{"id":73943,"date":"2024-01-30T07:01:13","date_gmt":"2024-01-30T07:01:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/?p=73943"},"modified":"2024-01-30T07:01:13","modified_gmt":"2024-01-30T07:01:13","slug":"the-icaews-training-courses-cannot-require-the-148-million-of-fines-it-is-sitting-on-so-what-are-they-going-to-use-that-money-for","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/2024\/01\/30\/the-icaews-training-courses-cannot-require-the-148-million-of-fines-it-is-sitting-on-so-what-are-they-going-to-use-that-money-for\/","title":{"rendered":"The ICAEW’s training courses cannot require the \u00a3148 million of fines it is sitting on, so what are they going to use that money for?"},"content":{"rendered":"

In the post here on Friday<\/a> about the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales's use of the \u00a3148 million of funding that they have received since 2015 from fines and cost recoveries paid to them by member firms that have failed in their public duty to undertake work to an acceptable standard I noted that the ICAEW said when explaining how they might use these funds:<\/p>\n

For example, we are examining how we can future-proof our training and qualifications, to ensure that the next generation of chartered accountants has the skills and expertise required by the workplace and wider economy of the future.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I thought I would look for some evidence of what the ICAEW thinks is needed.<\/p>\n

Because the ICAEW has just significantly upgraded the amount of time a chartered accountant must spend training each year, it has\u00a0 itself become a major player in supplying continuing professional development courses, which it promotes to its members (like me) as often as it can:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

I followed that link to this site<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

There I looked at the programme for March (there isn't apparently, one for February) and May (because again, it seems training is pretty unpopular in April) and found these:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

As is apparent, not a lot of this is about soft skills.<\/p>\n

None are about ethics. There is, instead, a deeply patronising one-hour course on ethics all chartered accountants must take each year.<\/p>\n

Most courses are deeply technical, which is not where almost any of the errors that have given rise to fines have been.<\/p>\n

Nothing is about meeting client expectations or the needs of stakeholders in society.<\/p>\n

Sustainability gets one course in the year. That's how important it apparently is despite the ICAEW saying that meeting the sustainable development goals in this area is core to its strategy and has implied this is a reason for keeping those millions.<\/p>\n

And the reasonable professional angst that any good partner should suffer from - which is why are we doing what we are doing for the people we are trying to serve and how might we do it better? - is entirely ignored, as far as I can see.<\/p>\n

But my real question is, how is it going to cost \u00a3148 million to support this programme, which is the only evidence of training programmes provided by the ICAEW that there is because they do not themselves provide training for their professional exams, but only mark them?<\/p>\n

Maybe they'd like to respond because I can see nothing here but a rather small training operation that could function with very little capital at all since payment for most courses will be taken upfront and they are done online.<\/p>\n

So, where is that \u00a3148 million going?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In the post here on Friday about the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales’s use of the \u00a3148 million of funding that they
 Read the full article…<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[67,26,99],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-73943","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-accountancy","category-accounting","category-icaew"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/73943","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=73943"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/73943\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":73948,"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/73943\/revisions\/73948"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=73943"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=73943"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=73943"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}