The American Institute of CPAs will be combining its popular Personal Financial Planning Section conference with four other events that the group hosts.

The combined event, called Engage, is set for June 12 through June 14, 2017, at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas.

With more topics, speakers and exhibitors, the AICPA hopes to provide expanded learning and networking opportunities.

“You’ll still have the same conference and the same networking,” said Scott Sprinkle, the current chair at the PFP event, at a general session Tuesday.

The PFP conference is being held this week in Las Vegas.

“You’ll have one fee and your choice of any sessions,” said Sprinkle, co-founder and managing member of Sprinkle & Associates in Littleton, Colo.

Engage will combine the AICPA’s PFP conference with events covering advanced estate planning, tax strategies, auditing and accounting and practice management and technology.

Some CPA planners are concerned about losing the intimacy of the current event, which has grown to the 1,300 attendees at the current session.

“CPAs don’t like change,” said Michael Eisenberg of Innovative Wealth Advisors in Encino, Calif., a CPA and holder of the personal financial specialist (PFS) designation granted by the AICPA.

“It’s new, so it’s a little scary,” he said.

But the larger event could offer more information and networking opportunities for planners and expose a wider population of CPAs to the opportunities in financial planning, Eisenberg added.

“As long a this portion of the conference doesn’t get watered down … it could be a win” for attendees, he said.

The AICPA has 412,000 members, 87,000 of whom practice financial planning.

“You can make it as big or as small as you want to,” Todd Helton, director of meetings and conferences for the AICPA, said of the Engage conference.

PFP-related sessions will be grouped together, and conference badges will be color-coded so like-minded attendees can find each other, he said.

The PFP meeting is the largest event now, and Engage might bring the size up to a few thousand, Helton added.

The high level of content at the 30-year-old PFP event has drawn a growing audience in recent years.

Financial planner and blogger Michael Kitces picked the conference as the Best Advanced Educational Conference in his 2016 ranking of events. (Kitces is also speaking at the conference.)

That kind of word of mouth has helped attract more non-CPAs to the event, said Andrea Millar, associate director for the AICPA PFP division.

Anyone can attend the conference, she said. “We want to be inclusive.”

Kitces said the issue for the conference organizers will be whether they can “maintain the edge and culture of the [PFP] event,” which appeals to “those who are serious about their craft.”

At this year’s meeting, planners could catch sessions from investment luminaries Roger Ibbotson of Zebra Capital Management, Rob Arnott of Research Affiliates and Michael Edesess of the City University of Hong Kong, mixed in with financial planning thought leaders Bob Veres and George Kinder.

The event planners wasted no time packing in dense educational topics. Sessions on health insurance, digital estate planning, diversification and continuity planning began promptly at 7 a.m. this morning.