ACCA Council candidates

Have any of my fellow long suffering ACCA colleagues had a look at the list of candidates for election to the ACCA Council?

A lot of them seem to be from Hong Kong, although many of them are pretty evasive as to where they live and work.

I could only find one candidate to vote for and even he didn't tick many boxes.

I guess that this is since the rule change which means that a set percentage of Council no longer need to be UK Auditors.

Going by the ACCA website stats 63% of all ACCA members are from "Europe & Americas" yet fewer than 45% of these candidates are from E&A. It will be interesting to see what the geographical make-up of the Council is after the AGM.

It seems to me as though the ACCA gets it UK credibility from UK Practising Certificate holders but doesn't expect to have to do much to meet their needs.

The ACCA qualification appears to have become the equivalent of an international MBA. It was very different when I joined as a student 25 odd years ago. Then along came the foreign travel loving Anthea Rose who took the helm and set a course for international expansion.

It reminds me of the UK's membership of the EC where the public are desperate for a referendum but the politicians are determined not to give them one as they know what the result would be. If the ACCA asked the UK membership for their views on the whole Global Domination strategy I can't imagine that the UK membership would endorse it.

In a recent Any Answers thread one poster announced that he was in both the ACCA and the ICPA. I was shocked by this as I always thought that one organisation demonstrated its members' compliance with UK best practice whilst the other was little more than a sham trade association giving its subscribers some official looking letters with which to hoodwink the public into believing that the fee payer was a bona-fide time served qualified accountant.

I'm starting to think that I've been overtaken by events and that the future lies in surrendering my ACCA membership and joining a trade body.