This week's blogs: keeping up standards
This week the profession’s army of bloggers look at global standards, exam result worries and the IASB
While I support global reporting and auditing standards and, in principle,
would like to see a level playing field for other market regulation, I am not
convinced that any global regulator or grouping of national regulators can keep
up with the smart guys who will look for and find ways around the rules. And we
have to accept there will always be jurisdictions that want to get competitive
advantage and attract business by having looser regimes, either overtly or
covertly.
More important is to encourage principles-based regulatory environments in
developed economies with criminal and civil sanctions for transgressors.
National regulators should cooperate to prevent non-compliant businesses playing
one jurisdiction off against another with special purpose vehicles, off-shoring
and transfer pricing abuse and to help identify and stamp out criminal activity.
Cooperation among national regulators should also encourage exchange of
information on good practice, results of regulatory research and development and
intelligence on developing business issues.
Richard Aitken-Davies, president, ACCA
blogs.accaglobal.com
It seems that people have different methods of preparing for [accountancy
exam] results. Some students shut it out completely, others talk about it
constantly and some just wish the days away, wanting the results to be over and
done with. You’d think after going through A-levels and degrees the whole
situation would get easier, but I don’t think it does.
I suppose we can be grateful that, for the moment anyway, the piece of paper
in front of us is just an exam result, not a disastrous set of figures for a
major client.
Your life cannot be made or broken over the space of a couple of hours. This
is still the rehearsal, and there will be plenty more time in the future to get
it right – or wrong!
And if exams and exam results seem stressful, then hopefully that just helps
us to be better prepared
for the professional work that lies ahead of us.
Having said that, I’m sure I’ll struggle to feel that way when I sit my next
exam, so I’ll have to ensure I refer back to my blog come May.
Daniel Chown, PKF UK part-qualified
younggun.accountancyage.com
The IASB needs to reach out to its current stakeholders whom it has ignored
for too long.
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It also needs to decide whether the price of securing US support for its work
is one that is worth paying at this moment in time.
Jeremy Newman, CEO, BDO International
blog.e-bdo.com