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The American Institute of CPAs‘ plan to createan international management accounting credential and offer the CPA credentialin other countries is putting pressure on another accounting organization thathas long established a beachhead in that area. (n~ e2tZ/
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The Association of Chartered CertifiedAccountants calls itself 'the global body for professional accountants.”Headquartered in London,the association not only must compete with localaccountancy bodies like the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England andWales,but with organizations around the world. It has a presence in the UnitedStates too,but there are relatively few ACCA credential holders in theU.S.,compared to CPAs. m
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Ian Welch,the head of policy at ACCA,visitedthe Accounting Today offices Tuesday to talk about changes in auditregulation,along with what his group has been doing in Europe and other parts ofthe world. The AICPA‘s announced last month it would partner with the CharteredInstitute of Management Accountants to create a new international managementcredential (see AICPA Approves Joint Venture to Create Management Credential)TheInstitute has previously announced plans to offer the CPA Exam abroad,as well asadd questions about International Financial Reporting Standards to the CPA Exam.Welch acknowledged the increased competition. .2jG
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'People outside the business find it hard tobelieve that professional bodies compete,'he said. 'It‘s seen as a weird ideathat people compete,but we do. KPMG competes with PwC. It’s the same thing. Ifwe don‘t bring in any students,ultimately we don’t have a future. The AICPA hasalways been the elephant in the corner. It‘s always been that if one day theyever got their act together,they could potentially blow everyone out of thewater. That’s always been in the back of our minds,but until recently theyhaven‘t shown a great deal of interest in doing so. Now they do seem to be doingthat. Certainly people in various parts of the world recently have beensaying,’Hmm,I see that the AICPA is launching this in my neck of the woods andthey seem to be all over the newspapers.‘ We’ve been an IFRS-based body foryears. We train our students,and we‘ve always been there. There’s always thisinevitable slight sense of pique when a body which has never been interested atall suddenly starts doing all this and people start saying,‘Oh yeah,I’ll jointhem because they do that.‘ It is undeniably a new threat,a new challenge. Weare in just about all the rest of the world,except for here,with the exceptionof our 2,000 or so members here. It’s always been that latent threat which hasnever quite happened. But we‘ll just have to do what we do better,like any otherstrategic threat,if that starts coming to fruition. You have to up your owngame.” 4IIXzMOa
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He noted that ACCA has gone increasinglyonline to attract more students and make it easier for them to access thecourses that way. 'We think we have a lot to offer,but if the AICPA gets its acttogether and puts serious resources into the international arena,we‘ll have todeal with that head-on really,'he said.
