# About cpa-wa — scope, sources and what we left out

> How this site is built: which records are loaded, what is deliberately not published, and what the numbers mean.

## How this site is built

An independent search layer over one public file. Not affiliated with the Board of Accountancy or the State of Washington.

### Scope: everything, on purpose

All **51,317** records the Board publishes are loaded and
searchable — lapsed, retired, inactive, suspended and revoked included.
Only the **25,984** currently licensed to practise appear on
the town, state and cohort pages.

That split is deliberate, and it is the main thing this site does
differently. A lookup that loads only current licences answers
« has this person’s licence lapsed? » with
*nothing found*, which reads like reassurance. Here it answers
*lapsed, and here is the date*.

### Two registers, not one

The Board publishes people and firms in separate files, and this site loads
both: 51,317 personal records and 2,356 firm registrations, of
which 1,430 are current. They are kept apart because the source keeps
them apart — nothing links a firm to the people licensed at it, and
inventing that link would be the most useful thing we could do and the least
honest.

Their numbers are also in separate sequences, so a single number can match
a firm and a person. The search returns both rather than choosing.

### ⚠️ What we deliberately do not publish on a page

**Board orders.** 80 of the 51,317 records carry a
link to a signed order on the Board’s own site. No page on this site
attaches an order to a named person: pages carry counts, and the link appears
only on the individual record, which is drawn in your browser from the part of
the URL after the `#` and cannot be indexed.

The reason is precise. The Board publishes each order as a document, and
the document is the only thing that can say what happened. Putting
« order published » next to a name on a rankable page
would create, for 80 named people, a permanent searchable accusation
that the Board itself has not created — its PDFs are not indexed by
name. We link; we do not characterise.

Note the limit in the other direction too: the Board has published orders
as documents only since **1 January 2020**. An older matter does
not appear in this file at all, so an empty count is not a clean record.

### ⚠️ What the address does and does not mean

The Board records one place per licence holder — where it writes to
them. It is not necessarily where they practise, and a town page is not a list
of local firms.

And **9,578** of the 25,984 people in practice have
**no state recorded at all** — 36.9%. They
are counted on no town page and no state page. We would rather leave a visible
hole than fill it by guessing.

### How the pages are chosen

A town gets a page when at least 20 licence holders in practice
are recorded there: 91 of 358 qualify, covering
91.4% of Washington-based CPAs. A state page needs
25; a town-and-cohort page needs 30. Below those
thresholds a page names a handful of individuals and describes nothing.

Every CPA sits in exactly one town and exactly one renewal cohort, so the
crossed pages divide their parent rather than overlapping it — checked
before the generator was written, not after.

### Source and freshness

One file: Washington State
Certified Public Accountants , published by the Washington State Board of Accountancy on data.wa.gov,
public domain, first posted 2017-10-12. The Board updates it nightly. Our copy
is from **2026-08-21**, and about
206 new licences are issued each month, so it drifts.

The oldest licence still in practice was first issued in
**1959**.

Although this information is updated nightly, the information found through this service is not guaranteed to be accurate or timely. The Board does not guarantee the use of this information for any purpose and as such, the information obtained from this database should not be considered an official endorsement of any individual or firm. For anything a decision depends on, check with
the Board.

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Página: https://cpa-wa.pages.dev/about/
Fonte: Washington State Certified Public Accountants — Washington State Board of Accountancy
Recolha: 2026-08-21