most up-to-date knowledge at speed and, through the use of verifiable credentials and decentralised identity management, we can ensure the integrity, equity and transparency of the CPE/CPD compliance process.
Solving CPD Compliance Problems by Digitising Our Knowledge Assets:
To address non-compliance with CPD requirements, we need to automate auditing processes and ensure transparency and fairness. By leveraging AI technology in an open blockchain application, professional bodies can efficiently and securely assess a large number of members’ CPD records, saving time and resources. This also enables real-time visibility of CPD compliance records, ensuring professional competence standards are met across our industry.
Fragmented Credential Verification:
Efficient validation of credentials is hindered by the distribution of CPE/CPD records and certificates across various private servers, apps and emails. This leads to time-consuming record-keeping, verification challenges, and increased risk of inaccuracies and fraud. A centralised app or member portal does not substantially fix these problems. The effective and efficient approach is to digitise the CPE/CPD as its achieved, and issue the credentials as NFTs (knowledge assets) to the blockchain address for the professional’s self-sovereign digital identity over which they have full control, including control over all digital assets associated with it.
Proving Attendance for Online Learning:
Verifying genuine participation in online courses and workshops can be problematic. By using Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs), we can provide irrefutable proof of attendance and participation, addressing this challenge. Training providers can issue NFTs with granular attendance and content data upon completion of the CPE/CPD activity, which enhances the credibility of digital credentials with origin and authenticity directly traced back to the issuer's address on the blockchain.
Interoperability:
By implementing a multi-chain decentralised application (dApp), we can retrieve and verify credentials in the form of NFTs including POAPs from different blockchains, providing a unified and verified record of professional development that’s easy for a user to maintain without having to deal with bridging their tokens.
Limited Global Reach of Professional Development Programs:
To cater to members accountable to professional bodies in other countries, serving offshore clients or expanding their operations globally, the application needs to be truly decentralised and borderless. Connecting professionals globally can enrich CPE/CPD training with diverse international insights. This allows accountants to stay abreast of global practices and emerging trends, and achieve career mobility.
High Costs and Subscription Models of Existing Solutions:
In Web3, the trend is shifting away from traditional subscription fee and rental models. Instead, value exchange is increasingly based on tokenisation and smart-contract microtransactions. By offering a subscription-free application and enabling direct transactions for CPD training, we can reduce costs for accountants. All members, including training providers, are empowered to have full ownership and control over their digital knowledge assets and services, creating a participatory economic structure with the decentralised application (dApp).
Decentralised Marketplace for Specialised CPD Training:
In today's complex accounting landscape, many professionals focus on niche areas and industries, often downsizing to solo practices. This shift has highlighted a gap in the market for specialised CPD training, as generic content lacks specific context. A decentralised marketplace driven by Peer-to-Peer CPD contributions can address the lack of specialised CPD training. This marketplace offers relevant and tailored content, enhancing professional growth through peer-to-peer learning and experience sharing.
Peer-to-Peer CPD introduces a competitive threat but also a new revenue opportunity for existing CPE/CPD training providers.
Accountants can repurpose training content from providers - for example, one takes a general "Australian Income Tax Residency Workshop," to create their own training materials specific to, for example, USA Dual Tax Residents or Music Industry. When an accountant enhances existing training material and it's sold as a new product, the original content creator can automatically receive a share of the sales, facilitated by smart contracts.
Inadequate Peer Review and Quality Control in CPD:
We can have quality AND quantity!
Implementing a community-driven model for peer review and quality assurance ensures that the most relevant and accurate training content is rewarded.
Call to action for my accounting peers!
Next week - Part 2 Concept Demo
Let’s start learning how to use the world’s most decentralised, secure and robust peer-to-peer networks so we can lead these new approaches in our professional development!
Whether you're a suburban tax agent, a corporate accountant, a professional accounting body, or an associated industry professional, YOU have the opportunity to define “the future of accounting”, inspire trust, and be the trendsetters who can elevate the public perception of our roles and value.
Stay tuned for Part 2 next time, to see a basic Proof of Concept!
We will demonstrate the key functionalities and advantages, based on using the Stacks blockchain and sBTC to bring this proposed P2P-CPD and VC solution to life.
This post was written during the Bitcoin Writers Cohort.
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