The Institute of Chartered Accountants of India (ICAI) recently embarked on a mission to successfully forge global partnerships through a series of interactive meetings and conferences with IASB, IFASS and Indian stakeholders from 10th April to 13th April, 2018. The discussions focused on issues related to Jurisdictional Standard setters across industry and Facilitating adoption of new IFRSs – Approaches and Experiences, according to Prafulla Chhajed, Vice-President, ICAI.
While the ICAI is committed to work closely with IASB and to deliver convergence of Indian Accounting Standards with IFRS Standards, he said recently, IFRS 17 Insurance Contracts have been issued by the International Accounting Standards Board (IASB), which is a major accounting reform for the insurance industry that plays vital role in the economy.
To provide Indian entities with a level playing field internationally, the ICAI arranged “IFRS – 17 (Ind AS 117, Insurance Contracts) Insurance Industry Outreach” on April 11, 2018 where Senior Technical Experts from International Accounting Standards Board (IASB), ICAI and Insurance Regulatory Development Authority of India (IRDAI) addressed the problem of multitude of accounting approaches and prescribed a consistent and uniform approach, he said.
Nilesh Shivji Vikamsey, ICAI India, said that India’s auditing standards matched world standards and, while the ICAI is training around 800 Chartered Accountant students annually, job openings existed globally for such candidates at the rate of 12,000 professional accountants annually in Canada, and 11,000 in Australia itself. “The ICAI still follows international accounting standards, but the IFRS-9 will be hitting us in a major way with a big impact on the banking sector, where the new model will increase Provisioning among banks,” he said.
However, it was questions about the Nirav Modi scam and other financial issues occurring in India that drew interesting exchanges from the ICAI representatives.
“We don’t have the powers to punish erring companies — but only the individuals — and six of our members were punished by us through a life ban. The ICAI has been established under an Act of Parliament since 1949, and we have been asking the Government to change our rules to enable us to have a deterrent mechanism for frauds. Interestingly, a similar organization like ours in the USA does not work under the Government ,” said Vikamsey.
M Devaraja Reddy (Former President – ICAI India) said ICAI has played a role in virtually every successful businessperson’s endeavours in India. “However, about the Nirav Modi scam, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) has to look into it as we are not allowed to go into investigations in such matters. Still, as a regulator, we are doing our best,” he said.
Commenting on “Black Money and tax avoiders,” Shivaji Bhikaji Zaware, (ICAI India) said an Auditor, despite also being a financial “doctor, architect, engineer, lawyer and even business service provider” continues to be a watchdog, but not a “bloodhound” as that is not their job.
“There is greed in every profession and also punishment for the same. Where the Nirav Modi case is concerned, there is a high power group formed by the CBI for that purpose and we are not getting into the blame game. There are things like internal audit, statutory audit etc. on November 25, 2016, the RBI had issued a circular giving a warning and we have asked lots of information from the Punjab National Bank who are not cooperating with us in regard to required information,” he said, adding that “There is collusion between larger groups of people and +technology misuse+ by them.”
Pointing out that the IACI is waiting for Indian banks to adopt IFRS standards, Sanjay Vasudeva (ICAI India) said “The Statute says that it is not the duty of the Auditor to detect frauds. You are “expecting the moon” if you expect this to be the rule.”
Liesel Knorr, Chair, IFASS, was also present at the press conference.
