Ed i to r ’s Note

editor’s note by Rob Rose

123 R F/ca r l a cas t a g n o

BEHIND SAICA’S COMEDY OF ERRORS

The FM spoke to a number of accountants who wrote the notoriously chaotic board exam on December 1. They sketched a terrifying picture of the body overseeing the process, which bodes ill for the profession

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At this point, it’s hard to estimate the damage done to the careers of those who wrote the exam

rom about 7am on December 1, aspiring

Fchartered accountants began to flood into the Gallagher Convention Centre to write what they hoped would be their final accounting board exam. It was the culmination of years of work and the final rite of passage to the coveted CA (SA) qualification.

At the convention centre that day, there were about 2,700 people set to write the eight-hour exam —part of a wider contingent of 4,935 people, in 24 centres across the world, who’d paid R6,022 apiece to the SA Institute of Chartered Accountants (Saica) to write this exam.

In the end, it was a fiasco. The problem was, Saica didn’t want anyone to use their own laptops so it had hired thousands of laptopswhich were laid out in the exam hall.

“It was clear pretty quickly that it was going to be a d i s a s t e r ,”one of the candidates, who asked to remain anonymous, tells the FM. “Some of the laptops wouldn’t switch on, others were old and couldn’t access the Wi-Fi as we had to, and others didn’t have batteries.”

The exam was meant to start at 9am, but as the tech failures cascaded, it became clear this wasn’t going to happen. For one thing, Saica clearly hadn’t sketched out what would occur when 2,700 students tried to simultaneou s ly log onto one Wi-Fi network —which promptly crashed.

“One of the invigilators then told us to rather try to use our phones as a hotspot to connect. The girl behind me then began to stress because she didn’t have a phone that could do that. Others didn’t have the data,”she said.

That, however, was only the beginning. While some of the candidates managed to access the exam program, they promptly got a “r u ntime error”, which meant delays of up to 15minutes as they had to restart the computer.

As another accountant explains: “After the first two hours, the lady behind me just burst out crying. Then she packed up and walked out. I’ll be shocked if she comes back and does it again —hopefully she’ll find the courage.”

Eventually, by 11.30amthe invigilators had managed to wrestle most of the laptops into service, and they decided to start the exam. The problem was, about 10% of the candidates still didn’t have working laptops at that stage.

“Even among those who were able to start, I saw people whose laptops stopped working midway through the exam, and they were then handed paper to write on. But since their laptops wouldn’t turn on, they weren’t able to go back and check what they’d already done,”she says.

In the end, an exam that was meant to finish at 5pm had taken some people until nearly midnight to finish. Writing an exam that could dictate the trajectory of your career is stressful enough; when the institution overseeing that exam throws grenades at you in the dark, it’s that much worse.

Saica CEO Freeman Nomvalo tells the FM it would be fair to say his institution dropped the ball. “We were blindsided at the top by the decision to hire laptops —I wasn’t told about it, and nor were others in the chain of command,” he says. “What made it worse was that a few days before the exam, the staff who decided on this were told by the service provider that some of the laptops didn’t meet the requirements, and we weren’t told about that either.”

The issue now is how to repair that damage. One of Sa ic a’s solutions is for all the candidates to redo the test in February, allowing them to claim the higher mark.

But understandably, those accountants who worked 15hour days for months to get to this point are wary of writing the exam again —if they’ve already passed.

The Senior Partners Forum, which represents SA’s largest accounting companies, has suggested to Saica that it should rather mark the first exam before any rewrite, so that those students who passed don’t have to redo it.

Saica may yet do this. Nomvalo tells the FM: “We have to respect the time spent by the candidates studying and then writing this exam, under stressful circumstances caused by Saica. So I’ve made a revised recommendation to Saica’s board, which will make a decision imminently.”

In a letter sent to Nomvalo last week, Dion Shango, PwC Africa CEO and chair of the Senior Partners Forum, said the debacle has created “anxiety and fear”a mo ng many can d id at e s . As it is, many of the accounting firms are fuming over how this played out. Ruwayda Redfearn, who will take over as CEO of Deloitte Africa in June, described the debacle (with evident restraint) as “disappointing ”.

Olivier Barbeau, managing partner of the Joburg office of Moore, doesn’t buy Saica’s explanation. “If they knew of the problems with the laptopsand did nothing, that’s a big problem. And if they didn’t know, that’s just as much of a problem. The board exam is one of Saica’s top three priorities — how can you mess it up?”he asks.

Barbeau says that at this point, it’s hard to estimate the d a m a ge done to the careers of those who wrote the exam. “It ’ll take them longer to qualify, and there’ll always be this perception that you’re one of those CAs who shouldn’t have qualified, but did so because of that funny exam,”he s ay s .

Though Saica has apologised, Nomvalo says the candid at e s ’trauma is real. “Yo u ’ve spent your life dreaming of becoming a CA, but at the last step, you get tripped up in this spectacular fashion by Saica —I really feel sorry for t he m ,”he says.

Given that the accounting professionwas already struggling to rebuild its credibility after the reputation-fraying scandals of Tongaat Hulett, VBS Mutual Bank and Steinhoff, this is the last thing anyone wanted.

Nomvalo concedes this point. “We had regained a bit of ground. The Edelman Trust Barometer, done earlier this year, showed that trust in the accounting profession had risen to 85%, from 81% three years ago. And trust in Saica had risen from 78% to 86%. So to regain trust, and then have something like this happen, doesn’t help,”he says. x