ICAEW urges firms to get the pro's in

They would say that wouldn't they!

Not surprisingly, the accounting association makes a statement of the obvious and then an opinion. They say that big business (what happened to small business?) must raise standards (this is the obvious) and employ professional accountants as Finance Directors.

While understanding the companies (big and small, listed and private) need professional and ethical accounting professionals, if they were to say that the Controller needs to be an accountant, I may not have commented.

Howerver, saying that Finance Directors or Chief Financial Officers should ideally be professional accountants is an opinion and only that. And an erroneous opinion at that.

While Finance Directors or Chief Financial Officers need to have a solid knowledge of the financial and reporting aspects of their job specifications, just relying on their being able to 'balance the books' ethically limits ethics and 'doing the right thing' to the numbers and to simply following the rules in reporting terms.

Ethics and the right behaviour is that and a lot more. Purely books people have too restrictive a focus and, judging by the fact that in recent years we have seen numerous experts in managing the books trip up, clearly this is not enough!

OAM

See full ICAEW Comments.