‘ICAN is increasingly changing the face of accounting profession in Nigeria’

Isma’ila Zakari, the 53rd president of the Institute of Chartered Accountants of Nigeria (ICAN), has among other responsibilities, the role of driving the adoption of international ethics standards for the institute. In this interview with KELECHI EWUZIE, he shares some of his strategic initiatives and how he hopes to revolutionise operations of ICAN to meet global best practice. Excerpts:

 How would you assess the accountancy profession in Nigeria in terms of skill development?

I will say the Accountancy profession has fared very well. Accountancy is the language of business and professional accountants and members of ICAN have impacted on the growth of the Nigerian economy and businesses in more ways than one.

There is no business today that they don’t have a chief financial officer whose duty it is to accumulate the numbers, comply with the standards and present disclosed information to the investing public about the financial state of affairs and the operation result of companies in Nigeria as well as in the public sector.

What are the contributions of ICAN members to the growth of organisations?    

ICAN’s quality of financial reporting is very good. In 2010 the federal government at the federal executive council level came up with what is called the roadmap to implementation of international financial reporting standards (IFRS)

IFRS is a radical change from system of accounting that was in operation in the past. The federal government effectively gave ICAN two years to come on board and convert all financial report to comply with IFRS.

ICAN immediately exposed the roadmap and also broke down what the implications are. The first implication is that there was a massive need for people to purge old accounting standards from their heads and become compliant with IFRS.

Today there are no listed companies or public entities that have not come on board with the IFRS. We have not heard of any company in the private sector that has not adopted IFRS. This goes to show how responsive the accounting profession especially ICAN members are to complying with global best practices.

In the same vein, in auditing, we have what we called the International standards of auditing. The institute has since adopted international standard of auditing and that is the standard ICAN members are using. Everything we are doing is in tune with global standards that are set.

We have adopted the most recent international ethics standards board for accountants (IESBA). The ethical standards deal with confidentiality. This ethical principle imposes an obligation to chartered accountants to maintain the confidentiality of information that is available to them in the course of doing their work.

However, now there is a radical change because the global accountancy profession that is the standard setter on ethics determined that accountant can no longer hide under the claim of the principle of confidentiality in the event of non-compliance with laws and regulations.

How is the level of compliance to the corporate governance?

So far where the corporate governance code appears to have coverage in the case of listed companies, Public Limited Companies, However where governance is lacking is in sectors like the Small and Medium Enterprises.

In the level where they are covered, what we have is satisfactory, but as you are aware in business there are changes and therefore it is important to revisit some of these corporate codes from time to time to improve their requirements. For now the quality of corporate governance code that we have is good enough to operate.

For us as professional accountants, we love the corporate governance code because the better the governance, the less the risk we face as auditors.

Under your tenure, what are some of the initiatives you will put in place to help develop the economy?

When I was sworn in as the 53rd president of ICAN, I listed out a number of things the council under my leadership would carry out. I want to say that we have a very sound, responsive and competent council made up of a diverse people from both the public and private sectors. I am happy with the composition of the council in terms of quality, experience and the readiness to deliver.

One of the things that we agreed to deliver on is that we will fully comply with all applicable international standards and I am happy that has been addressed. As far as we are concerned as an institute, we are NOCLAR compliant because our members are now duty bound to comply with the provision of the NOCLAR pronouncement.

The second thing that we talked about doing is engagement with international professional bodies and organisations. ICAN does not operate in isolation, we are part of the global accountancy profession and we must continue to engage and learn from each other and to contribute to the development of the profession globally.

We also have regional bodies in West Africa and the whole plan is to integrate accountancy and work together within the West Africa region so that we can contribute to the growth of the profession and also network among ourselves and contribute to West Africa integration thereby supporting the Economy Community of West Africa States (ECOWAS) mandate.

Another thing we are doing is that we are working with Pan Africa Federation of Accountants (PAFA) which is a continental body of accountants in order to engage and improve the profession.

One of the major things that I promised to do is to strengthen the small and medium practices in Nigeria. These are some of the audit firms that are not among the big four.

Globally, KPMG, PWC, Akintola Williams Deloitte and Ernst and Young are considered to be the big four auditing firms. In Europe, America the big four audit control 97 percent audit of listed companies.

In Nigeria, Small and medium practice firms are doing more work because they are the face of the Auditing profession in the lower cadet so we have a duty support them to be able to deliver better services, serve clients better and ensure that they have market because it is only from the quality of business that you get that an audit firm can grow.

We have already as a council set up a small and medium practice committee and that committee is to support them technically and come up with ideas on how to help them create market.

How effective is entrepreneurship training to help provide the needed spark for accountancy profession?   

When you talk of entrepreneurship, I am a supporter of it and I believe it is the only way through which Nigeria’s issue of unemployment and the size of the nation business will grow. You don’t need to be a graduate before you can engage in entrepreneurship. What you require is just the right idea and a mentor to put you through.

I am an advocate of entrepreneurship and I believe what we need to do is to come out with skill development.

How does ICAN hope to improve future workforce?

We don’t have a problem with the production of accountants through the pipeline because there are ample numbers of slots for students who want to study accounting.

However we are not only targeting accounting graduates, but graduates from other disciplines because ICAN training syllabus has a space for everyone including through our mid-tier Accounting Technicians Scheme West Africa (ATSWA). The certificate any candidate gets from this training can be equated with that obtained from a university degree.

This is so because we know the quality of the products. In fact, the trend now is that organisations that are employing chartered accountants prefer the chartered accountants who have gone through ATSWA to those who come from the BSc accounting.

The reason is that those who have actually come through that pipeline are doing everything at the foundation stage of accounting. They must meet all the syllabus requirements and you have to put in work of an accounting nature for 36 months before you can become an associate.

So an associate chartered accountant must have the education, experience and ethical disposition these are what make one an accountant

How will you like to be remembered?

I will like to be remembered as someone who impacted the accountancy profession and who led the institute to rise up to the next level.