The Hindu Business Line : ICAI plans course for ‘second tier of accountants’

Training programmes: Mr Ved Jain (left), President, The Institute of Chartered Accountants of India, and Mr V. Murali, Central Council Member, at a press conference in Chennai on Thursday.

Our Bureau

Chennai, June 12

Didn’t pass CA exams? Don’t worry. There is another way into accounting profession for you.

Wanting to build a crop of “second tier of accountants”, the Institute of Chartered Accountants of India (ICAI) plans to introduce an Accounting Technicians course focused at candidates who want to work for corporates and other businesses. “We need to produce second tier of accountants. Companies often do not need all the services a CA can render,” Mr Ved Jain, President, ICAI, told journalists here today.

Students who fail to complete the final CA exam and those who have passed the intermediate levels (PE-II) and article training as well as graduated CA students are automatically eligible for this two-year course. At present there are over 1 lakh such eligible candidates and about 20,000 more are expected to join the course each year, he said.

ICAI has recruited 60 professors for the programme and plans to double this number in a few months. It also plans to add research departments at these centres to facilitate work on niche areas such as derivatives, insurance, banking and capital markets.

Further, the institute is also developing an international course for overseas students with locally relevant courses in areas such as taxation, commercial law and company law. General subjects such as accounting and auditing will be common across countries.

The first such course will be introduced for students in the Gulf countries in about 4 months. The institute has also set up a chapter in New York to tap the about 1,000 Indian CAs practicing in the US.

Centres of Excellence

Mr Jain said the institute is in the process of setting up Centres of Excellence at Jaipur and Bangalore that will primarily cater to a three-month residential professional skills development programme proposed for CA students.

Mr Jain said the Rajasthan Government had allotted 25 acres of land and Karnataka about 10 acres for the project.

The Jaipur centre will be operational by December. Currently, about 55 students have enrolled for the first batch of this programme, which is being conducted out of rented premises at the National Institute of Financial Management, Faridabad. “We are aiming at training about 6,000 students at any point in time,” Mr Jain said.

Priced at Rs 48,000 a candidate, the course is a combination of personality development modules that IAS probationers and IIM- Ahmedabad students undergo.

“CA students who undergo this optional programme have 50 per cent higher chances of employment and compensation,” he said. Each CA pass out today has more than 2 jobs and is placed at an average salary of Rs 6 lakh a year.

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