Pathway for students to succeed
DEDICATED to produce globally recognised accountants, Taylor’s College and the Malaysian Institute of Certified Public Accountants (MICPA) recently inked a memorandum of agreement (MoA).
The three-year agreement grants Taylor’s College the status as a sole tuition provider for the MICPA-CAANZ programme.
Open to students and graduates, the MICPA-CAANZ programme offers an international accountancy course that has modules offered by MICPA and the Chartered Accountant Australia and New Zealand (CAANZ).
Therefore, students who have successfully completed the programme will obtain two professional qualifications - Certified Public Accountant (Malaysia) and Chartered Accountant (Australia and New Zealand).
“The pathway we are offering allows students to combine some papers from the MICPA programme into their final year in their degree.
“Interested graduates will start by sitting for five papers while accounting students will start with two papers in their fourth year and continue the other three later on perhaps while they are working,” said MICPA president and executive committee chairman Datuk Abdul Rauf Rashid.
Due to its global recognition, Abdul Rauf said the MICPA-CAANZ qualification will award graduates the recognition of a Chartered Accountant in any part of the world. He said that Malaysia produces around 5,000 accounting graduates a year.
“The challenge lies in encouraging them to continue further to take up the professional accountancy qualification,” said Abdul Rauf.
He added that to achieve the government’s target of having 60,000 accountants by 2020, there are many ongoing initiatives to facilitate accounting students and graduates to become professionally qualified accountants.
“MICPA has partnered with Universiti Sains Malaysia and Universiti Malaya to also allow a pathway for their students who come from non-accounting backgrounds to convert their qualifications and become a professionally qualified accountant,” he said.
MICPA executive director Foo Yoke Pin said that this is one way to encourage more Malaysians to take up accountancy.
“I believe that accountants don’t necessarily have to be accounting graduates, they can be non-accounting graduates as well,” he added.
Taylor’s College academic director HoeKhoo Li Lin said that the programme allows students to take two papers in their fourth year and undergo a nurture and development programme.
“This is what we will be doing with our first group in September,” she said, adding that the programme’s first batch will have 20 students from Yayasan Peneraju Bumiputera.
The programme will be open to the public early next year.