15-Year-Old Who Passed the CPA Exam is Now Law School Bound

By Martha Sanchez, The Sun Herald (TNS)

James Chilimigras leaned toward the computer screen, nervous.

“This is the last and most difficult of the four, day-long exams,” he told his family, who had gathered, and his tutor, Bryan Kesler.

Kesler crossed his fingers. Chilimigras raised his eyebrows.

“Well,” he said, and grinned. “I passed.”

Meet a world record holder: He is 15. He is from Bay St. Louis, MS. And in June he beat the old champion by two years to become the youngest person to ever pass the CPA exam.

He had graduated high school, gone to college and got his master’s degree all by the age of 14. He had accepted a full ride to law school at Loyola University in New Orleans, where he will start classes in August and likely become the second youngest lawyer in the world. And on July 14, a local group added to his ever-growing list of distinctions and inducted him as an honorary member of the Coast Young Professionals association.

Of which he is the youngest.

“When we say young professionals, we really mean young professionals,” Adele Lyons, CEO of the Mississippi Gulf Coast Chamber of Commerce, told the room of young people in their 20s and 30s, who represent companies such as Ingalls Shipbuilding and RPM Pizza.

Chilimigras posed for photos with his honorary membership and sat by his mother, who had come with Chilimigras’ little sister, grandparents and uncle to watch her son gain his latest honor.

“We’re just really proud of him,” Erin Chilimigras, James’ mother, said. “He’s put in a lot of work.”

And her son did much of it on his own. He graduated from St John Paul the Great high school at 12, went on to college at Western Governors University and got a bachelor’s degree and master in accounting by 14.

He spent much of this year studying for the notoriously difficult CPA exam, and passed it this summer.

“It was a lot of relief,” Chilimigras said when he passed. To be done “is so nice.”

He also has the highest LSAT—the law school entrance exam—score in Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana. He wants to help people through their life’s biggest issues, he said, and so he will go to law school at Loyola to learn how the law can help him do that.

“I think it would be cool to be a judge,” he said. “That’s a good way to make an impact.”

And he told the crowd he wants to do it in his home state, which quickly elicited cheers from the Coast’s youngest leaders.

“With other kids, they see goals for themselves,” he said, like winning sports championships and school contests. “It’s kind of what it’s like for me. The CPA exam was like my sports championship.”

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Accounting