Strength in letters

News of the current consultations toward a merger between Canada's chartered accountants and certified management accountants carried a whiff of deja vu. The profession has been down this road without success many times before, most recently in 2004. The national leaders of the two accounting bodies think so. In fact, for Joy Thomas, CMA Canada president and CEO, the string of failures since the 1920s makes the argument for unity even stronger. Even though there have been so many attempts and none of them successful, decade after decade, their organizations and their leaders have felt compelled to keep trying. With Canada and other countries converging their domestic standards with international financial reporting standards, oversight bodies such as the International Accounting Standards Board have gained more control over how new standards are set. Their overarching responsibility as a profession is to protect the public interest, concludes Thomas. They need to look at what will make the profession more effective, more efficient and more influential, and they need to take steps to achieve that.