Accountants must ensure high sense of integrity

ICAG (fin)
Story: Boahene Asamoah

THE Minister of State at the Ministry of Education, Science and Sports, in Charge of Tertiary Education, Ms Elizabeth Ohene, has called on professional accountants to ensure a high sense of integrity in the practice of their duties.
She said “if the country cannot count on the professional integrity of accountants in the country, then the country would be doomed”.
Speaking at the launching of five locally produced accounting manuals in Accra today, Ms Ohene said the country should be able to count on professionalism of accountants and should play an active part in national budget.
She added that the accounting profession also needed to be an integral part of the Ghanaian life and questioned why weighting of food items which were critical instrument of measurement was not part of the daily sales of goods in the country’s markets.
“You have a responsibility to become an integral part of our daily life and the economy as whole”, Ms Ohene stated.
She said the accounting profession comes with high responsibility to the society and urged accountants to partner her ministry in educating the youth on the need to take mathematics as a serious subject.
The Managing Director of HFC Bank, Mr Asare Akuffo, who chaired the function, said there was the need for the practice of the profession to reflect local demands.
He mentioned for instance the issue about audit, where in especially foreign countries the notion of auditing was not to discover fraud but rather to check whether proper procedures were followed.
Mr Akuffo said in such countries there were systems available to check fraud, however, he suggested that in countries such as Ghana, auditing must discover fraud as there were weak structures to deal with fraud in accounting practises.
“We must look at accounting systems that are relevant to the country’s own peculiar needs”, he stated.
He used the occasion to urge students to breast themselves with modern things and learn broad areas to be able to rise to the highest level in their careers.
The President of the Institute of Chartered Accountants, Ghana, (ICAG), Mrs Cecilia Nyan, said the launching of the manuals was an important step towards ensure that local students were adequately prepared for the examinations.
She said the books were not only relevant to local demands but also important for other countries as well.
She added that the manuals would help students to have access to books in order to study to pass their examinations as well as help increase the number of students who pass the chartered accountancy course from the current 100 annually to about 300 in a year.
Mrs Nyan also encouraged other professional institutions and companies to also make good use of the books as reference points and materials.
The first auctioned copy of the book was bought by Pricewaterhouse Coppers for GH¢7,500.