By Mark Sweney
Publication Date: 2025-12-29 08:19:00
The world’s largest accounting body wants to prevent students from taking exams remotely to combat a rise in cheating on tests that test professional qualifications.
The Association of Chartered Certified Accountants (ACCA), which has almost 260,000 members, has said it will only allow students to take online exams in exceptional circumstances from March.
“We are seeing that the complexity of the (fraud) systems is outstripping what can be built in terms of protections,” ACCA chief executive Helen Brand said in an interview with the Financial Times.
Remote testing was introduced during the Covid pandemic to give students the opportunity to qualify at a time when lockdowns prevented in-person exam assessment.
In 2022, the Financial Reporting Council (FRC), the UK regulator for the accounting and auditing industry, said that professional audit fraud was a “current” problem in the UK’s largest companies.
A number of…