Could I Trust an Accountant Who Once Stole $1.2M?

No. I agree that people deserve a second chance, but there is no reason for him to be in the money business. He should be doing one of the other 95% of jobs that do not require it.

The point of membership of a finance professional institute like the CPA is that the institute judges whether a member meets the ethics requirements or not.

Someone who claims to have membership when they could not be bothered to complete their membership training records - plus a fraud conviction - nope I would not trust them with my personal financial information.

Declaration of interests: I pay the UK equivalent of CPA (ICAEW) several hundred GBP/USD annually as certification that I'm financially trustworthy. Some of my work is figuring out how to execute fraud and then how to defeat it - so it's a bit like a white hat badge.

Someone lies and steals, is "rehabilitated", and right out of jail you catch them in a major lie again and still have a spec of trust in them? Wow.

My first thought is that when this guy got out of jail, he'd have a nice job away from being able to steal large amounts of money. But greedy people like OP and the business owner let it slide for a few bucks.

I should have gone into high stakes accounting and financial work. I could have hit and run down pedestrians, stole millions of dollars, killed a girlfriend in my home, etc... and people would still let me handle their money because I could save them about 2%. No one would bat an eye. Heck, people will even defend me!

In 30 years, it'll be interesting to read the studies of how our capacity to give convicts a new chance has increased or decreased. Before Google, we gave people second chances because we didn't know any better. Now that it's ubiquitous, it seems almost necessary for us to recalibrate what it means for someone to have paid their debt to society.