Chartered Institute of Management Accountants (CIMA) Global Vice President Melanie Janine Kanaka opined that students were better off choosing global as opposed to local qualifications for accounting.
Kanaka was recently appointed CIMA Global Vice President and is the first Sri Lankan based in Sri Lanka to be appointed to that position. CIMA has joined with the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA) to become the world’s largest accounting body by the metric of membership.
Country Manager at CIMA Zahara Ansary said, “CIMA is a global passport. It lets you succeed globally. That kind of opportunity you won’t get from a local body.”
Ansary noted that 2 of the presidents of the local bodies were members of the CIMA fraternity.
CIMA representatives were speaking on September 2 at the Hatch Co-Working space on the announcement of their career skills fair to be held in the coming weeks.
CEO Tresync Imran Furkan said that with the economic downturn due to COVID-19 there was a renewed demand for technical accounting knowledge to uncover fraud. Furkan suggested that in economically favorable environments there was a tendency for failure to be hidden and this could change because of the downturn.
Furkan was very confident that the Colombo International Financial City (CIFC) in Port City would be successful.
There is no large financial center in between Dubai and Singapore for the region and CIFC was well placed to serve that demand. Hong Kong is currently facing political issues linked to China increasing the scope for CIFC to succeed.
Furkan noted the relevance of local accounting bodies but reiterated the usefulness of a global qualification as there was a convergence of taxation regimes and accounting standards globally. Furkan said that there was a large scope for business process outsourcing to happen in Sri Lanka.
