Aspirant black CAs ‘excluded’
WORRIED: TRAINEES USE WORDS LIKE ‘INJUSTICE’ AND ‘ANXIOUS’ TO DESCRIBE OFFICE CULTURE
Pass rate for black candidates was 39%, while pass rate for white counterparts was 76%.
Every year the South African Institute of Chartered Accountants (Saica) administers the Assessment of Professional Competence (APC). This board exam is the last hurdle for an aspiring chartered accountant (CA) en route to qualifying. The latest results, released in late February, had an overall pass rate of 52%.
The pass rate for white candidates was 76% and the pass rate for black candidates was 39%.
The Conversation Africa asked Sedzani Musundwa, a registered chartered accountant and accounting lecturer who has researched the experiences of black chartered accountants, to unpack the results.
In your research, you’ve identified a high failure rate among black chartered accounting students as a trend. Why does this ma er?
Statistics provided by the Council on Higher Education show that black African students studying commerce have disproportionately higher failure rates than their peers of other races.
That trend continues when it comes to the APC administered by the professional body Saica.
But by this stage, it’s the cream of the crop getting culled: people who have made it through undergraduate and postgraduate degrees, and are already working, doing accounting articles in the same way as prospective lawyers do.
During my PhD research, qualified black chartered accountants recounted their journeys through academia, articles and the board exams. They spoke overwhelmingly about experiences of “injustice” every step of the way. One participant felt like they were “not even an employee” (of the firm at which they did articles).
Tell us about your most recent research on black chartered accountants.
A colleague, Theresa Hammond, and I interviewed black chartered accountants in South Africa who qualified between 2016 and 2022.
It was around 2016 that APC pass rates among black candidates began to drop. The candidates were grappling with a number of issues that ate away at their ability to perform at work and in their formal professional assessments.
For instance, they worried that their white peers and managers in accounting training firms thought of them as being incompetent and incapable purely because they were black. They were not allocated work or called into meetings that their white peers were attending.
The majority felt marginalised in the workplace. This made them feel constantly anxious and fearful about whether their articles would be signed off as successful by the end of the training years. They were left with only each other to turn to.
How can this situation be changed?
In both this study and a forthcoming book chapter, I point out that commerce faculties still think students from previously – and currently – disadvantaged backgrounds need “interventions” like literacy and numeracy classes and English writing classes. Instead, they need empathy and care from those around them; if these can be formalised, even better.
“Interventions” should be mainstreamed. For example, everybody should attend English comprehension classes because students in business really struggle with this. All students should also be directed to cultural consciousness classes and encouraged to see psychologists.
This, coupled with mentorship and coaching, can make a difference.
That’s been proven by organisations like Endunamoo. It provides tuition to all CA candidates who have failed the APC and want to repeat it. Its approach yields pass rates far better than the national average.