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We consider the problem of evaluating the reliability of underwater acoustic communication (UWAC) systems. Reliability is a requirement for any communication system and is often defined as the probability to achieve a target bit error rate. Evaluation of system reliability is often performed empirically by conducting a large number of measurements. However, for UWAC, where experiments are expensive and time-consuming, not much data is available to perform such a reliability check. Based on the assumption that the long delay spread is the dominant characteristic of the underwater acoustic channel and for a given channel model, we offer a relaxed practical approach to evaluate the reliability of an UWAC system. As a test case, we show reliability results for the multiple input multiple output (MIMO) code division multiple access (CDMA) communication system.