Letters - 6 August
ACCA merger – Three to one in favour
Last week, you published a letter from Malcolm Howard, a member of both ACCA and CIMA. The next day, CIMA reproduced the letter as the head item on its website home page.
Members of ACCA, CIMA and CIPFA all rightly take considerable pride in their qualifications. The three bodies each have great strengths. ACCA believes that a partnership between them will build on these and bring great advantages to their members and the wider profession.
A significant number of members of all the bodies have recognised the strength of ACCA’s proposals and have responded positively to them – by a margin of three to one.
Michael Foulds, president, ACCA
Where’s my merger letter? I am a member of CIPFA and have been following the moves by ACCA to seek support for a merger with CIPFA and CIMA with interest. I note (from ‘News analysis’, 23 July) that ACCA’s merger proposal was 13 months in planning, culminating in a massive information programme launched on 14 July.
At the time of writing this letter, some ten days after the launch of this audacious proposal, I have still to receive any details from ACCA, despite a mailing to all CIPFA and CIMA members having apparently been undertaken. I am reliant totally on the media for information on this important and potentially divisive issue.
Is the efficiency of this exercise an indicator of what might be expected from a merged institute? The rationale behind appealing direct to members of CIPFA and CIMA is to avoid long and damaging discussions between the governing bodies of the institutes.
What appears to have happened is that I, too, have been sidelined in the debate.
Is this really the best way to canvass support for a merger?
Philip Chamberlin, CPFA, North Shields, Tyne and Wear
Resources & Whitepapers
Accounting Software The power of customisation in accounting systems
Not enough to put in your eye Whatever the reception accorded to the English ICA General Practitioner Board’s publication, ‘Winning Business Strategies’ (9 July), it runs to some 250 pages in A4 format and weighs the best part of a kilogram.
On the scale on which it ranks as a ‘booklet’ (‘Taking Stock’, 16 July) therefore, I should think that your enjoyable magazine would be a postcard.
Nick Harrison, BA, FCA, FCCA, Aldershot, Hampshire
Introducing PR speak… DMD Moore criticises a sentence in the PwC merger announcement on the grounds that it lacks subject, object and verb.
The sentence reads ‘Which is why we just brought 140,000 of them together’. The sentence does have subject (we), object (140,000 of them) and verb (brought).
‘Which’ in this context means ‘and this’, so the sentence has a complete main clause and is grammatical.
It is written in PR-speak, but is that a fault, seeing that its purpose is to persuade?
Maurice Parry-Wingfield, Twickenham