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
Eoin Hayes (Dublin Bay South, Social Democrats)
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It strikes me as a self-running guild in some ways. That can have its own advantages. That is not to say it is necessarily wrong. It is just to say that for somebody who has worked in the US for a long time, it seems unusual in terms of how you would think about regulation and a regulatory environment more generally with regard to standards for a professional organisation and professions.
That brings me to the next point, which is about accounting firms more generally. My personal experience during my college years was that a lot of people were going into the auditing and accounting firms. There are approximately 17,000 students under the different professional bodies. In my experience, pay and conditions have not been fantastic for those individuals. Partner pay and remuneration has been significant. That often seems at odds with my experience of other organisations in other jurisdictions. How does IAASA think about that and what its role and the regulatory environment's role should be in pay inequality or pay and conditions for those in the professional bodies?