ACCA, others canvass curriculum update for improved financial reporting

The Association of Chartered Certified Accountants (ACCA), the Institute of Chartered Accountants of Nigeria (ICAN) and the Financial Reporting Council of Nigeria (FRCN) have canvassed an update in tertiary institutions’ curriculum. The reason for this, according to accounting professionals, is to improve financial reporting in the country.

The accountants, who spoke at an event hosted by ACCA, said there was a need to build financial and sustainability reporting foundations from tertiary institutions by updating their curriculum to enable implementation of the International Sustainability Standards Board (ISSB) sustainability standards.

The ISSB Standards, they explained, was a set of sustainability reporting standards developed by the Board with the aim of creating a comprehensive global baseline of corporate sustainability reporting.

Iheanyi Anyahara, director, of public sector accounting standards, FRC Nigeria, said the foundation of sustainability reporting starts from tertiary institutions, stating the need for professional accountants to ensure there is an updated curriculum for sustainability and financial reporting.

“The professional accounting organisations should also help tertiary institutions. We need to build the foundation of financial reporting from there. When I was doing my M.Sc programme, I understood that my professor was using old standards to teach. Let’s join hands and correct this,” he said.

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“The products from tertiary institutions are the feeders to professional level and if we don’t get it right at that stage, that means the products that will be feeding industry and commerce will be deficient which will require more training on the part of professionals; our idea is to build the foundation so that when they come into the field, it will not be difficult,” Anyahara added.

The director stressed the need to advocate for sustainability reporting and extend the knowledge to all supply chains.

According to him, professionals needed to advocate for sustainability reporting, arguing, “if we do not extend the knowledge to the supply chain, we will all lose; we must carry all the supply chain along. The big players in telecoms, for example, extend whatever they are doing in terms of capacity building to all other players and we need to adopt that.”

The professional bodies also canvassed collaboration of one with another, saying that such collaboration remained the only way to implement the ISSB sustainability standards in the country.

They noted that the coming together of ICAN, ACCA and FRC was to ensure that the standards that had been set by ISSB came to life. Victoria Ajayi, the global council member, ACCA, stressed that no single professional body could do it alone, adding they must therefore collaborate to ensure they worked in uniformity to achieve that goal.

“Capacity building is another aspect of collaboration and cannot be done by one body alone. It is one thing to adopt sustainability reporting and yet another thing for the board to adopt and know that we need to leave the place in a better way than we met it. FRC at COP27 promised that we would be adopting it and we are taking the lead in Africa already,” he said.