ICAEW must be smarting. Damian Wild was – allegedly – given a hard time at an ICAEW dinner following recent Accountancy Age criticisms:
Regulators weren’t happy with the critical line we have taken of the Financial Reporting Council in recent weeks but that was as nothing compared to the response to our recent poll probing accountants’ attitude to the relevance of their professional body.
Damian’s more important point is that nothing much has changed in the 8 years he’s been at the Age. He asserts that:
So Pope still Catholic, bears still defecate in the woods and most accountants still view their qualification as a passport and little more.
That may be true for some members but not all – not by a long stretch. Especially those in practice – outside the Big Four. Nothing much has changed in 25 years. The same issues members complain about are just as fresh today as they were when I first entered partnership. So what’s the problem?
The institutes and especially ICAEW don’t care enough about their members. Take this from a 27 year old qualified who’s working in a small practice:
Today the institute website is not working (again). A student colleague of mine needs to look up something in relation to their studies and they haven’t been able to use it since they tried at 8:30am this morning. (It is now 11:30am).
It is a pretty frustrating set of affairs. Of course, even when it is working it is not exactly the most useful of resources especially as the search function is so poor.
This chap is at the start of his career and already I can hear the tinge of the cynic. I’d also argue the ICAEW site is irrelevant to many members. Poorly designed, important content hidden behind paywalls. But there is more.
Despite claims to being the profession’s premier qualification, ICAEW is falling behind in the ethics debate. this is not a trivial matter given the number of tax cases involving the Big Four.
Ken Frost recently told me that contrary to what he had been led to believe there are now no plans to have a separate ethics paper. Contrast this with ACCA which has a very clear position on ethics as an integral part of the training agenda. ACCA gets it. ICAEW doesn’t. Where is ICAEW thought leadership in this important area?
Rather than take commentators to task for making plain observations many of us know anecdotally, those running ICAEW might think about relevance. And answering email. ICAEW CEO started a blog recently. I sent email congratulating him and making a few polite suggestions. That was the end of February. No response. No surprise. So much for wanting to reach out and here opinion.
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