Understanding the California Board of Psychology Audit

It’s every budding psychologist’s dream.

After four years of undergrad, five, six, seven, or even eight years of grad school, internship, passing the EPPP, and passing the California jurisprudence exam, you have finally become a licensed psychologist. All that hard work is finally over, right?

Not quite.

While the major obstacles have been overcome, you’re still left with ensuring you maintain your license and renew it correctly every two years.

And since the California Board of Psychology audits 10% of all license renewals every year, it’s just a matter of time before you, too, may face the headache of a Board audit.

How The License Renewal Process Has Changed

It used to be so easy - take some CEs, hold onto the certificates, pay to renew your license. Despite this previous ease of renewal, the California Board of Psychology reported a 26% audit failure rate in 2022 and 42% audit failure rate in 2023.

This means there are hundreds of psychologists who are failing their audits - don’t be one of them!

Now that the Board has transitioned to a more complex Continuing Professional Development (CPD) system, it stands to reason that this failure rate will skyrocket in the years to come.

When you renew your license, you check a box attesting that you have completed all necessary CPD requirements to the Board’s satisfaction and specifications.

Surprisingly, many people simply check this box without giving it any additional thought, but this is a gamble you shouldn’t take with such a valuable hard-earned license.

There’s no way of knowing if you’ll be one of the unlucky 10% any given year to be audited.

How The Board Chooses Who To Audit

The California Board of Psychology says they select who they’ll audit at random. If selected, you’ll be notified via email and via mail to your address on public record.

The Board will specifically be looking for any and all documentation pertaining to your CPD hours.

As I discussed in this article, the process for accurately recording your hours is quite difficult and convoluted.

What Happens If You Get Audited

As someone who cares deeply about doing things “by the book”, I was most worried about what would happen if I got audited by the Board.

I dread the idea of getting an email and a letter from the Board of Psychology advising me of the audit and needing to gather together all documentation to prove I had met the renewal requirements.

What if I had misplaced some documents?

What if I had inaccurately recorded them?

What if I had logged some activities that didn’t actually count?

Audits could lead to sanctions and/or fines by the Board of Psychology.

Not to mention the surge of stress inevitably comes along with it.

How I Track My CPD Hours

As a California psychologist myself, I never used to know for sure which Category or Activity to log the hours into.

I tried using the Board provided PDF form, and then a spreadsheet to track my hours.

However, I quickly realized the new requirements made doing so annoying, more troubling, and inaccurate.

The only way I could be certain I was logging my hours correctly was to constantly cross-reference the Board’s regulations.

This was time consuming, cumbersome, and still left a lot of doubt about whether I was doing it correctly or not.

That’s actually what led to the creation of License Ally. I wanted an easy to use online tool to be able to log and track my California CPD hours without any fuss.

Now I have one 🙂

All I need to do is select the Category and Activity, and all the relevant Board required fields are automatically shown in the interface. I just type in the details, hit save, and I’m done.

I never have to worry about missing a required reporting field, not having the minimum hours necessary, or going over the maximum number of hours allowed for each activity.

It even saves the additional documentation (certificates, proof of attendance, etc.) that the Board requires for certain CPD activities.

And if you’re a California Psychologist looking for an easy way to track your CPD hours?

You’re in the right place.

License Ally helps you easily track your CE and CPD hours so you can confidently meet the license requirements from the California Board of Psychology.

Plus, you get access to our members only CE course discounts and one-click PDF report to send to the Board in case you get audited.

If this sounds helpful to you, you can create a free account to try it out for yourself.