BY PROVIDENCE OBUH

President of the Institute of Chartered Accountants of Nigeria ICAN, Prof. Francis Ojaide, has called on tertiary institutions and tuition centres to include in their curriculum, the teaching of International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS), the International Standards on Auditing (ISA) and International Public Sector Accounting Standards (IPSAS).

Speaking at the presentation of accreditation and recognition certificates to  39 tertiary institutions and  six tuition centres in Lagos, Ojaide said: “The adoption of IFRS and IPSAS is now a global trend and as part of globalization, with the empowerment of the roadmap for the adoption of IFRS in Nigeria with effect from January 1, 2012 for publicly quoted entities, Nigeria has joined the bandwagon. Tertiary institutions and tuition centres therefore have a vital role to play in disseminating the knowledge to their students.”

Urging institutions and tuition centres to sustain the standards to which the Institute now lends its credence, he pointed out that to lower such standards will ultimately impact negatively, not only on professionalism in the country, but also on the global accountancy profession.

He said that the reason for the award is to ensure standards are maintained in the various institutions where they teach accountancy as a programme, adding that the Institute introduced the accreditation programme as a means of assessing the quality of accounting education in tertiary institutions and tuition centres when it realised that the pass rates of students in its various examinations were below expectations.

He revealed that the major causes of this poor performance could be attributed to poor preparation by students, inadequate teaching personnel in terms of number and quality, decayed infrastructural and instructional facilities in many institutions, poorly articulated curriculum for accounting and related programmes, poor library facilities and absence of Accounting Laboratory.

“Our accreditation exercise is designed to re-affirm the Institute’s commitment to high standards as well as facilitate the choice of academic institutions/tuition centres by our numerous students in their quest for accounting knowledge.  The ICAN accreditation exercise therefore is part of the institute’s quality control measures designed to align the quality of knowledge dissemination by tertiary institutions and tuition centres to global standards on which the institute benchmarks its training curriculum.”

He further explained that the accreditation certificate assists the student to be able to know the institutions they can actually attend, when they attend those institutions, they can be able to gain exemptions from the professional intermediate stages of one of the institute’s examination.

“In order to ensure that accredited institutions do not compromise the set standards, visitations are usually conducted every four academic sessions in the case of tertiary institutions and three years for Tuition Centres, to review and evaluate the standard upon which the previous accreditation/recognition was granted.   Such re-visits afford the team the opportunity to confirm whether the Institution has addressed the weaknesses highlighted during the previous visit,” he said.