Economic Transformation Programme (ETP) was unique with its 1,000 professionals and experts, running through 8-weeks lab period of 600 meetings. Some of the targets are extremely ambitious (eg. 92%of the RM1.4 trillion investment from the private sector-73% domestic, 27% FDI), in the spirit of aiming the stars and reach the sky.
However, the evil is always in the details and the ETP Roadmap contains few drawbacks. For instance one of the 12 NKEAs is business services whereby comparison was even made between Malaysia and countries like Philippines and Czech Republic to show how low our business services sector's contribution to GDP.
Under Business Opportunity 2 (page 423) - Accounting Sector, ETP stated that Malaysia must increase the quality of its accountants, especially in areas of international taxation and forensic accounting. Thus a new requirement to hold a recognised professional qualification (eg, ACCA, CPA) before being admitted as a chartered accountant in Malaysia is to be introduced. Malaysian Institute Of Accountants (MIA) therefore are required to introduce the additional requirement by mid-2012.
At a recent annual general meeting of the MIA, members especially those graduated from local institute of higher learning were told that MIA was not consulted over the issue. A check with the ETP roadmap on lab members for Business Services (pg 594) confirms this. There were no representatives either from MIA or Accountants General Office in the list of 34 lab members.
Accountants Act 1967 stated that MIA functions to determine the qualifications of persons for admission members and for ETP to make such a big decision without consultation with MIA with over 27,156 members as the governing body is highy unacceptable. The bigger concern is for the ETP to generalise that local accounting graduates were not up to the standard when its comes into international business.
And during the AGM, MIA member exercised their rights, voted down the proposal and retained the status quo.
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