The Hindu Business Line : Accounting technicians in ICAI’s new scheme

The entry requirements for articleship training in the chartered accountancy course were not tinkered with from 1949 to 1992 (except for a few years). This was mainly because the articleship was open only to graduates.

In 1992, the Foundation course was introduced which saw many talented youngsters successfully completing the chartered accountancy course.

However, many of the firms had their own reservations about the maturity of the entrants. To address this as well as the uniformity of the entrants, the ICAI, in 2002, decided to allow articleship only for students passing the PE-II course.

This decision of the ICAI frustrated both the entrants as well as chartered accountant firms, as the course got automatically extended to at least five years and firms suffered for want of entrants. Following another review in 2006, the course was thrown open to the students passing the CPT exam along with Plus 2.

The outcome is that today more than a lakh of students have successfully completed the CPT, but the main problem is that many of them are not able to do their graduation and some are unable to obtain articleship. In fact, some of them have been doing the so-called ‘dummy’ articleship.

The IPCC

The ICAI has now proposed to amend the regulations (Notification dated September 1, 2008) so that henceforth to do articleship the candidate has to pass both the CPT and Group I of the proposed Integrated Professional Competence Course (IPCC) .

This course has three levels — Group I, Accounting Technician (optional) and Group II. A candidate enrolled for the IPCC shall be eligible to three years articleship on passing the Group I or Accounting Technician level.

The regulation is silent about the number of papers and the details of the syllabus of these Groups and that of Accounting Technician course.

A reading of the regulation indicates that it is nothing but a throw back to the erstwhile Foundation or PE-I examination. Quite ironically the regulation has been notified along with the proposed Accounting Technician course but a candidate passing Group II of the proposed IPCC course is not permitted to register for articleship.

The articleship period in effect is reduced to three years but the minimum time for completing the course will be four years as against the existing three-and-a-half years.

Destabilising effect

As early as 1959, the stalwarts of the profession had clearly foreseen that the chartered accountancy course would be more apt and suitable for graduates as they would have the required aptitude and maturity.

Compared to the initial four decades, wherein much changes were not effected, the ICAI has been changing the curriculum quite often in the last two decades, more so in the last decade.

These changes have a destabilising effect on the profession.

There is no point in trying to unnecessarily compare the profession with that of engineering, medicine, and so on.

The problem lies more clearly on the overall structure of the profession with specific reference to practicalities, methodology of the examination and evaluation. It is time the ICAI looked into these aspects.

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