144
Opinion of the Court
of the CPA designation . . . where the licensee is unwilling to comply with the provisions of the [statute] under which the license was granted, is inherently misleading and may be prohibited.").
Ibanez no longer contests the Board's assertion of jurisdiction, see Brief for Petitioner 28 (Ibanez "is, in fact, a licensee subject to the rules of the Board"), and in any event, what she "believes" regarding the reach of the Board's authority is not sanctionable. See Baird v. State Bar of Ariz., 401 U. S. 1, 6 (1971) (First Amendment "prohibits a State from excluding a person from a profession or punishing him solely because . . . he holds certain beliefs"). Nor can the Board rest on a bare assertion that Ibanez is "unwilling to comply" with its regulation. To survive constitutional review, the Board must build its case on specific evidence of noncompliance. Ibanez has neither been charged with, nor found guilty of, any professional activity or practice out of compliance with the governing statutory or regulatory standards.8 And as long as Ibanez holds an active CPA license from the Board we cannot imagine how consumers can be misled by her truthful representation to that effect.
C
The Board's justifications for disciplining Ibanez for using the CFP designation are scarcely more persuasive. The Board concluded that the words used in the designation— particularly, the word "certified"—so closely resemble "the terms protected by state licensure itself, that their use, when not approved by the Board, inherently mislead[s] the public into believing that state approval and recognition exists." Final Order, App. 193-194. This conclusion is difficult to maintain in light of Peel. We held in Peel that an attorney's use of the designation "Certified Civil Trial Specialist By the
8 Notably, the Board itself withdrew the only charge against Ibanez of this kind, viz., the allegation that she practiced public accounting in an unlicensed firm. See supra, at 140.
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