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AccountingWEB’s 2010 state of the profession report

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28th Jan 2010
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If Barack Obama can do it, why can’t we? The annual state of the union address gives the US president an opportunity to look back at the previous previous year and to set his agenda for the year to come. John Stokdyk borrowed the idea to set the scene for AccountingWEB's 2010 policy initiatives.

Some internal changes within Sift Media at the beginning of the year paved the way for my return to AccountingWEB.co.uk as a full-time editor. I worked on the site during 2001-05, but spent the past five years in the world of technology. Many readers will be familiar with my contributions to IT Zone, but my awareness of some of the profession’s more specialist concerns is somewhat rusty.

Over the past month, I’ve been doing background reading and contacting influential voices to bring up my accountking knowledge back up to date. This 'state of the profession' report presents my findings in a number of key sectors, each of which is presented in a separate article linked to the summaries below. While I have relied extensively on the expertise of others, including Mark Lloydbottom, the conclusions are my own and point the way towards how AccountingWEB will approach the issues that come to the fore in the new decade.

  • A decade in accountancy
    Mark Lloydbottom sets the scene with a look back at a turbulent decade in accountancy. Enron and 9/11 left their mark on the profession, but the fall-out from the 2008 banking collapse will ripple through every business and household in the UK as we struggle with the debts that resulted. The challenge facing practitioners is planning how to minimise the impacts on their clients and firms.
     
  • Taxation
    Apart from tinkering with the wording, tax simplification has been a non-starter for as long as I can remember. What has changed beyond recognition is the merged HMRC. The Carter programme for universal online filing is nearing completion, with one last sting in the tail in the shape of iXBRL. Attitudes at Somerset House and in political circles are hardening towards agressive avoidance, but is the profession listening?
     
  • Reporting and regulation
    Are the wheels coming off Sir David Tweedie’s grand project to create a single set of global accounting standards? Vested interests in Europe and the US are not making his life easy and an embarassing climbdown to fudge fair values and financial instruments in the amendmened IAS 39 further dented the IASB’s credibility. In the meantime, few UK small businesses accountants are looking with much enthusiasm at the international standard for SMEs. Read this article to find out how accountancy has become like football’s Premier League and why the biggest threat it faces may come from within the profession itself.
     
  • Technology
    While the big global conglomerates snap up smaller rivals, a new breed of fast-moving, Web-based life forms are challenging accountancy’s software dinosaurs. Since there is no way of avoiding software as a service (SaaS), isn’t it about time the profession got over its PC fixation and learned to love the Cloud?

For all of Gordon Brown’s dour assurances, 'boom and bust' has returned with a vengeance. Youth unemployment is climbing to levels that remind me of the early 80s recession when I started my career. Accountancy (and insolvency) is better equipped to survive hard times than most sectors, partly because of its inherent conservatism and resistance to outside interference.

To twist that famous old French cliché, the more things change, the more accountancy seems to stay the same. While many of the arguments and debates I have picked up after returning to the frontline are the same ones I was wrestling with five years ago, the business, economic and social environment is noticeably different. New technologies have engulfed us and taken interactive media and user-generated content into the mainstream. Accountancy’s early adopters – many of whom frequent this site – have picked up on these new tools, but evidence suggests the wider professional population is still sitting on its hands or thinking more about tax returns and/or the golf course. As I’ve found in the past few weeks, jumping into the online hive is a good way to get acquainted with some of the ongoing debates, if only accountants could only learn to adapt their professional reticence for the digital age.

I have spent much of my time during my explorations of the technology wilderness arguing with Cloud evangelists. In 2005, nobody on AccountingWEB wanted to know about application service provision (ASP) or any other of the weird buzz phrases that were being bandied about. I’m a long-term student of technology history and have a very good feel for the way the industry goes through generational shifts, but the point I have made over and over to the Cloud fanboys is that you can’t lead a community of 90,000 accountants to places they don’t want to go.

What you can do in a forum like AccountingWEB.co.uk is put up relevant, unbiased information and ask questions that will make people think about and debate the issues they face. That is what Rebecca Benneyworth, Gina Dyer, the rest of the team and I plan to do in the next five years.

I hope you come along with us – it should be an interesting ride.
John Stokdyk

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