Audit qualification
There is an important change for ACCA students and members training for the audit qualification. ACCA can longer accept credit union, industrial and provident society or friendly society audit experience as being statutory audit experience for the purposes of the 44 weeks’ experience requirement.
The audit experience must be in the audit of entities where the audit is: ‘(a) Required by European Union Law, or (b) Required by national law as regards small companies’ (S1461 of the Companies Act 2014, as amended).
Our training forms and guidance documents are in the process of being updated. The change aligns ACCA with the position in the other Irish recognised professional bodies.
Monitoring reviews
The ACCA audit compliance monitoring team are continuing with their quarterly series of articles on key topics arising during their audit monitoring reviews. This quarter they return to ISQM and, in particular, the importance of monitoring and remediation, and the firm’s annual evaluation. Find out more.
The DSS is seeking registered professionals to join the Decision-Making Representative Panel
DSS panel
The Decision Support Service is seeking registered professionals in Ireland to join the Decision-Making Representative Panel. A panel member who is an accountant will, for example, assist persons with limited decision-making ability to manage their money and taxation affairs. Find out more and apply now.
A credit union may now agree to participate in a loan to a member of another credit union
Credit union legislation
The Minister for Finance has signed the statutory instrument commencing further sections of the Credit Union (Amendment) Act 2023. A credit union may now agree to participate in a loan to a member of another credit union or the referral of members of one credit union to another. This will allow for syndicated loans for larger projects and for potentially more mortgage lending.
The commencement order also allows for approval of all plans and policies by the board every three years instead of every year, as is the current requirement, and it requires that the board design and adopt an ‘environmental, social and governance policy’. Some provisions of the 2023 act remain to be enacted, including the provisions regarding corporate credit unions.
Cybersecurity
ACCA members in public practice have reported being targeted by another phishing attempt, in which scammers attempted to pass off a fake email as being sent by ACCA.
Telling accountants to pay a made-up tax should have made people notice that the email was fake
It was not a particularly sophisticated attempt. The email ‘from’ field was not an ACCA address; the physical address for ACCA was not a real address as Queen Street is in Glasgow and not in Dublin; and the named ACCA staff person is not a real ACCA employee. Finally, telling accountants that they have to pay a new made-up tax should have made people working in practice notice that it was fake. However, the attempt should serve to put everybody on notice that the scammers are getting better, and we all need to be more aware of the risk.
Members in practice would be advised to set up a dedicated email address for their correspondence with their professional body. Do not advertise this anywhere, and either opt out of disclosing an email address on the public register of auditors, ‘find an accountant’ and the directory of members, or have a separate dedicated email address that is publicly available.
The practising certificate renewal process will start shortly and this would be a good time to make those changes, although they can be made at any time through a firm’s myACCA login.
It is also always a good time to review a practice’s cybersecurity; the government is offering grants to assist businesses, with up to €3,000 available for small businesses to review online security. There is a checklist of IT controls that a business should consider implementing in appendix 6 of ISA 315.
