MIA sets out to grow pool of accounting professionals

THE Malaysian Institute of Accountants (MIA) intends to encourage more students to take up accounting and aims to safeguard the interests of accounting graduates.

MIA president Datuk Mohammad Faiz Azmi said Malaysians should have appropriate skills and knowledge to become seniors in the management team.

“We realised that many people in the financial ecosystem may not be chartered accountants. For example, they could be accounting technicians who work in shared services. At the same time, some people may not be able to afford to go to universities.”

He said MIA would expand its ecosystem to look after accounting technicians and accounting graduates so as to enhance the competency of accountancy professionals.

“We try to encourage them to better themselves through lifelong learning. We hope to be able to encourage them to update their skills and learn something new.”

He said the target was to have 60,000 accountants by 2020, though not necessarily chartered accountants.

Faiz said as far as technology was concerned, the accountants of today could do with better tools.

For instance, shared services require accounting technicians or accounting graduates.

“We are moving away from the spreadsheet to a proper system, and ultimately apps, to do accounting.

“It opens up other windows for accountants to use data analytics. Every corporate now has a lot of data, even the government.

“You also need to have information technology skills to extract the data to make it meaningful,” he said.

Faiz said big accounting firms already used data analytics.

“We have to embrace the fact that many large corporates no longer use paper. The question is how can we best do audit and consulting work using the data that they already have.”

Faiz said there were about 3,000 accounting graduates produced by local universities annually but only about 1,000 registered with MIA.

Meanwhile, MIA chief executive officer Dr Nurmazilah Mahzan said accountancy was a versatile profession the skills benefited various sectors.

Established under the Accountants Act 1967, MIA is the statutory accountancy body that regulates, develops, supports and enhances the integrity and status of the profession while upholding public interest.