Date: 2025-08-22 Page is: DBtxt003.php txt00025859
ORGANIZATIONS
CHARTERED ACCOUNTANTS WORLDWIDE
WHY? THIS VIDEO IS AN EMBARRASSMENT?
CHARTERED ACCOUNTANTS WORLDWIDE
WHY? THIS VIDEO IS AN EMBARRASSMENT?
Original article: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OJJo7NIlSpg
Peter Burgess COMMENTARY
This video made me see red!
I am incredibly proud of my education. I may not have done as well during my career as might have been expected based on the breadth and quality of my education.
During my 20s I was articled to Brian Maynard, a Partner at the Chartered Accounting firm of Cooper Brothers & Co in London. 3 year articles had been introduced not long before this to those of us who already had university degrees. In my case I had already completed a double major in engeering and economics at Cambridge and as well as participating in an industrial management training program with a major manufacturing company Davy United in Sheffield, Yorkshire.
Qualifying as a Chartered Accountant was the 'icing on the cake' and for me a practical professional training that gave me the opportunity to understand all the different elements that had to come together to have a successful business enterprise.
Early in the 1980s I shared an office in New York with Angus MacDowell, another Chartered Accountant. We worked independently but collaborated from time to time where our interests and goals overlapped. Early on we represented the interests of the UK based Institute of Directors (IOD) in the USA, but that was terminated when the London office realized we were in our 40s and not our 70s! In some ways this was a precurser to the creation of ACAUS ... the Association of Chartered Accountants (ACAUS) in New York. Sandy Needham was also part of this office and early collaborator in the development of ACAUS. I was less visible than either Angus or Sandy because during the 1980s and 1990s I did mostly consulting work outside the USA for organizations like the World Bank and the UN with very unpredicatable presence in New York.
I did what I could to assist in the work that was done aby ACAUS better to integrate the American Certified Public Accountants more fully with the international community of Chartered Accountants. I was disappointed that the effort produced rather little progress. For me, it was something of a reminder that my training as a Chartered Accountant was indeed a 'Gold Standard' of professional and management training.
Fast forward another 20 years, and I am not sure that the modern younger Chartered Accountant has the same professional pride that I had at their age. It is a question I would like to see debated!
Of course ACAUS has now morphed into CAW
Peter Burgess