The point of membership of a finance professional institute like the CPA is that the institute judges whether a member meets the ethics requirements or not. So

The point of membership of a finance professional institute like the CPA is that the institute judges whether a member meets the ethics requirements or not. Someone who claims to have membership when they could not be bothered to complete their membership training records - plus a fraud conviction - nope I would not trust them with my personal financial information. Declaration of interests: I pay the UK equivalent of CPA (ICAEW) several hundred GBP/USD annually as certification that I'm financially trustworthy. Some of my work is figuring out how to execute fraud and then how to defeat it - so it's a bit like a white hat badge.