The Chinese mainland may have a shortage of experienced accountants, but local talents may be trained properly and they can fill up the vacancies, said Resources Global Professionals Ltd.

Managing director of the spin-off of Deloitte, Thomas Chu, told China Daily the company's Beijing office is currently relying on the migration of Hong Kong professionals, but he expressed hope that the local accountants can take over their positions in five years.

Founded in 2002, Resources recently set its foothold on the mainland. "Currently our Beijing office has 15 associates, but it can hardly poach appropriate domestic accountants." Chu said.

"The mainland only has 10-year history of corporate finance and that most of the accountants failed to fulfil our criteria of 6 to 15 year accounting experiences," he said. "We still count on Hong Kong accountants to fill up the vacancies."

In view of the prospective career outlook, more and more Hong Kong accountants are willing to work on the mainland, Chu said adding that Resources stresses on the consistency of income between Hong Kong and the mainland.

"Our mainland associates' salary ranges between 500,000 and 1.2 million yuan per year, which has almost reached the Hong Kong level."

Apart from the competitive salary package, the job's high flexibility is also the sweetener attracting accountants.

"Our job is on a project-by-project basis and the salary is calculated in term of hours... so the associates have high autonomy to adjust their working hours and have more time to enjoy their family life."

He also said that the associates reap great deal of satisfaction since 90 percent of the company's clients are multinationals and heavyweight corporations.

Regarding Hong Kong accountants, Chu said they still enjoy the advantages of working on the mainland. "However, their privilege will vanish over the coming five years because the local associates gradually get mature and are capable of handling their jobs.

Indeed, many mainland enterprises prefer to recruit mainland-born accountants with several years' experience from 'The Big Four'. Given the thousands of mainland university graduates entering the accounting firms every year, the scarcity of talents is likely to get over in the near future.

With the growing awareness of corporate governance for the mainland enterprises, Chu believed it would give advantage to expand their business in the market.

"The company is rich in experience of Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) compliance," he said.

In 2002, the US government passed SOX in an attempt to ease corporate fraudulence, accentuated by the series of corporate scandals such as Enron, Tyco International.

"In anticipation of the mainland government likely to implement SOX-liked acts for polishing up domestic corporate image, our expertise could provide a more comprehensive consultancy to our clients," he said.

(HK Edition 02/16/2007 page6)