Accounting’s watchdog, the Financial Reporting Council, is turning the focus of its annual report to industry trends on diversity and inclusion. Plus it’s planning an event to nudge accountancy bodies towards highlighting the issues.
The FRC’s annual Key Facts and Trends in the Accountancy Profession shows the sector’s professional bodies, such as the ICAEW, have more than 530,000 members worldwide, a rise of 16,706 from 2017, which is the highest rate of year-on-year growth in the past five years.
This year, its 16th, the FRC requested data, collected voluntarily, on seven additional diversity indicators on the workforce of the professional bodies and firms.
Widening diversity
Anonymity has been maintained to encourage the accountancy profession to improve and widen its diversity and inclusion data collation in future. The FRC asked whether accountancy bodies collected data on ethnicity, disability, religion/belief/ sexual orientation, school type, first generation to attend university and caring responsibilities.
The results show that the accountancy bodies currently used four of the seven additional diversity indicators to record student data. The other three indicators, religion/belief, sexual orientation and caring responsibilities, are not being recorded.
Representation at partner level
PwC and EY have the largest percentage of female partners (19 per cent), with KPMG and Deloitte at 17 per cent. KPMG and EY have 8 per cent BAME representation at partner level, PwC 5 per cent and Deloitte 3 per cent.
Melanie Hind, FRC executive audit director, says: “I know from personal experience that accountancy is a route into senior roles in business.
Benefits of diversity
“It is encouraging to see that the number of people choosing the profession is continuing to grow worldwide.
“The benefits of having a diverse and inclusive workforce are well documented.
“The FRC is planning an event on diversity later in the year at which we will discuss with, and encourage the bodies and firms, to continue collecting diversity data and look at how to attract and develop talent from a wider cross section of society.”
Other key stats included in the FRC report:
- There are about 164,000 students in the UK and Ireland and nearly 590,000 worldwide.
- Global student numbers increased by 2.4 per cent.
- The number of registered audit firms was 5,660 in 2017, a fall of nearly 19 per cent since 2013.
- Fee income for the Big Four audit firms was up 6 per cent compared with an increase of 4.2 per cent for firms outside the Big Four.
- Fees for non-audit work were down about 9 per cent for Big Four and non-Big Four.
