About a hundred people, mostly men, gathered on Wednesday evening to welcome 197 new members of the Association of Chartered Certified Accountants (ACCA), who joined the global body of professional accountants from Sindh during 2011.
All participants were in formal suits with a plastic badge neatly clipped to their lapels. A white badge meant the person was a new ACCA member while a red badge indicated he was an employer who, in all likelihood, had already hired a fair number of ACCA members in his organisation.
Talking to The Express Tribune, Head of ACCA Karachi Rehan Uddin said professional accountants in general, and ACCA members in particular, were gradually taking leadership positions in large organisations because of their ability to better assess financial implications of risky decisions. “Our members are now into fields other than pure accounting as well because of their deep understanding of financial management.”
Fazal Hussain Gafoor, who is chief financial officer (CFO) of the Central Depository Company (CDC), the only entity handling electronic settlement of transactions carried out at all three stock exchanges of the country, said about 22 part-qualified and full members of ACCA worked at the depository. Saying that MBAs used to work in those positions previously, he added that he now preferred to hire ACCA members because of their sound training and readiness to work in diverse fields.
He said CDC paid new ACCA members between Rs25,000 and Rs50,000 a month while fresh graduates of the Institute of Chartered Accountants of Pakistan (ICAP) received a monthly salary of between Rs50,000 and Rs100,000.
Aslam Dossa, who was previously a partner at BDO Ebrahim and Company, an audit firm, and now teaches at the Institute of Business Management (IoBM), said the company employed at least 30 ACCA members. “Our firm paid new ACCA members Rs40,000-plus a month.”
He said fresh graduates of ICAP received about Rs20,000 a month more than what a new ACCA member would get because the former were professionally bound to work for the firm for at least three years. “Employers want their employees to stay in their jobs for some years at least, but ACCA members are more mobile.”
New ACCA member Shahrukh Tariq, who works at Ernst & Young Ford Rhodes Sidat Hyder & Company, one of the largest audit firms of Pakistan, said ICAP had established a monopoly in the job market for professional accountants. “But ACCA is catching up. It’s the fastest growing body of accountants. It’s growing faster than ICAP.” He added that his audit firm paid new ACCA members Rs40,000 a month or more.
Shahzaib Masud Khan, who works as treasury manager and financial analyst at ICI Pakistan Limited, told The Express Tribune that his company employed at least 20 ACCA members. The starting salary of a new ACCA member at his company, Khan said, was between Rs30,000 and Rs35,000. “They work in diverse fields such as treasury, internal audit, taxation, financial analysis, salaries and leasing.”
The banking sector seems to pay new ACCA members better than audit firms or other businesses. Khurram Alavi, who is product development manager at Habib Metropolitan Bank, said the starting salary of a new ACCA member at his bank was over Rs60,000 a month.
An ACCA affiliate, someone who has yet to complete his practical training, gets over Rs35,000 a month, he said, adding that a part-qualified accountant received a monthly salary of between Rs18,000 and Rs25,000.
Published in The Express Tribune, March 2nd, 2012.
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