The Appraisal Foundation (TAF) just released the final competency brief for business appraisers, and if you only skim it for what changed, you’ll miss the more interesting part.
Yes, the wording shifted. “Ideally, USPAP should be followed” is gone — a line that always sat a little awkwardly for those of us who work with credentials and frameworks outside the USPAP orbit. TAF also pulled back its language on congressional authority and, more importantly, opened the door wider to other legitimate valuation frameworks governing an engagement. For ISBA members, whose BCA and BCA-R credentials sit in exactly that “other framework” space, that’s not a footnote. It’s an acknowledgment that competent business valuation doesn’t run through a single standards pipeline.
But here’s what we’d actually flag for the ISBA community: TAF published the full public comment record, not just a summary of “themes we heard.” That’s the part worth paying attention to.
Most standards bodies treat the comment period as input they synthesize behind closed doors — you get the exposure draft, then you get the final version, and the reasoning in between is a black box. TAF didn’t do that here. Anyone can go read what practitioners actually argued, see where the pushback clustered, and judge for themselves whether TAF’s revisions were a reasonable response or a watered-down compromise. That’s a meaningfully higher bar than “we consulted stakeholders.”
It’s also a decent answer to anyone who thinks this profession needs heavier outside oversight to keep itself honest. A standards body that airs the disagreement, revises the document in response to it, and shows its work isn’t hiding from scrutiny — it’s inviting it. That’s self-governance functioning the way it’s supposed to, and it’s worth ISBA members pointing to the next time someone questions whether voluntary standards processes actually hold up.
The takeaway isn’t really the deleted USPAP line. It’s that this is what a credible standards revision looks like — and it’s a model worth expecting from other bodies in our space going forward.
