Sign the Rethinking Accountancy Open Letter
UK accountancy departments and institutions
Introduction
We believe that the current accountancy education system is narrow, culturally uniform, and insufficiently responsive to the ethical challenges of the profession. This perpetuates the social, economic, and environmental injustice that we witness daily. The problems with current audit practices and the practices of the ‘big four’ accountancy firms – PwC, Deloitte, EY, and KPMG – are becoming increasingly evident. These problems are institutional and cultural rather than just market-based, with prominent critical economists such as Professor Atul Shah arguing that many of these issues stem from accountancy education.
Sponsored by
To:
UK accountancy departments and institutions
From:
[Your Name]
We Call for Accountancy Education to:
1) Become more critical in its approaches, including engaging with accounting’s flaws and limitations and to call out the dominance of the ‘Big Four’ and the implications of this dominance.
2) Address the current lack of consideration for the climate crisis. Accountancy needs more and better tools to deploy in order for accounting to contribute to ecological sustainability.
3) Teach accountability accounting and address the ethical dilemmas of the profession including the cultural acceptance of tax avoidance and evasion, money laundering, and corruption.
4) Develop more ethical accounting pedagogies (teaching) and epistemologies (theories and methods) rooted in real world examples, which will assist reforming the profession.
5) Address challenges of inclusion, diversity, and equality and access (IDEAs) towards more socially sustainable ends.