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D. Murali

A CIMA Stage 3 problem in `management accounting techniques' begins thus: "County Preserves produce jams, marmalade and preserves." And question 2(a) of the May 2005 CA Final paper on `cost management' begins this way: "C Preserves produces Jams, Marmalade and Preserves."

Persevering further, you'd find the original, or the root of the ICAI problem in page 782 of Colin Drury's Management & Cost Accounting, fifth edition (2000), from Taxmann. "All products are produced in a similar fashion; the fruits are low temperature cooked in a vacuum process and then blended with glucose syrup with added citric acid and pectin to help setting." While setting the paper, however, a few changes were made to the cooking, and so the copy reads: "All the products are produced in a similar fashion; the fruits are cooked at low temperature... "

Last week, in the case of Carlon Ltd, we saw that the exchange rate was £1 = Rs 10. This week, there seems to be an appreciation of the pound to Rs 100, because "fruit extract 400 kg @ £0.16 per kg" becomes "fruits extract 400 kg @ Rs 16 per kg". But labour is unfairly discriminated against. County pays labour at £3.25; here, it is only Rs 32.50, signifying a conversion rate of Rs 10.

Elsewhere in the problem, CIMA describes the economics of weather: "The summer proved disastrous for the raspberry crop with a late frost and cool, cloudy conditions at the ripening period, resulting in a low national yield." The poetry is cut off by the ICAI: "The climatic conditions proved disastrous for the raspberry crop." There is some imagination instead; the original reads, "The impact of exchange rates on imports of sugar has caused the price of syrup to increase by 20 per cent," but the copy puts it as, "the impact of exchange rates for imported sugar plus the minimum price fixed for sugarcane caused the price of syrup to increase by 20 per cent."

As if to give the game away, there are a few loose ends in copying. For, `fruit extract' in the original becomes `fruits abstract', and `actual results' turn into `retail results', flummoxing any reader to abstract limits. This is a star-marked problem, as in last week's case, so the paper setter had the benefit of a ready solution from the Students' Manual.

"A woman is handicapped by her sex, and handicaps society, either by slavishly copying the pattern of man's advance in the professions, or by refusing to compete with man at all," said Betty Friedan. Without going into a debate on what Betty said, I'd adapt the quote this way: The ICAI is handicapped neither by resources nor by anything else, but resorts to slavishly copying the pattern of foreign problems in the professional exams, and thus refuses to compete with excellence at all.

RootOfTheProblem@rediffmail.com

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