Accountants and the public interest
Thu, 01 Jul 2010 13:26:00 BST
A fundamental characteristic of professions is that they should serve the public interest. At its annual conference in July, the Council of the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales dedicated some time to thinking about what this might mean for the accountancy profession today. In order to stimulate and guide their thinking, they invited Dean of the Business School and Director of FEGReG, Professor Chris Cowton, to open up the session.
Chris's lecture acknowledged the difficulty of defining the public interest with any degree of precision and finality, but argued that this is not an insurmountable hurdle to pursuing a productive agenda. Examining the key characteristics of any true profession, he explained how the public interest is to be served through the complementary twin elements of ethics and knowledge, where a useful body of knowledge is not only to be maintained and developed by professional bodies but also kept up-to-date and practised by members. Chris concluded his lecture by discussing some of the practical challenges of fulfilling, and being seen to fulfil, this vision of serving the public interest.
