Earning Trust in an Era of Accountability

At difficult and uncertain moments, the accountancy profession is a safe harbor. The entire profession is united by everlasting principles of integrity, professionalism, and independence. We are accountable to professional organizations and public oversight, and we have earned a trusted central role in the financial ecosystem over many generations.

To keep earning this role in an era of accountability, we need to embrace changes while tackling ethical challenges. Our successful navigation of the sustainability transformation, the rise of artificial intelligence, and our continuing contributions to the fight against corruption will be particularly important.

Stepping Into the Sustainability Transformation

It is a multifaceted and complex topic, but one way or another, the sustainability transformation is deeply relevant to every professional accountant in India and around the world, as well as every stakeholder in our profession.

As an IFAC observer in 2019 and as a Board member since 2020, I have seen IFAC make sustainability a top priority, in particular under the leadership of our former president Alan Johnson and former Chief Executive Officer Kevin Dancey. The "building block approach" was a permanent matter for discussion at the Board while the EU launched the Green Deal, and IFAC played an important role in the emergence of the International Sustainability Standards Board, or "ISSB," under the IFRS Foundation.

We continue to support our profession in driving the sustainability transformation, and in leading the transformation of the organizations and stakeholders our profession serves. IFAC has unique strengths to bring to these efforts in our role as both the profession's global voice and as its global convener. I believe this is a critical role.

"The accountancy profession, as a trusted and influential public interest profession, should speak clearly about how society can best undergo the sustainability transformation."

The accountancy profession, as a trusted and influential public interest profession, should speak clearly about how society can best undergo the sustainability transformation. And within the profession, we need to engage with each other through active, ongoing dialogue and support each other's efforts by exchanging best practices and resources.

The role of non-financial information in the sustainability transformation is simply essential. Financial markets need this information so that investors and lenders can make efficient decisions that align with sustainability targets. But for this to be true, no actor can be outside the reporting system.

Our focus is on sustainability as it relates to all professional accountancy organizations in India, but also beyond India. We emphasize the need for a global system for mandatory sustainability disclosure, which will minimize regulatory fragmentation and reduce costs.

We believe, the IFRS Foundation standards are the right foundation for this system. We welcome all well-intentioned initiatives for sustainability reporting standards, but we strongly encourage alignment and interoperability. Ultimately, we are all on the same sustainability journey, so we should embark on it together.

Embracing Sustainability Disclosure and Assurance

We have been talking to our colleagues across the accountancy profession, to the regulators and other stakeholders outside of the profession, about the opportunity that professional accountants have in embracing sustainability disclosure, sustainability assurance, and the broader sustainability transformation.

We are the profession best positioned to lead on sustainability reporting and assurance. We have the technical skills to integrate financial and non-financial information. Wherever we are in the value chain, we have the skills to transform high quality standards into high quality information. And our reputation and clear accountability to our professional organizations and regulators will bring trust to this information, in the same way that we bring confidence to traditional financial statements.

As sustainability disclosure has taken shape, another key area has emerged, which also calls for strong advocacy and engagement: the assurance of sustainability disclosure.

Assurance gives investors and stakeholders confidence in the information they are receiving from companies. With it, investors and all other users of sustainability information can get a clearer picture of a company's true impact on the world and its prospects for long-term value creation.

IFAC provides evidence-based insights into global sustainability reporting and assurance trends, helping stakeholders identify gaps, inform policy, and track progress through our State of Play series of research reports. We see a positive trend in the share of companies that obtain assurance on their sustainability disclosures, but we also find persistent fragmentation in the standards used for assurance.

As with sustainability disclosure, it is vital for all countries to converge on a unified approach to sustainability assurance. Resolving a fragmented system only gets more difficult as time goes on.

IFAC supports the International Standards on Sustainability Assurance (ISSA) 5000, produced by the International Auditing and Assurance Standards Board (IAASB), becoming the global baseline standard for sustainability assurance. It was developed to be profession-agnostic, and it allows for a broad range of assurance providers while maintaining a high level of quality.

But for this standard to work as intended, jurisdictional policy makers and regulators must ensure that all assurance providers, whether they come from the accountancy profession or not, are held to the same stringent standards of competence, ethics, and independence. We must prevent the emergence of a two-tiered system, one in which regulated, professional accountants are held to stringent standards, while others function without uniform oversight or accountability.

The accountancy profession in India should speak strongly in favor of the adoption and implementation of ISSA 5000 as the path forward on sustainability assurance. For our part, as individual professionals, we need to be ready to meet market expectations in the assurance space and to compete with non-professionals.

Upskilling and Reskilling for Sustainability

Embracing sustainability is going to require professional accountants to upskill and reskill, and acquire new competencies.

The role of Professional Accountancy Organisations (PAO) at this point will be enormous because they are the primary support through this transformation for their individual members, at any age or level of experience, and this includes accounting students, who need their curriculum to include sustainability as the core material.

In March 2025, IFAC revised the International Education Standards (IES), which are the global baseline standards for accountancy education, to embed sustainability-related learning outcomes in the training of professional accountants. These changes ensure that the next generation of professionals are equipped with baseline sustainability knowledge and skills.

At IFAC, we will keep communicating with our member organizations to explain new changes and articulate the best ways they can adapt, for example, by developing effective training programmes for their own members.

Let me emphasize that our profession is the profession best-positioned to lead on sustainability reporting and assurance. But if we want our stakeholders to call on us, we need to do our part, individually and collectively, by embracing sustainability.

It is extremely important for PAOs to move swiftly and boldly with their members on sustainability. This will take a lot of hard work, and there will be bumps in the road on every PAO's journey, but it is imperative to keep going.

"ICAI, through its sustainability offerings for its members and its engagement in national, regional, and global conversations about best practices, is an excellent example of leadership."

ICAI, through its sustainability offerings for its members and its engagement in national, regional, and global conversations about best practices, is an excellent example of leadership.

Embracing Artificial Intelligence

In my global engagement as IFAC President, I have found that artificial intelligence is being discussed everywhere, perhaps most prominently as the theme of ICAI's 2025 World Forum of Accountants in New Delhi, where I was honored to speak.

AI is revolutionizing the way accountants and auditors work in ways that enable us to process and analyze vast amounts of data with greater speed, accuracy, and impact. For example, auditors can leverage AI to uncover hidden patterns, correlations, and insights, and these outputs can support predictive analytics, risk evaluation, and fraud detection. Generative AI is also proving to be a valuable tool for drafting audit reports and distilling complex information.

Important changes are also happening outside of formal systems and processes, in emails and spreadsheets, in team meetings, in presentations, and in countless one-off tasks that AI is transforming.

We have an incredible opportunity. We can use AI to shift from scorekeeping to strategy; to create more time to do higher-value work; and to participate in the transformation of our profession, rather than to resist it. The profession's real challenge is not whether we can use AI; it is whether we will redefine our own work before others redefine it for us.

I must add that we should always consider, with high attention to our professional responsibilities, to meet the new and still emerging risks of AI, including cybersecurity, threats to privacy, lack of transparency, and bias within AI models.

I fully recognize that some in our profession feel anxious about how AI might impact our relevance. Overall, I believe AI is an opportunity to add more value and increase our relevance. But we should consider carefully whether we are prepared to seize this opportunity. The core skills of a professional accountant are strong, and we do not need to reinvent ourselves, but we must build on those skills.

Individually, we will need to increase our digital literacy and get practical experience with AI. At the national level, PAOs need to support their individual members to upskill and reskill for AI and a range of other digital competencies following ICAI's example. PAOs will always be the best and closest resource for individual professionals who are trying to upskill and reskill. Their support will be especially important for small- and medium-sized practices, which often have tight budgets for technology.

PAOs also need to engage with educational institutions to make sure the curriculum for accounting students is keeping pace with technological change. IFAC's International Panel on Accountancy is exploring the AI competencies future accountants will need and how AI is reshaping the learning process.

Overall, the era of accountability demands that professional accountants continue to lead with ethics on AI no less than on sustainability. AI is just a tool, not a solution. At all times, we need to keep earning our trusted reputation and never take it for granted.

Fighting Corruption

Although new and emerging issues rightly grab our attention, it is also critical not to lose sight of the unending fight against corruption and money laundering. The accountancy profession has a direct role to play by enhancing transparency and accountability in the public and private sectors, and by supporting an ecosystem of actors and policymakers who strive to counter corruption and economic crime at the global and domestic levels.

Our profession is a natural leader on this for a few reasons. We have the right technical skills and expertise to make a difference. We are in a central position in public and private organizations, where we can have an enormous positive impact. We are motivated to act because we stand for ethical integrity and the public interest, and against abuses of public trust. And our reputation is such that we are expected to play a role in this area.

IFAC's efforts are mainly guided by our Action Plan for Fighting Corruption and Economic Crime. It sets the tone that the global profession understands our important role, and that we have a comprehensive, practical approach to fulfilling that role. It's a framework both for IFAC and for our members and partners. I encourage you to have a look online.

Corruption and money laundering are permanent threats to businesses, good government, and healthy societies. They are fundamentally human issues, and that means they will always be a concern. But that cannot make us any less determined to do something about it as professional accountants.

Returning to Ethics

Our profession's fundamental purpose is to serve the public interest. The quality that enables us to do so, which sets us apart as a profession, is ethics. At all times, we need to continue to live up to the high expectations we have for ourselves as well as the high expectations of our stakeholders, and never take our trusted reputation for granted.

It is our duty to act with integrity and professionalism, grounded in the principles of the International Code of Ethics for Professional Accountants, the gold standard for professional conduct. If we do, we are certain to thrive in the era of accountability.