EW Sells Awards

The Elijah Watt Sells award program was established in 1923 by the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA) to recognize outstanding performance on the Uniform CPA Examination. Current criteria call for Sells awards to be presented annually to ten candidates. These candidates must have completed testing during the previous calendar year and passed all four sections of the Uniform CPA Examination on their first attempt, earning the highest cumulative scores. Only one Sells award category currently exists. Plaques from the AICPA are presented to all ten winners.

The 2007 Elijah Watt Sells Award Winners

The 2007 Sells award winners (and their jurisdictions) are:

Steven J. Alden (MA)
Rapheal Joseph Hamilton (KS)
John Gerard Berger Jr. (IL)
Wenxin Li (NH)
Jason J. Brancazio (CA)
Barri Alexandra Litt (SC)
Bryan Edward Dean (WA)
Walker Fleming Saik (NC)
John Briscoe Escosa III (KY)
Bryce Alexander Schonberger (CO)

Click here for a list of Sells award recipients in previous years. The list is available to download as a PDF file. The Adobe Acrobat Reader is needed to view a file in PDF format. The reader is available as a free download from Adobe Website at: www.adobe.com/prodindex/acrobat/readstep.html

The Sells award program was created in 1923 to honor Elijah Watt Sells, a founding partner in Haskins & Sells, a predecessor to Deloitte & Touche. In 1896, Mr. Sells became one of the first to qualify as a CPA in New York State. He was active in the creation of the AICPA and served as a member of its governing council.

Between 1923 and 1935, only one Sells Award was given after each examination administration to the candidate who received the highest combined scores in passing all four sections of the Uniform CPA Examination. Between 1935 and 1977, gold and silver medals were awarded to the two highest scorers and, beginning in May 1978, a bronze medal was also awarded to the third highest scorer at each examination administration. At some point after 1978, plaques replaced medals as the means of recognizing award recipients.

In 2004, when the Uniform CPA Examination became a computer-based test (CBT), the Sells award program was restructured and the current award criteria, as described above, were introduced. In the CBT environment, candidates have the flexibility to take sections of the Uniform CPA Examination in any order they wish, and to schedule test sessions in numerous U.S. locations eight out of twelve months of the year.