ASIA-PACIFIC
• CPA Australia
past-president Alex Malley has been appointed chief executive of
the professional body. He will succeed Geoff Rankin on 12 October
2009.
Malley is currently chief executive of the
Urological Society of Australia and New Zealand.
He has had more than 20 years of experience
consulting to the private and public sectors and has held senior
posts in academia.
He is also the immediate past-president of CPA
Australia. His 18 month term ended in March this year.
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By GlobalDataCurrent president Richard Petty said Malley’s
leadership and relationship building skills were crucial to CPA
Australia’s capacity to further enhance its position as a global
professional accountancy designation for strategic business
leaders.
“Alex Malley’s knowledge and insight of the
organisation and its members located in Australia and across the
globe position him extremely well to ensure CPA Australia’s
continued international relevance and appeal while retaining the
highest professional standards and the quality of the CPA
designation,” Petty said.
• The Chinese Vice-Minister of Finance, Wang
Jun, is to be the first person from outside the UK to receive
honorary membership to the Institute of Chartered Accountants in
England and Wales (ICAEW).
Wang has contributed to the accountancy
profession and to the finance and business world, actively
promoting the adoption and implementation of new Chinese Accounting
and Auditing Standards, which came into force for listed companies
on 1 January 2007, the ICAEW said. He has also been an advocate for
the convergence of Chinese and international accounting standards
and progress made under his leadership has been recognised both by
the International Accounting Standards Board and the European
Securities Committee. Wang has also driven the adoption of
corporate governance good practice for the largest Chinese
enterprises.
Under his tenure, the Ministry of Finance
introduced new company legislation, which set out comprehensive
internal control requirements due to come into force for large
companies on 1 July 2009.
ICAEW president Martin Hagen said Wang has
been instrumental in leading reform of the accountancy profession
in China.
“The policies he has pursued have introduced
transparency and accountability to China’s economy as the country
emerges as a world economic power,” Hagen said.
• The Association of Chartered
Certified Accountants has awarded its highest number of
qualifications in Vietnam. The 70 students who graduated are a
record in an academic year. The certificates were handed over in
Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City.
NORTH AMERICA, LATIN AMERICA
• The US Public Company Accounting
Oversight Board has amended its rules to delay the 2009
inspection deadline of 49 registered non-US public accounting
firms. The amendment allows the audit watchdog to postpone, for up
to three years, the first inspection of any foreign-registered
public accounting firm that the board is otherwise required to
conduct before the end of 2009 and that is in a jurisdiction in
which the board has not conducted an inspection prior to 2009.
The delays will allow inspections to take
place co-operatively with the watchdog’s non-US counterparts rather
than legal disputes arising from conflicts between foreign laws and
PCAOB requirements, the board said.
• Financial Accounting Standards
Board (FASB) chairman Robert Herz has criticised the
politicisation of the US accounting standard setting process and
re-emphasised the need for greater transparency in a speech to US
journalists. Speaking at the National Press Club in Washington,
Herz said while accounting did not cause the crisis and improvement
of standards will not end it, the crisis did reveal a number of
areas requiring improvement of standards and overall
transparency.
• The Bahamas and Eastern Caribbean accounting
institutes have signed up to a practice monitoring programme that
is intended to significantly improve auditing procedures and
quality assurance review systems.
Practitioners and firms will now be monitored
to ensure audit reports and audit procedures comply with
international standards on auditing and other internationally
recognised rules.
The programme is run jointly by the
Institute of Chartered Accountants of the
Caribbean (ICAC) and the Association of Chartered
Certified Accountants. The monitoring visits will be carried out by
ACCA.
• The average salaries and average total
compensation for management accountants remained steady in 2008,
according to a survey by the Institute of Management
Accountants (IMA).
Despite the downturn, 71 percent of
respondents reported salary increases – only 3 percent less than
2007.
• The FASB has launched a new agenda project
to establish an overarching framework to make financial statement
disclosures more effective, co-ordinated, and less redundant.
The project was added in response to requests
and recommendations received from several constituents including
the Investors Technical Advisory Committee and the US Security and
Exchange Commission Advisory Committee on Improvements to Financial
Reporting, said FASB chairman Robert Herz.
• The US Center for Audit
Quality (CAQ) will fund five research projects selected by
the centre’s research advisory board. The projects include a study
on the collaboration between financial statement auditors and fraud
experts in fraud risk assessment and a review and model of auditor
judgments in fraud-related planning tasks. They were selected from
nearly 50 proposals that addressed issues including audit quality,
professional judgment, professional scepticism and the value of the
audit.
• One million candidates have now sat the US
CPA examination online, according to the American Institute
of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA).
AICPA president and chief executive Barry
Melancon said reaching the one million exam mark illustrated how
the CPA profession has enjoyed unprecedented growth as an
attractive career choice.
EUROPE
• The European Financial Reporting
Advisory Group (EFRAG) has appointed Pedro Solbes as
chairman of its supervisory board. Solbes, who succeeds Göran
Tidström, will begin his role immediately. Solbes was nominated by
the EC as a public policy member of the EFRAG supervisory board
earlier this month. He was the Spanish Minister of Economy and
Finance from 2004 to 2009. Prior to that, he was the EC member
responsible for economics and financial affairs between 1999 and
2004.
Three additional public policy members will be
appointed in September after the completion of the EC nomination
process.
• The Federation of European
Accountants (Fédération des Experts comptables Européens –
FEE) has issued four further policy statements on sustainability
and the accounting profession. The policy statements are:
Towards a sustainable economy: the contribution of assurance;
Embedding sustainability into corporate governance; Carbon
emissions information; and Sustainability and the crisis: shaping a
sustainable economy.
The federation released four previous policy
statements on sustainability and the accounting profession in
January this year. More are planned for the future.
• A sample of European companies have swooped
on the chance to reclassify their financial instruments, giving
their 2008 annual accounts a boost of almost €30 billion but with
insufficient fair value disclosure, according a report by the
Committee of European Securities Regulators
(CESR).
The CESR study selected a sample of 100
European financial companies with total market capitalisation of
€503 billion, including 22 in the FTSE Eurotop 100 index.
Almost all banks surveyed took up the
reclassification option.
The International Accounting Standards Board
permitted the reclassification of some financial instruments in
line with IAS 39 and IFRS 7 in October last year following strong
political pressure from banks and governments in the UK and Europe.
The amendments to IAS 39 introduce the possibility of
reclassifications for companies applying IFRS, which were already
permitted under US GAAP in rare circumstances.
• The Chartered Institute of
Management Accountants (CIMA) has launched an online
community network called CIMAsphere. CIMAsphere is a virtual
community where practicing and aspiring management accounts and the
wider public can share knowledge, advice and expertise. There will
be several discussion boards, covering topics ranging from
strategic management and economics, to financial reporting and
business ethics. A team of in-house experts will also write blogs
on the technical, business and policy issues relevant to
members.
• The Autorité des Marchés
Financiers (AMF) of France has appointed Xavier Tessier as
director of international affairs in its regulatory policy and
international affairs division. Tessier joined AMF in 2003 when it
was founded.
In his new role Tessier will be responsible
for the AMF’s international activities, specifically its
participation in international and European regulatory bodies,
relations with European institutions and bilateral relations with
the AMF’s foreign counterparts.
AFRICA, MIDDLE EAST, SOUTH ASIA
• The Institute of Chartered
Accountants of India (ICAI) has signed co-operation
agreements with the Certified General Accountants
Association of Canada (CGA) and the Bahrain
Institute of Banking and Finance (BIBF). The ICAI and CGA
aim to share insights into each group’s structure and operation,
and regulatory framework, with emphasis on possible co-operation on
professional training, education and examination, technical
research, as well as representation on international professional
bodies.
The accord could pave the way for mutual
recognition agreements between the bodies, said CGA Canada
president Tony Ducie. The ICAI and BIBF will also look to take
advantage of each other’s expertise in designing distance education
programmes, designing study materials for students, examination
systems, and disciplinary and regulatory mechanisms.
• The ICAI has launched an eXtensible Business
Reporting Language (XBRL) website. The ICAI created an XBRL group
in 2007 and has since developed the taxonomy for general purpose
financial statements for the commercial and industrial sector. The
exposure draft of the taxonomy has already been issued and it will
shortly be sent for accreditation by XBRL International. Taxonomy
for banks is being prepared, and an exposure draft is expected to
be issued shortly, the ICAI said.
• The Arab Society of Certified
Accountants has published the Arabic version of IFRS 2009.
The 2009 edition includes some basic changes made since 2008,
including a revised version of IFRS 1, amendments to IFRS issued as
separate documents in the first annual improvements project and
amendments to IFRS resulting from revised or amended standards.
• The Institute of Chartered
Accountants of Pakistan has successfully conducted its
first council elections through electronic voting. The e-voting
system allowed members who live overseas or in remote areas within
Pakistan to vote. It generated a significant increase in voter
turnout. The e-voting system was developed in-house and ran 24
hours a day for a week without any glitch, the institute said.
• The Indian securities regulator will take
the unusual step of funding a class action in relation to Satyam
Computers, its auditor Price Waterhouse and related parties, Indian
media has revealed. The Securities and
Exchange Board of India (SEBI) will provide
financial support towards a class action that has been filed by
Midas Touch Investor Association in the Supreme Court.
The Midas lawsuit is seeking compensation for
about 300,000 investors of the IT giant, which was implicated in
India’s largest fraud earlier this year. The investors collectively
hold 90 million shares of Satyam. The Economic Times
reports this is the first time SEBI has provided financial
assistance to help investors launch a legal challenge.
The newspaper says SEBI will foot about 75
percent of the legal bill. Twenty-three SEBI-registered investor
associations have access to this type of SEBI assistance in a
country where lawyers charge a flat fee despite the outcome of the
case.
