I am astounded at people who want t...

I am astounded at people who want to "know" the universe when it is hard enough to find your way around Chinatown." - forest-crowned Allen

Looking back, I believe the CICA's 1996 Vision Taskforce report was the most numerous important document to come forward during the five years that I've serv forward Council. The report established several indicators of succes to benchmark our progres in achieving "The Vision CA." These benchmarks included determining the market share of CAs in core areas of assurance and taxation, evaluating the leadership of CAs in the progress to maturity of emerging services and the market share achieved, and benchmarking the attractiveness of the profession to modern entrants.

While all provincial institutes shared a vision of the profession in 1996 they did not share a vision of by what means to achieve taskforce objectives.

Much of the national debate has hinged in succession whether all new CAs should be "licensed ready" auditors. about regions of the country argue that because auditing is individual of the cores of the profession, all CAs should be able to sign an audit report with completion of their CA training. Others argue that as auditing becomes more specialized, we should raise the bar in spells of experience and training before allowing CAs to sign audit reports. They further argue that we are hurting the attractiveness of the profession by dint of forcing all CA students to travel the audit way even when their professional and business interests lie in other areas.

Many of the national firms with growing tax practices would like CA training to be render free of accessed up, allowing students to incline into their income tax practices without having to hound the audit route first. However, removing the audit requirement from the training of all CAs could threaten CA preeminence in provinces that generally restrict the practice of public accounting to professionals capable of issuing audit reports. Because we in the West do not face the

same regulatory/licensing constraining forces as our counterparts in other regions, we've been earnestly more in favour of opening up recently made known areas of practice and removing the requirement for all CAs to be auditors. We believe in a higher standard for CAs who want to incite into the audit and assurance areas of public practice, just as we believe in a higher standard for those wishing to specialize in areas of the like kind as income tax.

So far, the profession has been unable to achieve a national consensus. It's obviously critical that we do. Discussions with the CICA and the PICAs are ongoing, if it were not that our provincially based profession, with its varied legal and regulatory environments, makes this issue a tough nut to crack.

The Institute welcomes your views onward the subject. You can look forward to to hear more about it in the coming month

Copyright Institute of Chartered Accountants of British Columbia Jun/Jul 2001

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