The Association of Chartered Certified Accountants (ACCA), the world's largest accounting body, has decided to scrap the remote exam system it introduced during the COVID-19 pandemic. Analysts said the collapse of trust in the credential itself has become a bigger threat than the convenience brought by technological advances.
On the 30th (local time), ACCA said it will halt all remote exams starting in March next year and return to in-person testing. Except in exceptional situations, all candidates must physically attend test centers. ACCA is the world's largest accounting body, with 257,900 members and more than 500,000 students worldwide. Helen Brand, ACCA chief executive officer (CEO), said in an interview with the Financial Times (FT), "The sophistication of cheating systems has outpaced the rate at which we can develop security systems."
According to ACCA, cheating patterns related to recent remote accounting exams have become far harder to detect than in the past. Traditional remote proctoring relied on webcam-based eye tracking and keystroke pattern analysis. The system could not block cheating that occurred off-screen. Candidates exploited this by photographing exam questions with smartphones and feeding them to AI chatbots like ChatGPT. They photographed the complex accounting solutions and explanations provided by AI in real time, entered them as is, and received high scores.
Employees at the major accounting firms known as the "Big Four" were also repeatedly caught systematically cheating on internal exams. Dozens of audit staff at Ernst & Young Global Limited (EY) shared answers and cheated systematically on a 2022 ethics exam essential to maintaining Certified Public Accountant (CPA) status. EY was also found to have made false statements during the investigation. As a result, it was fined $100 million (about 144.822 billion won), the largest penalty ever, by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).
PwC, KPMG, and Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu Limited (DTTL) also received fines in the millions of dollars over cheating that involved thousands of employees across the United States, Canada, Australia, the Netherlands, and elsewhere. A probe by the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (PCAOB) found that hundreds of employees at these firms shared internal training exam answers for years. The revelation that even executive leadership took part in cheating sent the accounting industry's ethics to rock bottom. Experts said the problem has reached a systemic limit that affects not just individual ethics but the credibility of accountants themselves. Brand, the CEO, said, "Among high-risk, high-stakes exams, there are now almost none that still allow remote proctoring."
The Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales (ICAEW), another accounting body, has also been sounding repeated warnings about cheating since the end of the pandemic. Last year ICAEW officially said, "Reports of exam malpractice are continuing to increase." Although ICAEW did not disclose specific statistics, it said in a press release that it is "increasing." This indicates that meaningful internal trend changes in cheating have already been detected and that the issue is being recognized as structural.
ACCA said it made a conservative choice in light of the public nature of the accounting profession. Professional accounting credentials underpin trust in corporations' financial statements. This protects investors and maintains order in capital markets. If trust in accounting exams wavers, distrust could grow toward audit reports and corporate governance overall.
Experts predicted the move is likely to spread to other professional certification exams. The Guardian said, "After the Big Four accounting firm scandals, cheating has been elevated from individual misconduct to an industrywide risk," adding, "This ACCA decision is a last-ditch measure to protect trust in the accounting profession, the final bulwark of capital markets."