Outgoing Chief Executive's report
In this report:
During my six months as your interim chief executive I've overseen a number of projects to further the work of the Institute. In this report, I’d like to touch on a few of the “business as usual” projects that the staff, boards and committees of the Institute perform so well.
Students and academics
As you know, this organisation has always recognised the importance of educating the next generation of accountants. The relationship with the University of New Zealand (as it was then) was established in our first decade, and to this day we continue to support both secondary and tertiary initiatives to support the quality of education.
This year, we signed an agreement to become a sponsor of Enterprise New Zealand Trust, which supports financial literacy and business education in schools. As Platinum Corporate Sponsor, the Institute has naming rights to the National Excellence Award in Sustainable Business for both the Lion Foundation Young Enterprise Scheme (YES) and Student Enterprise Learning Link (SELL) programmes and the opportunity to:
- set the criteria for the awards
- participate in judging, selecting and presenting the awards
- mentor students and present seminars on particular aspects of the business planning process.
We also sponsor the Financial Literacy Programme and NZICA Financial Planning Modules, which enables us to support teaching of financial literacy initiatives and be part of an assessment panel for the new unit standards for the financial planning modules.
At the tertiary level, we continue to support the university student commerce associations, and this year added two more institutions to the four we already supported.
We’ve also run a series of very successful forums for academics in sub-disciplines associated with our profession, and a heads of departments’ conference. These are initiatives that we’ll continue into the next year.
Advocacy
Another important business-as-usual activity is advocacy. The advocacy work done by Institute staff and committees on behalf of members is of an exceptional standard and is achieving good results. One recent example is the non-disclosure rules.
An Act passed in June 2005 to give accountants legal privilege in relation to tax advice needs amendment to ensure it survives litigation discovery. We have worked hard to have this changed, because it is a big issue for our members. If our legal privilege regarding tax advice lasts only as far as the courtroom, the Commissioner of Inland Revenue can break that legal privilege every time a case is taken against a client. By contrast, advice from a lawyer is covered by legal privilege.
After extensive work, including wide consultation and representation to the High Court Rules Committee, we have agreement on an amendment.
Other advocacy work on the taxation shortfall penalty rules, regulatory responsibility, auditor regulations, and a range of other issues continues.
New Zealand standards
Our professional standards and accounting standards teams, both staff and volunteers, have faced a huge workload this year, and have made great progress. For example, this year was the start of adopting International Standards on Auditing (New Zealand). We studied, consulted on and adopted seven of the 34 standards, which is an excellent start.
We’ve also made a considerable contribution at the international level, for example on the classification of redeemable shares.
Internal capability
In his report last year, Garry Muriwai commented that 2008/2009 would be the year that we would turn some of our attention to the internal capability aspects of the strategic plan. We’ve progressed the leadership and culture programme that Garry spoke about; all of the business units, all managers, and most staff have completed an inventory on their leadership style, have completed workshops on leadership, and have begun to examine what changes they might wish to make. The inventory will be repeated at yearly intervals.
By the end of my tenure, we’d developed – and delivered the workshop on – the CHOICES values programme. CHOICES is an acronym to summarise the values that our staff members agreed typified the organisation they wanted to work for: C=creating value by working together; H=having respect and building success; O=open and playing it straight; I=improving and innovating; C=celebrating success and learning to succeed; E=expecting the best; S=supporting integrity and leadership.
The intended results include stronger connections between business units and a workplace that is fun to be in – a workplace of choice.
Acknowledgements
For more about the work of the Institute, please read the divisional reports in the section Our activities. The general managers of these divisions and their staff have completed some excellent work this year – and did so within budget. I am grateful to them for the support they gave me during my six months as interim chief executive.
Keith Wedlock
Interim Chief Executive