Launch of PERMAC, the Expanded Programme to Strengthen Haiti's Audit and Accounting Market
- The program is a delayed response to a diagnosis made fifteen years earlier. It takes its agenda from the Report on the Observance of Standards and Codes issued alongside the 2007 Financial Sector Assessment Program, whose recommendations were to strengthen OCPAH's management capacity, adopt IFRS in full and develop competition in the Haitian audit market.
- The driver is bank supervision rather than the accounting profession. BRH, with MEF, approached OCPAH in order to improve transparency at financial institutions and among the financial system's large debtors, which is why the program's target is audit capacity for those specific entities.
- The capacity objective is quantified and modest: to bring forward 8 to 10 firms capable of auditing financial institutions and the system's large debtors. That number is the measure of how thin the market was judged to be.
- Financing is small relative to the ambition and comes from the two institutions themselves. The pillar program is 1.3 million US dollars, of which BRH contributes the gourde equivalent of 1 million dollars and OCPAH 300,000, split 75 percent to strengthening audit firms and OCPAH and 25 percent to IFRS implementation. Separately, BRH with MEF is to set up subsidies and loan guarantee funds for the selected firms, which is the part that could move more money than the program itself.
- The third pillar buys the pipeline rather than the current stock: an IFRS curriculum at INAGHEI, Université Quisqueya and Université Notre Dame, with IFRS specialists recruited and an exchange program with foreign universities.
- Governance is shared but chaired by the profession. A tripartite commission of a coordinator, deputy coordinator, secretary and three members administers the program, with coordination held by OCPAH.
- The program runs four years, 2023 to 2027. Note one internal inconsistency in the presentation itself: the diagnostic report is dated 2007 in the context section and 2008 where the program's objectives are set out.
Presented at the Hotel Montana on 22 March 2023, this deck sets out the origin, aims, components, financing and management of PERMAC. Its starting point is the Financial Sector Assessment Programme carried out in Haiti in 2007, under which the World Bank and the IMF published a Report on the Observance of Standards and Codes (ROSC) with recommendations on Haitian accounting and audit practice - among them strengthening the management capacity of the Ordre des Comptables Professionnels Agréés d'Haïti, full adoption of IFRS, and the development of competition in the Haitian audit market. The presentation explains that it was in that context that the Banque de la République d'Haïti, together with the MEF, approached OCPAH to set up a program to strengthen the market, out of a concern to improve transparency at financial institutions and among the banking system's large debtors. It is a launch presentation rather than a program document, and is held for the record of a reform whose written trail is otherwise thin.
How to cite
Ordre des Comptables Professionnels Agréés d'Haïti (OCPAH), 2023, Launch of PERMAC, the Expanded Programme to Strengthen Haiti's Audit and Accounting Market, https://ocpah.ht/wp-content/uploads/presentation-lancement-du-permac-mars-2023-5.pdf