The after effects of Coronavirus on CA Profession

The pandemic of coronavirus is said to change the way people have been living their lives. It is true that once this crisis is over, everything around us will change forever. The huge disruption which Covid-19 has caused to industry will take a long time to recover. In most of the industry it is now being felt that FY 2020-21 will be drained with no or very low profits. Under these circumstances, role of financial consultants especially Chartered Accountants will become extremely crucial. But the virus will not only infect the industries but also the consultants. There would be a drastic change in the way consulting business had been carried out in the past.

The spread of virus will change business preferences. The promoters would prefer to use virtual offices and remote assistance to meet their business needs. Business premises would be closely monitored ensuring that the virus doesn’t enter the factory gates. With scarce availability of skilled labour, crunch in finances, fear of spread of virus, poor support systems would make running of business really difficult. The consultants should press reset button and explore new and innovative ideas which will help their clients sustain their business. Apart from roles, consultants must adopt new means of operations as well. They would be expected to make a paradigm shift from manual operations to automated ones involving extensive use of technology including video conferencing, screen sharing, remote audits and much more. One can easily divide the post Covid measures into immediate, short term and long term. 

Immediate measures:

With changing priorities of business, nothing is more important than reviving the industry at this juncture. Taxation, statutory compliance, advisory and other secondary compliance would certainly be pushed to back burner. And rightly so, these all are by-products of flourishing business. The remuneration of Chartered Accountants which had been pinching in a normal business situation will become even more painful once businesses resumes after lockdown. 

The consultant should overhaul his approach and work on innovative products which would help them maintain his relevance. The new products such as business revival consultancy, Human Resource Management, Engaging Technology, change in cost structures and even Business Funding Consultancy would be in huge demand after the lockdown is over. The business houses of all levels would you’re your support in understanding their contractual obligations which they would wish to settle at the earliest. Not only legal consulting but also arbitration services would play a huge role in settling the number of issues which will crop up. 

If we continue to sleep over our traditional jobs of tax return filing, book keeping, audits and such similar activities which we had been doing in past, the future might turn out be a nightmare. 

Short Term Measures:

Leaving apart BIG 4 and other big sized consulting firms, the midsize, small and micro consultancy firms should rethink and overhaul their style of working. They must extensively bring is use of cloud storage, remote access, organized email structure and even online modes of communication to meet the challenges. It is only with technology that these firms can save themselves from setbacks in future. 

Even in today’s world where technology is palm size, many firms continue to use traditional desktops to carry out their operations. The data theft, confidentiality, data loss, data security and many other such fears have stopped them from adopting new technologies. I would suggest, they should not procrastinate this further. All types of controls and measures are also available in the online world, they just need to be explored. Just to sensitise, there are options where employer can remotely erase the entire data on an employees devices or even restrict use of such data. Adopting new technology would not only cut down costs but also prove to be employee friendly. 

The audits would completely change post Covid-19. Gone are days when professionals used to visit the client place, sit there, collect manual data and then come back to their offices. Both the parties would now refrain to maintain any physical touch. They would prefer to send the data over emails, conduct video conferencing and even sign documents online without even meeting once during the entire audit assignment. Not only efficiency of audits will increase but also be auditor friendly which will give them assess to data round the clock without remaining bound to specified working hours. 

Long Term Measures:

Once the system settles and any risk of Covid-19 is mitigated, there would come role of our leadership. They would be expected to redefine how the CA Profession would be carried.  I wont be surprised if another set of Audit standards purely based on use of IT be announced by ICAI very soon. Conducting internal audits, statutory audits and even bank audits remotely would be highly promoted. The extensive use of technology, machine learning and even artificial intelligence in CA profession would be reality soon. 

But amidst all this situation, the approach at the helm of affairs should drastically change. The professionals should not be kept bound within the shackles of professional ethics and highly optimistic Code of Conduct. They must be rationalised and necessary relaxation must be given. This will help CA profession jump leaps and bounds simultaneously motivating professionals in adopting aggressive approach. 

With webinars becoming new normal, ICAI should instruct its branches not to incur heavy expenses which they had been doing in past for conducting sessions/seminars at the luxury hotels. There would no such need and even the CPE hours requirements can be relaxed. The quality of these webinars will be far better than those being conducted at present as there would be no geographical boundation. The best in class across the globe can now be easily accessed, increasing the horizon and abilities of a professional mind. 

The CA firms should also plan to position themselves in this changing era and try to cope up with the new challenge. With Challenge comes abundance of opportunities. Opportunity to serve across the globe, opportunity to become professionally dynamic, opportunity to learn world best practices and much more. Instead of cribbing we should try and adopt the new rules of the industry.

I would end this article with a note, “Nothing is permanent except Change”, Let your success make some noise.