Every time Malaysia is shaken by another financial scandal, we look for someone to blame. The board failed. The auditors failed. Management failed. Regulators should have acted earlier. And eventually, someone asks, “What are universities teaching our accountants?”
It is a fair question. For decades, Malaysian universities have taught students ethics, corporate governance, auditing, risk management, internal control and professional conduct. We teach them not only how to prepare numbers, but why those numbers must be trusted. Yet financial failures still happen. Perhaps what we need to ask is whether universities are actually preparing students to remain professional when doing so becomes difficult.
In an examination, the student is told that management has manipulated revenue. The student identifies the ethical problem, quotes the relevant principle and recommends the correct action.
A decade on, that same student may be sitting in a finance department. The company is about to miss its target. The boss wants a transaction recognised before year-end. The student, who is now the accountant, is uncomfortable. But now there is a salary, a bonus, a promotion, and a family to support.
That is where professionalism really begins, at the workplace, not in our classroom. And it raises a question we rarely ask clearly enough, “What are we trying to produce in our universities, professional accountants or workers for the accounting industry?”
Industry understandably wants graduates who are ready to work. Employers want digital skills, data analytics, artificial intelligence (AI), communication skills, and knowledge of current systems. Universities should listen. But industry demand cannot become the sole purpose of accounting education.
A university is not a factory producing workers according to the specifications of today’s employers. The employer pays the salary but does not have the right to determine professional judgement.
This is why the responsibility for developing accountants cannot belong to universities alone. Academics not only teach, but we also do research, supervise, publish and serve our universities. Meanwhile, professional practice changes at extraordinary speed outside campus. AI enters auditing. Tax becomes digital. Finance functions automate. Sustainability reporting develops. New forms of fraud emerge.
We then invite an industry speaker for two hours and call it university-industry collaboration.
That is not enough. Neither is another memorandum of understanding. If industry believes academics have become disconnected from practice, then open the door to practice.
Malaysia should create a structured professional-currency system for accounting academics. For lecturers and senior lecturers earlier in their academic careers, establish an Accounting Professional Residency. Let them periodically enter audit firms, finance departments, tax practices, regulators, technology teams and other professional environments. Not as student interns, but as academic professionals.
Let them see how accounting actually works today. Let them experience the technology, the uncertainty, the deadlines and the difficult judgements that textbooks cannot fully reproduce.
For established senior lecturers, associate professors and professors, create an Accounting Professional Fellowship. They should not enter industry merely to observe. They should enter with something to contribute. Give them a real and difficult problem. Why are internal controls repeatedly failing? How should AI be governed in financial reporting? How can fraud indicators be detected earlier?
Let industry provide the problem and professional context. Let academics bring research, evidence, analysis and independent thinking. Practice gives academia currency. Academia gives practice evidence.
But a residency or fellowship should not end with a certificate. What was learnt must enter the curriculum. Cases and assessments must change. Technology must enter classrooms. Students must face ambiguity. They must learn that AI can produce a confident but wrong answer. They must confront situations where management pressure conflicts with professional judgement. And they must practise saying no before their salary depends on saying yes.
This is not a replacement for student internship or industrial training. Students still need industry exposure. But sending students into industry does not automatically keep the university current. We need knowledge moving in both directions.
Industry alone cannot do this. Universities must recognise professional engagement in academic workload and promotion. Professional bodies must help define professional currency. Regulators should return lessons from recurring failures to educators. The government should remove barriers that prevent meaningful movement between universities and practice. Industry must provide controlled access. Academics must enter with humility, but also with something valuable to offer.
No institution owns accounting education. They share responsibility to not just educate accountants for their first job, but also to prepare them for a lifetime of professional responsibility.
MOHD SABRUN IBRAHIM, PhD, C.A.(M), CPA (Aust.)
Accounting department head
Faculty of Economics and Business
Universiti Malaysia Sarawak
