Can Artificial Intelligence Pass Accounting Certification Exams? ChatGPT: CPA, CMA, CIA, and EA?

ChatGPT is daily in the media with many predicting massive disruption, especially in accounting and auditing. Yet, prior research shows relatively poor performance of ChatGPT on student assessment questions. We extend this research to examine if newly released ChatGPT models and capabilities can pass major accounting certification exams including the CPA, CMA, CIA, and EA (enrolled agent) certification exams. We find that the early released ChatGPT 3.5 model is unable to pass any exam (average score across all assessments of 53.1 percent). However, with additional efforts ChatGPT can pass all sections of each tested exam: moving to the ChatGPT 4 model improved scores by an average of 16.5 percent, providing 10-shot training improved scores an additional 6.6 percent, and allowing the model to use reasoning and acting (e.g., allow ChatGPT to use a calculator and other resources) improved scores an additional 8.9 percent. After all these improvements, ChatGPT averaged a score of 85.1 percent across all sections of exams and passed them all. This high performance suggests ChatGPT has sufficient performance that it likely will prove disruptive to the accounting and auditing industries.