Indian Institute of Accounting (IIA) has been proposed by parliamentary panel offering competition to ICAI. The Indian Institute of Accounting, as per the house panel, will be established by a central law similar to other eminent educational institutions like the Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT) and the Indian Institutes of Management (IIM). Indian Institute of Accounting, like IITs and IIMs, will also be set up in different parts of the country and work closely with these institutions along with National Law Universities, and other national and regional institutions.
Students passing from Indian Institute of Accounting will be given a license to practice (similar to CAs) and they will be called as Certified Professional Accountants (CPAs).
Indian Institute of Accounting News
The proposal is a part of a series of recommendations made on the report on the Chartered Accountants, the Cost and Works Accountants, and the Company Secretaries (Amendment) Bill, 2021, tabled in Lok Sabha on Wednesday.
The panel proposed constituting an IIA primarily to focus on academics while the Institute of Chartered Accountants, or ICAI will be limited to the role of a “licensing agency”. “The proposal visualizes the IIA as an academic institution that educates licensed professionals similar to AIIMS, PGI, JIPMER, National Law Schools. In contrast, the Institute of Chartered Accountants of India will be a professional certification agency, much the same way it is now,” the report stated.
Indian Institute of Accounting
IIA will be run by a fully autonomous board of governors which will include both experts and lay persons along with officials from ministries of finance, education, and corporate affairs.
The institute will be “research-driven” and offer a five-year undergraduate course in the beginning and eventually offer postgraduate and PhD programmes as well. Given liberty of choice, students who will qualify for the undergraduate programme will be given two degrees–a bachelor of accounting and a bachelor of business. After graduation, such students will also get a license similar to CAs and will be called Certified Professional Accountants.
Indian Institute of Accounting vs ICAI
The 3.4 lakh-strong community of CAs is justifiably upset at the idea of a competing body.
The institution that wears its CA-honour on its sleeves may be fighting a losing cause. And sadly, it does not have many supporters outside its fraternity in this. For, it is an idea whose time has come.
proposed IIA will also have an academic council that will be responsible for developing the undergraduate curriculum. The undergraduate curriculum will include financial and cost accounting, auditing, tax, law, business strategy, organisational behavior, management, governance, and public administration, technology, data science, psychology and other related subjects. Recently, Debashis Mitra, the new chairman of the Institute of Chartered Accountants of India had announced that a new curriculum will be launched this year.
At the postgraduate level, students will have the choice to specialise in areas like forensic accounting, business analytics, cyber security, valuation, international tax, and other relevant fields. Admission to the institute will be done on the basis of an entrance test in line with National Education Policy 2020.
Netarhat
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