The world’s largest accountancy body aims to allow students to take exams remotely in a bid to curb rising incidents of cheating in exams that mark professional qualifications.
The Association of Chartered Certified Accountants (ACCA), which has about 260,000 members, has said that from March it will stop allowing students to take online exams in all cases except in exceptional circumstances.
“We are seeing that the sophistication of (fraud) systems is exceeding what can be done in terms of safeguards,” Helen Brand, chief executive of ACCA, said in an interview with the Financial Times.
Remote testing was introduced during the Covid pandemic to enable students to qualify at a time when the lockdown had halted in-person exam evaluation.
In 2022, the UK accounting and auditing industry regulator, the Financial Reporting Council (FRC), said that cheating in professional exams was a “live” issue in the UK’s largest companies.
Multi-million dollar fines have been imposed on large auditing and accounting firms worldwide over fraud scandals in trials.
The FRC investigation found that fraud cases also involved some tier-one auditors, a category that includes the “big four” accountants – KPMG, PwC, Deloitte and EY – along with Mazars, Grant Thornton and BDO.
In 2022, EY agreed to pay a record $100m (£74m) to US regulators over claims that dozens of its employees cheated on an ethics test and that the company misled investigators.
The ACCA said it had concluded that online tests had become too difficult to police, given the increase in artificial intelligence (AI) tools available to students.
Brand said ACCA, which has more than half a million students, has worked “intensively” to tackle cheating, but “those who want to do bad things are probably working at a faster pace”.
He said the rapid development of technology, led by AI tools, has pushed the issue of fraud to a “critical point”.
Last year, the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales (ICAEW), which also trains accountants around the world, said reports of fraud were still rising.
However, ICAEW still allows some examinations to be conducted online.
“There are very few high-risk exams now that are allowing (remote monitoring),” Brand said.
