More to the job than number crunching

Date: 16/01/1997

By Chris Johnstone

ASK an accountant for an opinion and you can probably get the bottom line on almost anything.

If you ask the boss of the only national institute of accountants with a Brussels office following the work of the EU institutions, then you can count on a measured view of whether they are on track.

Brian Currie, president of the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales, likes what he sees in the current non-interventionist European Commission.

In the 1980s, the institute would have been faced with a raft of problem dossiers from the Commission, mostly stemming from the Directorate-General for the internal market (DGXV). That is not the case any more.

Daimler Benz was one of the turning points for Currie. When the German auto giant announced a couple of years ago that it intended to seek a listing on the New York stock exchange, and alter its accounting rules to meet US concerns, that put paid to any ideas the Commission may have harboured of fostering separate EU accounting systems.

When it became clear that other European companies would follow Daimler Benz down the path of US listing, the Commission changed course and abandoned a separate approach in favour of international cooperation on accounting rules.

Attitudes in the accountancy pro-fession had been moving towards this world-wide approach for some time.

“They have not gone soft on us, but the Commission is now a lot more pragmatic,” says Currie, adding: “Access to the policy-making process comes much earlier than before, which also makes life easier.”

More recently, the institute calculates it has helped to put the profession into the lead in filling in the detail of a European code of conduct for statutory auditors.

All this fits in well with Currie's minimalist view of government regulation. For him, governments should set broad goals and only intervene when business, professions or industry show they are incapable or unwilling to meet them.

For Currie, the devil is literally in the detail but he currently sees little on the Commission agenda, detailed or otherwise, to threaten his members.

Recent Commission probes into whether or not the major international accountancy firms were getting so big as to pose a threat to competition now seem such a thing of the past that they almost slipped the president's memory.

And Currie believes that the Commission's aim of harmonised national tax systems would not cut a swathe through the ranks of Europe's accountants even if this unlikely prospect became a reality.

Most accountants are business all-rounders for whom number crunching tax issues occupy but a small part of their day.

“If they were asked 54 questions in a day, only two would be about tax,” explains Currie, adding: “About one in four of our members work outside the accountancy profession, many as managing directors of large companies.” Even so, and despite the fact that mutual recognition of qualifications broadly exists, this has not led to the emergence of a new breed of blue-suited Euro-accountants migrating from one member state to another.

Cultural differences are a far bigger obstacle than the local exams which must be passed to be able to work in another EU country, according to Currie.

The current priority being accorded by the Commission to getting agreement on a European company statute a type of off-the-peg registration for large companies which would allow them to bypass local rules wins qualified backing from Currie as “a useful additional tool”. But he adds: “It remains to be seen how many people would use it.”

His biggest concern now is about business ignorance over the impact of a single European currency, whether the UK joins or remains an observer.

While banks carried out reviews a few years ago and are now acting on the results, most of the business community has been in slow motion, he says.

The institute, together with its EU counterparts, is planning to play its part in changing this by commissioning several studies on the subject.

The accounting life of Brian Currie has involved work in nearly all European countries and substantial stints in three Scandinavian cities since he joined Arthur Andersen in the 1950s.

In this, he is typical of the many UK accountants who work abroad. Brussels confirms the pattern, with many British accountants working in Commission departments.