Specialised accounting courses mooted

The Institute of Chartered Accountants of India (ICAI) is negotiating with various universities on the possibility of conducting a specialised B.Com course in accountancy and finance and special M.Com course in finance and taxation, a top ICAI official said in Coimbatore recently.

The ICAI has already entered into an MoU with IGNOU to conduct these courses, to be commenced in June, by which exemptions would be granted in different subjects to the students of the institute, Jaydeep Narendra Shah, Chairman, Board of Studies, ICAI, said.

As per the MOU, an "Articled trainee" can join B.Com with IGNOU by paying Rs.4,000 and can appear for B.com exam after completing one year of articleship. Students will get around 70 per cent credit in various subject and will be required to appear in six subjects, instead of about 20 subjects for normal students.

A student passing six subjects, completing three years of articleship and clearing Professional Competence Exam, shall be awarded B.Com degree by IGNOU, he said, adding the ICAI, after identifying universities with certain standards, would have tie-up with them to offer similar courses.

Saying that ICAI had developed an E-learning software for the benefit of the students, Shah said that initially 100 hours of IT training wuld be available through this system.

Shah said that there was a huge shortage of CAs since only 1.5 lakh CAs were available against the demand of about 2.5 lakh to three lakh, in view of the boom in the country's economy.

Earlier, addressing the two-day regional conference of the Institute of Cost and Works Accountants of India, a senior executive of Tata Consultancy Services said Indian corporates could only succeed through strategy developed by an exceedingly good executive machinery.

S. Mahalingam of the TCS said information was the key driver of management, which was very different from what used to exist in the "pre-liberation days — the days of the licence raj." Most companies in India had multiplicity of application systems and, therefore, they were not integrated. Experience in such cases was that too many things were measured but too few controls existed.

"While integration of systems would take time, we need to decide on the starting block and build systems architecture on top of it," he said.

It would be best to start at the pace where value was being created, Mahalingam said and lauded the institute for selecting 'enterprise excellence and value creation through management accounting,' as the theme of the conference.

Narrating the success of TCS for the last one decade, Mahalingam said an overall architecture for implementing the system should be created "and while designing it, we need to look at empowering the managers of various units so that they delivered results." — PTI