Scots ICA selected to teach Russians
The World Bank has chosen the Scots ICA to run a series of courses for trainee accountants in Russia. The institute is working with the Russian National Training Foundation under a Bank-sponsored scheme initially to develop courses for accountancy trainers.
The institute’s training, run in conjunction with the St Petersburg Institute of Commerce, includes computer-based teaching, and general exposure to auditing, tax, financial management and accounting, plus several weeks of management development.
Andrew Mackie, an assistant director at the Scots ICA and responsible for the scheme, described it as a milestone in Russian business practices.
He said: ‘This course is very important for Russian businesses to whom accounting as we know it is a new but vital concept. It will take some time for auditing, for example, to develop into the way we understand it in the West.’
Mackie said that tax appeared to be one of the biggest obstacles facing Russian accountants. Tax efficiency in Russia was ‘everything’, he said.
‘In the West, accounting is geared towards pleasing the shareholders while in Russia achieving tax efficiency is the top priority,’ explained Mackie. ‘A visit from the pistol-wielding tax police is not unheard of in Moscow.’
Mackie added that the courses were intended to appeal to local companies who wanted to form joint ventures with Western organisations and were in need of a Western standard of accounting.
The institute expects to be involved with similar kinds of projects ‘in due course’.
The Scots ICA’s professional competence exam results showed a 17% improvement on last year’s figures. Jill Henderson of Deloitte & Touche in Glasgow won the Albert J Watson prize for achieving the highest grade
