DailyPost 2297
WILL ICAI SHOW THE WAY?
While the vast majority of Indian professionals from different genres are hiding their head in sand, as if nothing has changed in the last decade or so, but in reality, the digital immersion age has fully set in. Whatever little was left of it, Covid-19 came as a universal technology filler. Now there is no going back. This has been the direction in the last two decades or so, but the last few years has made it a make or mar story. You need to take a clear cut call on whether you want to continue on the wrong side of technology. It might just end up in an existential call in the near future itself.
Singularity University and various other digital thinkers have been seeing the nemesis the accounting as a practice and slowly the trend moving on to auditing as well. What havoc human professionals have done to these professions is another reason to find shelter in the lap of technology. I have been declaring for long that today every profession in fifty percent domain and fifty percent technology. The ones who have the domain knowledge would be aplenty, and the ones with the tech value add will be few and far between. The aversion to technology can turn out to be subversion of domain.
In this context the decision of ICAI to propose tech in the CA curriculum is in the right direction. What nature of audit can be done on the firm like FTX if you don’t know technology. That is certainly lots in between to be mastered. When everything is digital, it is difficult to understand, as to how you undermine technology and be a successful professional delivering what is required by today’s accounting and auditing standards / requirements. What ushered is forensic audit? There can any number of opinions, but one cannot deny at least one facet, that it is also somewhere a failure of regular audit.
If forensic audit is the future and regular accounting and audit be consigned to automation, and high end audit based on a different type of business and financial intelligence will be the future. How well our current breed of CAs fare in the changed scenario? ICAI intervention is not only timely, it would also provide credibility to the profession in the midst of onslaughts. The proposed syllabus if approved will have subjects on the tech side; Data Science to Blockchain technology to Artificial Intelligence. The quality of the curriculum as to be matched by the quality of the content and what we call in technology as hands on. Reasonable level of hands one during the academic course would be add the winning punch.
HOPE ICAI WILL SHOW THE RIGHT PATH TO OTHER PROFESSIONS AS WELL.
Sanjay Sahay