Education, Careers & Professional News
Chartered Accountants Syllabus upgraded
There is a dearth of qualified chartered accountants (CA) — a shortage of around 20,000 CAs in India. Responding to the need, the Institute of Chartered Accountants of India (ICAI) is taking fresh initiatives to make CA an attractive career choice for the youth.
The reason, I feel that CA is still not as popular a career as medical or engineering is that most school curriculum, and especially those of the state boards, do not impart any inputs on Commerce and Economics at the secondary level of schooling and therefore students do not get interested in the discipline at a younger age, observed Manoharan T N, president, ICAI. The council is planning to hold interactive sessions with students and parents and is even producing a film on CA curriculum to popularise the discipline.
Manoharan is hopeful that the new CA syllabus, expected to get the governments approval within a month, will be able to attract more students to the profession. On imple¬mentation of the revised CA programme, the duration of the course will come down from five years and three months to four years. There will be only one paper, an objective-type Common Proficiency Test (CPT) to seek entry to the programme, which will increase the certainty and attract bright students. Enrolled Students will be able to start practising earlier, as a part of the programme, and earn a stipend. All this should enable us to increase students enrolment from 35,000 last year to 50,000, he added.
The revised syllabus is expected to see more inputs on financial reporting and introduction of corporate financial reporting in the subject.To make it more internationally oriented, it will also focus on IFRS-based financial reporting and US GAAP-based financial reporting.
New subjects like Advanced Management Accounting to strengthen the role of a CA in an organisation and Information Technology and Systems Control, with a focus on information system control techniques, data integrity privacy and security and information system auditing standards, have been proposed in the new syllabus. The paper on Business Ethics is aimed at infusing the required values and ethics in professional accountants.
ICAI is also contemplating on adding five new branches to its existing network of 107 centres. The new centres are being proposed at Bellari, Kakinada, Sangru, Gorakhpur and Baruch.The branches of ICAI will act as marketing agents and guide students and parents about the discipline, he said.