Akin to IIT, IIM, Indian Institutes of Accounting to be set up across India

NEW DELHI: A parliamentary panel has proposed to establish an Indian Institute of Accounting (IIA) to raise the standards of accounting education in India.

The IIA, as per the house panel, will be established by a central law similar to other eminent educational institutions like the Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT) and the Indian Institutes of Management (IIM). IIA, like IITs and IIMs, will also be set up in different parts of the country and work closely with these institutions along with National Law Universities, and other national and regional institutions.

The proposal is a part of a series of recommendations made on the report on the Chartered Accountants, the Cost and Works Accountants, and the Company Secretaries (Amendment) Bill, 2021, tabled in Lok Sabha on Wednesday.

The panel proposed constituting an IIA primarily to focus on academics while the Institute of Chartered Accountants, or ICAI will be limited to the role of a “licensing agency”. “The proposal visualizes the IIA as an academic institution that educates licensed professionals similar to AIIMS, PGI, JIPMER, National Law Schools. In contrast, the Institute of Chartered Accountants of India will be a professional certification agency, much the same way it is now,” the report stated.

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ICAI is a statutory body created by an act of Parliament for regulating the profession of chartered accountancy in the country. The institute functions under the administrative oversight of the ministry of corporate affairs. The IIA will also offer a “competition” to the Institute of Chartered Accountants of India, or ICAI.

IIA will be run by a fully autonomous board of governors which will include both experts and lay persons along with officials from ministries of finance, education, and corporate affairs.

IIA: Courses offered, admission

The institute will be “research-driven” and offer a five-year undergraduate course in the beginning and eventually offer postgraduate and PhD programmes as well. Given liberty of choice, students who will qualify for the undergraduate programme will be given two degrees–a bachelor of accounting and a bachelor of business. After graduation, such students will also get a license similar to CAs and will be called Certified Professional Accountants.

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The proposed IIA will also have an academic council that will be responsible for developing the undergraduate curriculum. The undergraduate curriculum will include financial and cost accounting, auditing, tax, law, business strategy, organisational behavior, management, governance, and public administration, technology, data science, psychology and other related subjects. Recently, Debashis Mitra, the new chairman of the Institute of Chartered Accountants of India had announced that a new curriculum will be launched this year.

At the postgraduate level, students will have the choice to specialise in areas like forensic accounting, business analytics, cyber security, valuation, international tax, and other relevant fields. Admission to the institute will be done on the basis of an entrance test in line with National Education Policy 2020.