About the syllabus

[Vanessa]

Paper P1, Professional Accountant is a new compulsory paper in the Essentials module at the Professional level of the ACCA Qualification.

The syllabus represents a set of issues required for understanding how accounting in a business context – contributes to, and is underpinned by, governance and ethics.

Part A of the syllabus focuses of corporate governance, responsibility, and accountability. This involves important themes like the agency relationship between directors and shareholders, the meaning of governance, the role and types of directors, issues of responsibility, and the meaning and limits of accountability. At the same time it aims encourage students to think about the ethical assumptions made by accountants as a professionals.

The next three parts of the syllabus – B, C and D – focus specifically on issues like internal control, the identification and assessment of risk, and controlling and mitigating risk. These arise due to the recent corporate failures.
Paper P1 lays stress on this area since they play a crucial part in an accountant’s responsibility to act in the public interest and in the interests of shareholders.

Effective corporate governance is possible only with sound systems of internal analysis, control, and audit. Being aware of all possible risks, understanding their potential impact, as well as the probability of occurrence, are important safeguards for investors and other stakeholders.

Part E of the syllabus. This section contains Ethical assumptions that surround any profession and system of governance. The accountancy profession is governed by certain ethical frameworks that inform practice and guide practitioners. This part of the Paper P1 syllabus evaluates some of these assumptions, and includes some of the ethical theories that help to explain them.

[Nancy]

Further to what Vanessa said, the reason for including P1 in the ACCA syllabus is basically to minimise the corporate failures like those of Enron, Worldcom, Pergamon publishing and many more.

P1 in a nutshell covers all the areas that deal with ways to manage corporations keeping in mind the principles of corporate governance and ethics.All in all P1 is all about managing businesses in a manner that is not only economically beneficial to the business but also benefits the soceity as a whole.

Topics covered in the syllabus command a great value in all business decisions in the current industry. Being well versed with the subject will definitely help you not only get through ACCA but also be a responsible and successful professional.

[alishaACCA]

well, thx to both of you for this post,,,,,,
futher to wat u said nancy can u list the lessons that are to be learnt from the big corporate failures??

[alishaACCA]

the internal audit part and mitiagting risk part was already examined in f8 paper.......
why is it also included in p1?
is the approach now different??

[Nancy]

hi alisha,
precisely that is what P1 is all about! it teaches us importance of transperancy, ethics and being true and honest towards your stakeholders. Something that did not happen in all these corporate failures. I would suggest that you actually read some of these cases. You will yourself understand the lessons to be learnt from them.

[Vanessa]

Re: the internal audit part and mitiagting risk part was already examined in f8 paper.......
why is it also included in p1?
is the approach now different??

In F8 level, internal audit and risk management pertained to issues at operational levels e.g. in the areas of purchases, revenue, payroll, etc. It deals with the methods of auditing in these areas.

However in the P1 paper, internal audit and risk management are discussed from the perspective of the board level. i.e. how the issues are handled / managed at the board level and reported to the various stakeholders, thereby leading to sound corporate governance practices

[Siro]

The paper P1 dedicates 20% course to Professional Ethics and the rest is based on Corporate Governance and other topics I have not yet looked upon!

[Nancy]

Hi Siro,

P1 exam was held for the first time in december 2007. It is a fairly new subject and the importance of various topics can be best judged by studying the exam paper.I have studied the P1 exam paper for december 2007 and as it seems that although there are 7 full chapters dedicated to ethics the examiner has examined it only in one question carrying 12 marks in the compulsory question and for 8 marks in one of the optional questions. This amounts to 12% of the entire 100 marks paper (since you have to attempt the compulsory 12 marks). Needless to say, it is important!

However remaining all questions are mainly based on sections A - based on corporate governance and section C and D - based on risks. As of now to get well acquanted with the paper study these sections well.

Although I will suggest that all the students who are sitting for the first few sittings of P1 should study all the sections carefully since the examiner has a lot of scope to question you on each and every topic. At least till he exhausts a wide vareity of questions on all topics. It is a learning curve period.