Is Accounting a Profession? Essay

The distinction between whether accounting is or is not a profession is not always as evident as you or I may think. Accounting is a broad term covering many roles and requirements, and when investigating further within literature it appears there are numerous attempts to broaden the recognized scope as to what professional accountancy actually is, and in others comes a more traditional, drawn back view.

Kohler (1963) defines accountancy as the theory and practice of accounting; its responsibilities, standards, conventions and activities. An accountant is defined as someone who performs certain accounting functions such as accounts analysis, auditing, preparation of financial statements but the role often extends much further beyond this. There is a difference between what is classified as a profession or more simply as a trade, with a profession being deemed a requiring specialized knowledge and continued learning, usually following an intensive academic preparation whereas a trade can be considered a skilled job, requiring more manual skills and special training.

I suppose in the first instance you’d assume to practice accountancy you must have a qualification but that is not the case. It’s not a protected term like a solicitor or a lawyer, and although professional qualifications are often desirable it’s not compulsory, so I suppose anyone can act, and call themselves an accountant. I aim to discuss these views in more detail throughout this reflective essay, with the hope of inciting ideas withing yourself as to whether you believe accounting is a profession or not.

When practicing accountancy, one’s duties will usually depend on the level of qualification, professional experience and designations they hold. Whilst you can argue that you do have the ability to operate and perform duties as an accountant without a professional qualification, it is usually the case that this would be on a smaller scale, and on the more simplistic end of what you would define as accountancy. Many medium-larger corporations state minimum education levels and to progress through the hierarchy, also being a member of a professional body.

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To be considered as a member of these professional bodies, you must successfully pass a series of exams and agree to abide by ethical principles as an active member. These principles influence both behavior and decision making due to being mindful of key areas such as professional competence, integrity, confidentiality, objectivity and professional behavior. If faced with an ethical conflict or dilemma, a professional accountant is required to follow this code of conduct (varying slightly between governing bodies) and is expected to put the interests of society first. Anderson (1932) stated to preserve the integrity of his reports, the accountant must insist upon absolute independence of judgement and action. The necessity of preserving this position of independence indicates certain standards of conduct. If the confidence of the public in the integrity of accountants’ reports is shaken, their value is gone (Duska, Duska and Kury, 2011). If accounting wasn’t considered a profession, I don’t believe these principles would be held in such high regard.

This is further complicated by the fact there are guidelines and principles, but no hard rules. Why and to what extend is an accountant ethically obliged to disclose a situation? What is classed as a situation? It’s all based on judgement and this varies person to person. For example, if you are selling your home, you wouldn’t necessarily point out every flaw within the property or its likely you will struggle to sell. Is an accountant expected to do the same? Accounting as a process is developing or preparing information to provide business and financial information, so long as this is truthful and accurate to the accountant’s knowledge this is acceptable. Sometimes this isn’t enough though, and the accountant is expected to be more aware of the external situation that may fall outside of their remit. This wider responsibility is relatable to other professions, such as a lawyer who would be expected to understand the full, outer picture rather than just the information presented to them prior to drawing conclusions or giving any advice. There is an argument that some of this behavior is influenced by an individual’s moral philosophy (Forsyth, 1992), which I believe can be true and there are instances of accountants practicing immorally but this can be said of any profession. On the other hand, Marques and Azevedo-Pereira (2009) suggested that philosophical orientations of relativism and idealism do not influence ethical decision making by charted accountants. The morality, and ethics is something you study when preparing to be an accountant but its more something that’s learned and developed over time with experience.

Having to abide by something which is developed over time raises the question that accounting could be a career rather than a profession. Career is broadly defined as and is commonly considered to be the lifelong sequence of role-related experiences of individuals (Hall, 2002) and career success can be defined as the positive psychological and work-related outcomes accumulated as a result of one's work experiences (Seibert and Kraimer, 2001, p. 2). To successfully practice accounting in today’s world requires both educational knowledge and practical experience. Career is a journey of learning and work, which is different for different individuals. It is the sequence of occupations and work profiles that a person carries out, responsibilities undertaken, movement and transition between jobs and the sense of satisfaction derived from working with the organization (Surbhi, 2018). This point is strengthened by the skills gap clearly demonstrated within the profession. As suggested by Lawson et al. (2014: 298), most of the changes in accounting education have not led to the necessary structural changes needed to position all accountants for long-term career demands across a variety of organizational settings. There’s been a long-standing debate as to the effectiveness and preparedness of accountancy students and from my own personal experience I can agree with this. It’s not until you start to put theory into practice, and attempt real world scenarios that you actually start to build substance to your studies to be able to make accurate and business relevant decisions. Both lawyers and doctors must complete a 4-year undergraduate degree before entering their residency programs, but this is not the case for accountancy. There is a distinct divide between accounting as a practice and accounting education. One of the recommendations from the Pathways Commission (2012: 36) is to “develop curriculum models, engaging learning resources, and mechanisms for easily sharing them as well as enhancing faculty development opportunities in support of sustaining a robust curriculum”, with the first objective being to “engage the accounting community to define the body of knowledge that is the foundation for accounting’s curricula of the future” (The Pathways Commission, 2012: 37), which is suggestive that accountancy is a learned profession.

It's important we continue to review and reflect on accountancy as a profession and professional practice as the industry and what is expected of its habitants changes so rapidly. Technological advances including automated auditors, MTD, artificial intelligence all expand the skill set required of professional accountancy and further widens the increasing responsibilities. Without this reflection, those more traditional accountants will be left behind as suggested by (Olsen 1979), “Those who yearn for a return to the days of less standards and responsibilities are apt to be disappointed. All the signs point in the opposite direction”. The Chartered Global Management Accountant (CGMA, 2019) has developed their own framework airing to technical skills, but these are not tested in any great detail within the syllabus, further confirming my point that the professional practice described as accountancy is a far wider remit than its standard definition. Intelligent robots can currently be used to count inventories, inspect fixed assets, handle bank audit confirmations and read contracts or other documents to generate meaningful insights (Lin and Hazelbaker, 2019), freeing up the accountant’s time to add value in more meaningful business support areas that aren’t necessarily accounting based but require someone of that caliber to produce insightful KPIs and advice.

In my opinion, the original and more traditional scope of accountancy should be considered a profession however as evidenced above in today’s world, accountancy is more of a career. It’s not something you can just learn over a designated period of time and be able to perform, you need a breath of real-world experience to draw from, continuous progression and training, and the ability to keep up with the ever-expanding responsibilities the public expects from accountancy as a whole.