I was reading the latest issue of Accounting Today Magazine (Accounting Today, vol. 26, no. 11, November 2012, page 7. "Meet Our Accountant of the Month" by Danielle Lee of Altamonte Springs, Fla. Congratulations to Laura Wood for winning the award for her career with Florida-based National Accounting and Management Services, which she co-founded with her husband.
The article goes on to talk about Laura Wood's piloting of an ultralight "plane" (perhaps machine is a better term). The "plane" is considered by some to be a powered parachute and is composed of a parachute (which provides the lift) and a small "lawn mower-like engine" hooked to a backward facing pusher propeller.
Congratulations to the author, Danielle Lee, and Accountaning Technology magazine for recognizing that EAs (enrolled agents) are in fact Tax Accountants. Occasionally, this controversy plays out when I talk to an Enrolled Agent or other tax professional. Many tax professionals and EAs feel they are not tax accountants. Where they have gotten the idea for this misconception I will never know.
Actually, if you check the facts, a Bachelor's Degree (Bachelor of Arts or Science) in Accounting in most colleges and universities have 6 to 9 semester hours of credit in Tax Accounting. This coursework is composed of 3 semester hours of credit in Individual Taxes, retirement plans, and Ethics for the tax accounting professional, 3 semester hours of credit in Entity Taxation (Corporate, Partnership, Estate, and Trust Taxation), and 3 semester hours of credit in Income Tax Preparation and forms.
Each semester credit hour represents 1 actual hour each week in the classroom for 15 to 20 weeks, or about 45 to 60 hours of coursework for a three semester hour course. The homework support required for each hour of classroom work that I recommended to my students when I was teaching college and university level credit courses at an accredited college for 24 years was a minimum of 3 hours of homework for each classroom hour or 135 to 180 hours for a 3 semester hour course.
An accounting degree then constitutes 90 to 180 hours of tax accounting classroom coursework and an additional amount of tax accounting homework of "independent study" of 270 to 540 hours for 6 to 9 semester credit hours of tax accounting. The minimum total hours of tax accounting work in classroom and homework come to 360 to 720 hours. That is a lot of work in tax accounting.
I consider the EA designation, like the Accredited Tax Accountant-Advisor (ATA) credential of the Accreditation Council for Accounting and Taxation (ACAT), to be the premier tax accounting credential(s) in the field of accounting. So when someone says an EA is not an accountant, be sure to proclaim proudly that an EA is a tax accountant who has passed the Special Enrollment Examination of the Internal Revenue Service.