The real barriers facing CA students in Bangladesh

A recent article in The Daily Star, titled "Rewarding yet relentless: The Chartered Accountancy journey in Bangladesh", offered a compelling window into the personal struggles of Chartered Accountancy (CA) students—the low allowances, demanding work culture, and sacrifices required to enter this prestigious profession. Reading that account, we—three Bangladeshi professionals now based in the United States—felt compelled to offer a different lens on these struggles. While that article captured the individual journey, we aim to examine the systemic failures that make that journey so unnecessarily difficult.

The Institute of Chartered Accountants of Bangladesh (ICAB) estimates that the country needs about 20,000 qualified professionals. Yet, since independence, it has produced only 1,967 CAs, with merely 613 currently practising. In 2024, these 613 practitioners served a population of 17.5 crore and issued 57,993 audit reports—an average of 95 reports per practitioner. This overwhelming workload systematically compromises audit quality and undermines financial integrity across the economy.

The most damning example is the Hallmark-Sonali Bank scandal, where over $450 million in fraud went undetected for years because auditors failed to verify collateral and detect forged documents. This was not a failure caused by a shortage of accountants; it was a failure of compromised quality within a restrictive system. If the current model truly produced excellence, such failures would be anomalies—not recurring symptoms of systemic dysfunction.

Regional disparities are equally stark. Sri Lanka, with one-eighth of Bangladesh's population, has 225 percent more professional accountants. India boasts over 400,000 chartered accountants. Even Pakistan, despite its economic and political turbulence, has trained 10,000 CAs.

At the current growth rate of 63 new CAs annually, meeting even ICAB's conservative estimate would take 310 years—assuming Bangladesh's economy stops growing altogether. This mathematical impossibility exposes a fundamental institutional failure that no amount of individual perseverance can overcome.

While colonial-era structures laid the initial framework, today's restrictive system serves the economic interests of those who control it. Both ICAB and ICMAB leaderships benefit from an artificial scarcity that protects incumbent practitioners from competition, ensures high fees for a handful of firms, and concentrates power within Dhaka-based networks.

Defenders argue that restrictive entry safeguards quality or that articleship provides essential training. However, evidence shows that Bangladesh's audit environment is characterised by low fees and client pressure that compromise auditor independence. The articleship system itself lacks structured mentoring and often relegates trainees to routine clerical work rather than meaningful, value-added learning.

The system's harmful manifestations are clear. Professional bodies treat the profession as an exclusive club rather than a vital national resource. Nearly all professional activity is concentrated in the capital, perpetuating geographic inequality. Article students often work for Tk 7,000-8,000 per month—far below Dhaka's living costs—creating financial barriers that exclude talented individuals from lower-income backgrounds while sustaining a cycle of cheap labour.

This shortage imposes tangible costs. Bangladeshi businesses increasingly hire senior accounting professionals from abroad. Bangladesh Bank's recent consulting contracts with foreign firms exemplify this pattern of exporting opportunities. The consulting sector—where IT consulting alone is projected to reach $2.11 billion by FY2025—remains dominated by foreign firms recruiting qualified accountants from other countries. Meanwhile, poor-quality financial statements continue to erode investor confidence, and Bangladeshi representation in Middle Eastern and Southeast Asian markets lags behind its neighbours.

The crisis is deepening as artificial intelligence (AI), robotic process automation, and data analytics replace traditional compliance tasks—not in the distant future, but today. Accounting graduates often possess theoretical knowledge but lack essential digital skills, including data analytics (Power BI, Tableau), enterprise resource planning (ERP) expertise (SAP, Oracle NetSuite), automation tools (UiPath), advanced Excel and SQL, and an understanding of AI and blockchain.

Future Bangladeshi accountants must evolve into strategic partners—auditors who use data analytics to examine 100 percent of transactions, management accountants who build real-time dashboards with predictive models, and consultants who advise on cloud-based systems and RPA implementation. By automating routine tasks, technology enables accountants to focus on interpretation and strategy—areas where human judgment remains indispensable. This would also raise billable rates, attract top talent, redefine the profession's value proposition, and directly boost national productivity.

The following roadmap outlines incremental yet achievable steps:

Modernise entry requirements: Establish unified Bachelor of Accounting degrees enabling direct exam access without mandatory articleship, and integrate accounting-related information system tools into the curriculum.

Implement two-tier certification: Separate examination qualifications (certificate level) from practice requirements (licence level), allowing work experience during articleship to count towards licensing. This would increase the number of qualified professionals while maintaining practice standards.

Decentralise institutional control: Establish independent regional licensing authorities in each administrative division, comprising local businesses, academics, and professionals.

Mandate fair compensation: Introduce living-wage standards for entry-level roles and replace the exploitative term "article student" with "staff auditor" or "junior consultant." Fair compensation should be a regulatory requirement, not a voluntary gesture.

Strengthen regulatory oversight: Expand the authority of the Financial Reporting Council and the Bangladesh Securities and Exchange Commission to investigate professional misconduct, criminalise financial statement fraud, and establish transparent audit quality metrics.

Require local partnership: Enforce 20-80 partnership models for foreign consulting engagements—20 percent foreign expertise combined with 80 percent local resources—to ensure effective knowledge transfer.

These steps are essential not merely to produce more accountants, but to build a professional infrastructure capable of supporting Bangladesh's transition to middle-income status. The anonymous writer rightly captured the personal resilience required to become a CA—the sacrifices, perseverance, and determination. But individual heroism cannot substitute for institutional reform. We should not accept a system that demands extraordinary personal sacrifice merely to enter a profession. As the women CAs quoted in that article observed, pursuing Chartered Accountancy "is still a privilege"—and that is precisely the problem. In a modern economy, professional accounting should be an accessible career path, not a privilege reserved for those who can endure years of exploitation.

Bangladesh stands at a crossroads. Recent scandals—from loan defaults and money laundering to the collapse of financial institutions—further highlight the steep cost of inadequate professional oversight, a burden the nation can no longer afford. Nor can it allow neighbouring countries to seize regional opportunities that Bangladesh is well-positioned to capture.

The era of gradual change has ended. What Bangladesh needs now is bold, transformative action—action that dismantles the professional bottleneck and expands the vision of what the nation's economic potential can truly be.

Sherif Saeed is a CPA based in Maryland, US, and has worked for one of the 'Big Four' accounting firms.

Dr Khondkar Karim is a professor of accounting at the Manning School of Business, University of Massachusetts–Lowell, and a CPA.

Dr M. N. Elahee is a professor at Quinnipiac University, Connecticut, and a former faculty member at the Department of Accounting and the Institute of Business Administration in Dhaka University.