Trends in the Accounting Profession: A Demographic Study of U.A.E

Abstract

Accounting has drawn more attention on developing good collaborative critical knowledge and skills that establishments are looking for and it brings a career in transnational or parent enterprise, a foreign affiliate, subsidiary, associate, and branches, anywhere in the world.

The emerging GCC market offers an excellent and unique growth opportunity for qualified finance professionals, which has a remarkable population of local citizens and the UAE offers the highest payment in the field of accounting with a good emirates workforce. The Unified Agreement of the Gulf Cooperation Council on Value Added Tax (GCC UAVAT) provides the framework for the introduction of value added tax (VAT), it has been published in the official Saudi Arabian Gazette to be applied in all six member states of the GCC. In addition, an audit of accounts is required by the Law on Commercial Companies (2015) for all types of entities in the UAE in the light of the next Value Added Tax (VAT) in 2018.

The present study is a real-time comparison of past, present and future of accounting profession from multiple nationalities and service firms in the UAE. The present study aims to overview the accounting profession, to identify the core values of the accounting profession in order to ethically fix the profession to the next generation for public trust and public value. In addition to understand the future perspectives of the competency gap, and to examine the circumstances and the competitive situation faced by accounting professionals in the industry.

This study explores the factors that effect the core values espousal between 150 professional accountants from various worldwide enterprises in the United Arab Emirates. The questionnaires used the five points Likert scale, to identify the statistical information for the demographic profile of the participants. Further more, the differences between the demographic variable and key factors were analyzed, applying Kolmogorov-Smirnov ‘z’-test and factorial analysis. It concludes that the UAE is the most competitive job market in the region and has the most diverse and experienced professionals.