Quote of the Day: “Her reckless disregard for the truth is a revelation of character that is incompatible with the professional designation of CPA.”
A woman in Canada has been permanently barred from practice after faking the Chartered Professional Accountant designation just inches away from the finish line of licensure. Shout-out Business in Vancouver for their write-up.
Safiya Ibrahim Elshazly of Burnaby, British Columbia had her membership in Chartered Professional Accountants of British Columbia permanently canceled and will pay a $25,000 fine to CPABC after a disciplinary hearing confirmed that she “made fraudulent misrepresentations to employers, recruiters, clients and CPABC, that she had work experience and qualifications which she did not, and that she held the CPA designation when she did not.”
The story begins in 2019, three years after she completed an associate’s degree in Business Administration, when she entered the CPABC Professional Education Program (CPA PEP), a step toward licensure. In May of 2021 she passed the CPABC Common Final Examination (CFE), the northern equivalent to our CPA exam. With the grueling exam out of the way she had seven years to meet the practical experience requirement, which calls for “a minimum 30 months of paid, relevant, and progressive work experience.”
Prior to passing the exam, in November of 2020, Ms. Elshazly reached out to a recruiting agency. Here’s where it starts to go off the rails:
The resume she gave to the agency stated falsely that she was a “Chartered Professional Accountant (CPA) 2019”, and described her experience and employment history as a “Senior Accountant (Public practice)” since 2015, and as an “Intermediate Accountant (Industry)” from 2007 to 2015.
She was hired by a public accounting firm called Johnsen Archer LLP at the rank of senior accountant in January of 2022 and began signing her emails as “Safiya Elshazly, CPA | Senior Accountant.” Apparently no one checked that she actually held a license and the firm discovered she was not a CPA when they tried to pay her CPABC membership fees, at which time CPABC told the firm she was a student member and not a Chartered Professional Accountant. The firm then terminated her employment.
A few weeks later she reached out to a different recruiting agency and updated her resume to say that she worked as a senior accountant at Johnsen Archer from November 2015 to present, again falsely claiming that she was a licensed CPA in British Columbia as well.
Let’s go back to the disciplinary order to see what happened next:
In January of 2025, Johnsen Archer received an inquiry from a recruiting agency regarding an application the Respondent had made for the position of Financial Controller with the Heiltsuk Tribal Council. In connection with the application, the Respondent had submitted Johnsen Archer as a reference, and the agency had also received an online reference for the Respondent purporting to be from Johnsen Archer. A potential fraud alert from the agency’s reference check system noted the IP address of the online reference was the same as the IP address from which the Respondent submitted the application. Johnsen Archer confirmed to the agency that the phone number and email address in the online reference were false, and that the reference did not come from Johnsen Archer.
So she used the firm she was fired from as a reference and then attempted to impersonate the firm to the recruiter. Nice.
The recruiting agency’s fraud alert system also uncovered that the Respondent had done the same with a false online reference in support of her application that purported to be from High Output Sports Canada (“HO Sports”).
While all of this was happening she also submitted fabricated practice experience reports to the CPABC. She said in one report she worked as a senior accountant for HO Sports from January 2020 to December 2023 and in another that she was there from January 2024 to April 2024, neither of which were true. She later admitted as much to CPABC and said that she tried to get a friend who worked at HO Sports to participate in the lie. Turns out she did do some work for HO Sports, contract work from November 2023 to January 2024.
Said CPABC in the disciplinary order:
The Respondent lied to get her CPA designation because she believed she deserved it. There are no mitigating factors that excuse her lying about skill and experience she did not have. Her lying about it continued after she received the designation. Her testimony at the hearing lacked credibility. Her admissions were too little, too late, and she took no believable responsibility for her behavior. None of her attempts at justifying her professional misconduct and contraventions of the Code of Professional Conduct have any merit, and provide no ameliorating considerations. To the contrary, her repeated pattern of deceitful behavior displays willful breaches of the Code, and her reckless disregard for the truth is a revelation of character that is incompatible with the professional designation of CPA.
Such a shame. You were RIGHT THERE!
