Wanted: More chartered accountants

And the result: entry level salaries have gone up by 60 per cent in just two years. Companies are shelling out anywhere between Rs 4 lakh to Rs 10 lakh per annum now as against Rs 2.40-6 lakh earlier.

And the booming IT industry wants the lion’s share of the available pool. In fact, three of the top six recruiters that went to ICAI’s campus this year were IT companies.

Freshers have been recruited on an average salary of Rs 6.72 lakh per annum and the maximum offer was Rs 12 lakh per annum. For instance, IT bellwether Infosys Technologies hired 250 CAs this year for its operations. It hired only 50 to 100 CAs last year.

Says Bikramjit Maitra, HR head, Infosys: ‘‘We have been hiring CAs for a long time. But now due to our growing financial services applications and BPO operations, we have been hiring them in appropriate numbers.’’

The shortage has also made big accounting firms to poach from each other. In the past six months, more than a dozen partners have shifted within the big six accounting and tax firms, leading to a phenomenal increase in partner-level salaries.

While an entry level partner earns between Rs 50 lakh and Rs 60 lakh a year, a senior partner with about five years’ experience nets between Rs 1.25 crore and Rs 3 crore.

Says Sunil Goyal, chairman, ICAI, western region: ‘‘CAs are no more confined to taxation and accounting. They have become very tech-savvy nowadays. Improved course curriculum, focus on IT and global accounting practices and grooming during articleship have made them to handle any job from a manager to CEO. The burgeoning IT and ITES firms with their growing business of financial applications and packages are absorbing them rapidly.’’

On the flip side, industry watchers observe that smaller firms could not afford the exorbitant salaries paid to CAs and their accounting standards suffer. But ICAI attributes the shortage to growing competence of CAs to work in different areas of expertise and the corporates grabbing them at all levels of management.

According to Goyal, the solution for the crunch lies in increasing the number of students taking up the profession. ‘‘The perception that only 1 to 2 per cent pass out every year is wrong. The chartered accountancy course is unique in the sense that for a mere Rs 12,500 course fee, at the age of 21 to 22, you can get lakhs of rupees in salaries,’’ he says.

–raghavendra.kamath@expressindia.com