International Accounting Education Standards Board: Organisational legitimacy within the field of professional accountancy education

This research investigates International Education Standards (IESs), pronounced by the International Accounting Education Standards Board (IAESB) of IFAC, to evaluate whether IESs are perceived as legitimate standards and whether the IAESB might achieve its goal of converging professional accounting education across the globe. This paper discusses the organisational field in which the IAESB operates to influence education practice. The research draws on Suchman’s (1995) “broad-based definition of [organisational] legitimacy”, which includes both strategic and institutional traditions, to frame our research. There is little published research into understanding the development and logic of IAESB pronouncements, and whether IESs are perceived as legitimate by education stakeholders in the field of professional accounting education. This research addresses the gap and examines two areas: First, it discusses the organisational field in which the IAESB operates and seeks to influence education practice, followed by an overview of the governance structure and the standard setting process of the IAESB; in so doing, we consider the professional accountancy education ‘logic’ emerging in IESs and reflect on the level of this logic might be perceived or accepted as legitimate within the organisational field. Second, we examine the extent to which selected professional bodies’ disclose compliance with IESs and use the findings to argue whether the IAESB has attained organisational legitimacy in pursuit of its self-declared goal of harmonising professional accountancy education across the globe. Our article contributes to the body of knowledge on the globalisation of professional accountancy education in several respects. First, it answers calls for a better understanding of how influences embedded in the standard setting process produces standards that may conflict with national regulatory environments. Second, much attention has been aimed at understanding the influences impacting on the development of, and compliance with, international accounting and auditing standards; however, education standards, developed to underpin practice, have been largely ignored. Finally, this article highlights important challenges to the IAESB that threaten the effective and converged implementation of IESs which will arguably lead to differences in the application of international accounting and auditing standards. In this context, we examine the extent to which 21 selected professional bodies, operating in diverse jurisdictions across the globe, fulfil their IFAC Statements of Membership Obligations and disclose compliance with IESs for the Initial Professional Development of trainee accountants. Our results show that disclosed compliance with IESs does not always indicate conformity of practice amongst member bodies. In addition, there are clear examples of compliance and of non-compliance with IESs, and little evidence that the IAESB monitors or enforces compliance with its standards. We discuss potential reasons for this varied immunity to IES practice and the impact this has on legitimacy of IES practice and the IAESB as an international private standard setter. We suggest that, for the IAESB to achieve its objective, it must focus its strategic efforts on: (a) communication with diverse education audiences, who are often not IFAC member bodies; (b) recognising alternative education logics to consider if they can be integrated with the IAESB’s emerging global education practice; and (c) develop processes to monitor and enforce professional accounting education practice. The results are based on a detailed compliance analysis of selected IFAC member bodies, which may limit wider generalisability of the empirical findings. However, this research should be useful to professional accountancy educationalists, and to the IAESB in developing and influencing globally acceptable and implementable standards of professional accountancy education practice.