Three students who sat their final CIMA exams in May were marked as absent for one of the papers despite completing it.

CIMA admitted this week that three students who were absent from the stage three tax exam received the results of the three students who had taken it.

One of the students affected, who asked not to be named, said CIMA had not acted quickly enough to remedy the mistake after she contacted the institute last Monday.

'I complained to the exam manager who was very apologetic but it took a week before they checked all my results,' the student said.

A spokesman for CIMA said that the problem had stemmed from a mistaken transcription by an examiner and that the problem had been resolved as soon as a student brought it to the institute's attention.

The spokesman added that the errors represented a 'minuscule' proportion of the exam papers which were sat by more than 33,000 students.

The exam result confusion follows problems in CIPFA's exam results in January after an error emerged in one of the institute's exam papers.

After students had voiced concerns that the error could damage their final marks CIPFA was forced to have the papers marked independently and called in auditors to review the education and training directorate's operations.