Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Wednesday, 9 July 2025

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Enterprise, Tourism and Employment

Irish Auditing and Accounting Supervisory Authority: Engagement with Chairperson

2:00 am

Mr. Kevin Prendergast:

We do not have a direct responsibility to work with third level institutions. The law requires that certain things be covered in education. However, on a soft basis, we actually work with them quite closely. There is a group for Irish academics in accounting called the Irish Accounting and Finance Association, IAFA. We have jointly hosted conferences with this body and we recently introduced a bursary to fund research into the area of audit. We are trying to improve the connections there. Recently, I spoke at a European conference on accountancy and training. We are very much at the foothills of AI in trying to figure out how we build this into education and training. We get into all sorts of interesting topics such as how to develop critical thinking and rounded thinking, rather than relying on the technology. There are a lot of challenges here but ultimately, we should get better people, getting more informed decisions, based on better data. That is the hope and there is a lot of work for all of us on that.

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