Small and Medium Practitioners (SMPs) are an essential segment of the accountancy profession and an important category of MIA members. Currently, there are 2,880 SMPs registered with MIA, excluding firms registered with the Audit Oversight Board (AOB). There are 3,260 MIA members who are public practitioners (i.e. PC Holders) and about 71% (2,330) of them are sole practitioners. (Do refer to the MIA Integrated Report 2021 for a comprehensive yet succinct focus on SMPs and MIA’s initiatives to develop SMPs).
MIA is committed to assisting SMPs to build up their capacity and competencies, through initiatives such as the annual MIA SMP Forum. This is critical not only to ensure SMPs’ agility, resilience and business continuity, but to support the fledgling economic recovery and the health of businesses, especially the Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises (MSMEs) that account for nearly 40% of Malaysia’s GDP and are struggling in the pandemic economy.
SMPs today face the challenge of operating within an increasingly complex environment as the COVID-19 pandemic health crisis evolves and governments continue to take unprecedented actions to manage its spread. To navigate through uncertainty and thrive, SMPs must become more innovative, agile and resilient.
The programme of the MIA SMP Forum 2021, to be held from 16-17 November 2021, has been specially curated to boost the all-round capacity and capabilities of public practitioners. This will enable them to not only influence and support business, but forward-looking public practitioners will also be able to influence positive changes within their own practices through their strategic leadership.
The following are the highlights of the Forum:
- Understanding Audit of Less Complex Entities (LCE) – which will discuss the global call for action to address issues of complexity, length, understandability, scalability, and proportionality related to using the International Standards on Auditing (ISA) and ISA for LCE Exposure Draft. As smaller entities dominate the Malaysian economy quantitatively, the LCE standard is expected to have a tremendous impact on the audit of SMEs in Malaysia and points of contention such as assurance level and exclusion of group audits.
- Fiscal Challenges in Government Revenue Collections – which will discuss the government’s upcoming efforts to enhance revenue collection and how SMPs and their clients might be affected.
- Cash flow management during a crisis – which will cover SMP fees and collection processes, as well as the use of technology, other tools and techniques to boost cash flow management.
- M&A of accounting firms in Malaysia – which assesses the urge to merge and the pandemic’s impact on the market for M&A.
- Developing a technology adoption strategy for SMPs – which discusses the factors that should be considered in developing such a strategy and the elements that can make or break a technology adoption initiative.
- Selecting solutions for your practice – which explains the care and planning that SMPs need in implementing any technology adoption and highlights several factors that SMPs must consider in making their selection, based on the guidance issued by MIA in May 2021 on selecting software.
- Funding for Future-Proofing – which examines the various funding and fiscal assistance schemes available to SMPs to improve their business efficiency and reroute for future success, including applying for change management grants, funding of technology adoption and comparison of various methods in adopting technology (i.e. SAAS, PaaS and IaaS)
- Capitalising on your digital appearance/visibility – build your digital brand in this timely session that recommends employing various methods/tools such as developing a website and using social media, website and podcast to create and enhance one’s digital appearance/visibility for maximum impact.
