California Trust Account Compliance: CTAPP and AB 3279
Published by Holvine LLC · Reviewed by Richard Kaplan · Last reviewed on
California’s Client Trust Account Protection Program (CTAPP) is the State Bar of California’s framework for overseeing attorney trust accounts, created under Assembly Bill 3279. This page covers three specific pieces of it — the designated licensee requirement, the bank-reporting requirement, and the mandatory compliance review program — not the whole of California trust accounting law.
Designated licensee and bank reporting
Under Business and Professions Code section 6091.3, a California-licensed attorney must give the financial institution holding their client trust account (CTA) the attorney’s State Bar license number. If a law firm holds the account, the firm must designate one of its members — the designated licensee — to provide that number on the firm’s behalf. For CTAs open before this requirement took effect, the State Bar has required compliance between January 1, 2026 and July 1, 2026.
The designated licensee must:
- be the primary account holder or a signatory on the trust account,
- be responsible for performing, or supervising, the account’s monthly reconciliation, and
- serve as the point of contact for other licensees in the firm who have questions about the account.
Mandatory compliance review program
Separately from the bank-reporting requirement, the State Bar runs a mandatory client trust accounting compliance review program: it randomly selects a cross-section of attorneys and requires each one to complete a compliance review, performed by a State Bar–approved CPA at the attorney’s own expense. The State Bar has described the goal as strengthening trust account practices statewide and catching problems before they cause client harm.
[À VÉRIFIER : au-delà de ces trois points (désignation du licencié, signalement bancaire, programme de revue de conformité), aucune autre exigence CTAPP n’est documentée sur cette page — notamment les modalités précises de sélection, la fréquence exacte du programme d’audits pour les années suivantes, ou toute autre obligation de reporting annuel. Ne pas déduire d’exhaustivité de ce silence.]