30th September, 2010
President of the Association of National Accountants of Nigeria, ANAN, Mrs. Iyamide Gafar, has called on members of the association to always make standard setting in accounting profession their watchword so as to contribute meaningfully to the development of the country.
Gafar made the statement at the Gala Dinner and Award Night of the Mandatory Continuing Professional Development (MCPD) programme of the association that took place in Lagos, Nigeria.She explained that the aim of the annual programme would among other things assist members in identifying areas that needed improvement as well expose them to research on new ideas and encourage them to inculcate best practices recognised globally.
Gafar also said that all efforts to stimulate direct foreign investment in Nigeria might not yield any fruit until the country adopted international standard for financial reporting. The theme for the programme was Standardisation and Accounting Ethics.
In his speech, the Chairman of ANAN, Ikeja branch, Lagos, Mr. Solomon Oladimeji, called on members to contribute their quotas in the quest to make Lagos a mega city. Delivering a lecture on Financial Reporting Standards, the guest speaker, Paul Adejona berated current standards for reporting financial statements in Nigeria, describing it as fictional.
He said financial statements, as reported in Nigeria currently, were not capable of revealing the precise financial health of organisations because issues like inflation and risks, which mattered a lot to business operations, were not reported.“Other countries, like Brazil and Netherlands, have a way of reporting effect of inflation in their financial statements but in Nigeria, there is yet to be a provision for reporting inflation,†he said, attributing this backwardness to low influx of foreign investments in Nigeria.
“No wonder these foreign investors that are coming with their hard currencies are still finding it difficult to invest in Nigeria because they have concluded that our financial statement is not effective enough and it is porous,†he said.He advocated the adoption of international financial reporting standards since the standard of reporting financial statements in Nigeria allowed external auditors to post a clean bill of health on a company’s financial statement while in reality, calamity and failure were knocking.
“There is no proper time that we need to adopt this international reporting standard than this period we are now,†he said.
Mr. Benjamin Jenfa, the chairman of the event, said the role played by ANAN in the country exemplified why Nigeria needed a radical leader, saying that the late General Sanni Abacha labelled the association executives as radicals at a meeting with him.
“He told us we write too much and that as we write, he keeps dumping our reports under the table,†he said, adding that the late Abacha advised them to keep writing because “a day is coming when Nigeria will have a radical president that will implement your reports.â€