FOCUS: Bridging the COVID-19 knowledge gap is critical for accounting profession

An existing skills deficit has now become an urgent problem in search of a solution Lockdowns and the emergence of the work-from-home (WFH) model is exacerbating a competency problem in accounting and auditing. Before COVID-19 struck, it was already apparent that students taking the Initial Test of Competency given by the South African Institute of…

Focus: Focus on Ethics

Although South Africans are known to have open hearts, it is primarily the poor living in major townships who benefit from charity drives rather than those living in what Moeletji Mapheto calls ‘the forgotten villages’. Coming from one of those forgotten villages herself, Moeletji set out to remedy this with the establishment of her NGO,…

Focus: Focus on Ethics

Ethical leadership in the current South African landscapeThe business ideals of profit and shareholder wealth maximisation cannot be sustainable if ethics are not engrained in the DNA of the business operations. Kwena Maseko sees the dominance of ethics in current leadership discourses as an appreciation of ethics as the cornerstone of organisational leadership. But what…

Focus: The digitisation of assurance

Buzzwords like automation, mechanisation and digitisation can sound like the end of the human workforce and the loss of personalisation, but they offer a bright and efficient future for the assurance industry Digitisation, automation and transformation. Machine learning, robotics and artificial intelligence (AI). The lexicon of technology buzzwords has become, for many sectors, representative of…