Institutes collaborate to deepen professionalism, sign agreement

To boost competency of practitioners, the Institute of Chartered Accountants of Nigeria (ICAN) and that of England and Wales (ICAEW) has established agreement through a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) to strengthen skills and capacities in knowledge sharing for improve global economy.

During the signing at its headquarters in Lagos, the 53rd President of ICAN, Alhaji Isma’ila Zakari said the nature of the agreement is to improve professionalism and learn from each other with the aim of improving the economy. He said ICAEW will contribute to skills and capacity in ICAN while ICAN will offers ICAEW of its experiences of impacts in Africa region.

According to him, ICAN will through the partnership, improve on systems and examinations, standard development in ethics, start computer based examinations and on screen margin, which is the computer based assessment for examinations and sharing of information on professional accounting ethics.

He said, “The MoU is starting with immediate effect because we have held robust discussion with the president and his teams from the ICAEW and we have worked out areas and immediately the MoU will start to yield results and benefits for both professional accounting organizations. We will have technical help desk where we can tap from the benefit of their expertise. This does not come at any cost to both institutes. We have already signed some MoU with Professional accounting organization in the West Africa region like the Gambia institute, Niger institute and one of our team is currently in Liberia working together with the Liberia institute of certified accountants”

Speaking, the president of ICAEW, Nick Parker revealed that the institute has been working with ICAN for a long time and is very keen to work with local accounting bodies in West Africa and was impressed with ICAN’s exams, saying that they are of very high standard.

“Both institutes will improve because what we are trying achieve is a world strong economy and in order to achieve that you need to have local and strong professional bodies. One of our principles when we came on board in 1880 is transparency and ICAN was founded on the same principle and so we are both working for the same goal because if you have transparency, then you have accountability and you can bring companies and individuals to answer for their action”.

He added, “We produce a lot of intellectual property and reports that are global and we will rely on ICAN to report to us and bring the West African perspectives to our reports for a true global report.”