The institute was incorporated in October 1996. Sas such it is appropriate that I use this months CEO blog to take a brief walk down memory lane and look at its achievements over the last 30years.
Origins
Celebrating a legacy of Sustainable Value Creation and Professional Excellence
1996-2026
In 1996, the idea that Australia needed a dedicated management accounting professional body was not obvious. It had to be argued for. While Australia was well served by generalist accounting institutions at the time, it did not have a body whose centre of gravity lay inside the organisation rather than outside it.
The established institutes were built around reporting, audit, and compliance: work directed at shareholders, regulators, and the tax authority. The work that interested us was different in kind. It was the work of shaping a decision before it is taken rather than recording it afterwards. What does this product actually cost? Is this market worth entering? What will this strategy do to the company’s value in three years? How will our decisions today affect the environment and the society we live in? Such decisions were being taken by many accountants in the country, but they did not belong to any dedicated professional body that could educate, train and represent them.
Mr. William Dix AO, Dr. John Miller AO, and I met over lunch in Melbourne in July of that year to discuss this issue. Bill Dix had run Ford in Australia and later chaired Qantas. John Miller held professorships at Monash and Swinburne and had been President of the Confederation of Asian and Pacific Accountants. Neither of them needed another commitment. However, both understood immediately what was missing.
That’s when ICMA ANZ began. The Constitution was adopted on 11 October 1996, and the Institute was incorporated on 12 November.
The First Years
The inaugural AGM was held in 1997, and Dr. Leon Duval was appointed Foundation President. A secretariat was established in Melbourne, in a single room, in Leon’s office. The education programme and the On Target newsletter both launched that year, which in retrospect was ambitious for an organisation with very limited income through membership subscriptions of the first 70 foundation members.
In 2001, the Institute took its first permanent premises at CMA House, purpose-built to hold the secretariat, training rooms, and the library. Owning premises within five years of incorporation was not a matter of vanity. It signalled to a sceptical profession that the body intended to still be there in a decade.
Building the CMA Education Programme
The programme came first, and it remains the thing I would point to before anything else. It was designed as a ladder rather than a single qualification, because the profession we were trying to serve did not consist only of graduates.
It now runs to nine levels. A school leaver can enter at Certified Accounting Technician and climb through Registered Cost Accountant and Registered Business Accountant to Graduate Management Accountant: sixteen units across four stages, with a credential awarded at every stage rather than only at the end.
Above that sits the CMA itself, two postgraduate subjects in Strategic Cost Management and Strategic Business Analysis. Above that again, there are MBA and DBA pathways for those going further.
The Graduate Conversion Program was added for non-accounting graduates and professionals, taking the four Stage Four subjects directly at honours or master’s level. Twenty-nine Certificates of Proficiency now sit alongside the core programme, from Business Valuation through to Environmental and Sustainability Analysis.
Research and Publications
In 2002, we established the Journal of Applied Management Accounting Research, and in 2017 changed its editorial direction towards peer-reviewed, practice-oriented work, which is where the discipline actually needed a journal. Management Accounting Frontiers a more academic research journal followed.
In 2008, we established two non-profit research institutes: the Institute of Certified Carbon Analysts and Auditors, and the Institute for the Advancement of Corporate Reporting and Assurance. In 2012, the ICCAA was recognised as an observer organisation to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, a standing that very few accounting bodies of any size hold.
The library now holds over 12,500 texts and professional publications and is among the strongest collections in Australia in management accounting and risk management.
Going Global
The Institute’s international expansion was deliberate and, for the sector, slow. We appointed one closely supervised Regional Office or Centre in each country rather than licensing our name widely. That policy is the single reason the credential means the same thing in Colombo as it does in Melbourne.
Sri Lanka came first, in 1999, when the Institute of Chartered Accountants of Sri Lanka introduced the qualification there. The Academy of Finance was appointed as exclusive partner in 2006, and the programme has run continuously since, attracting a number of non-accounting professionals, especially Engineers and Bankers, via the GMA Conversion program. Other regional partners followed: Indonesia, Hong Kong, the Philippines, UAE; etc. Today there are Regional Offices in twenty countries and members in one hundred and sixteen.
Thirty-six universities across six countries carry subjects accredited towards the programme, and sixteen Recognised Provider Institutions deliver it in their own markets. Calwest University and Manchester Business School admit our CMAs directly into their MBA programmes, which is recognition running in the other direction.
Recognition
In 2014, we co-founded the International Management Accounting Collaborative as a charter member.
The ICMA is accredited by the Commonwealth of Nations under the category of Civic Organisations. Accreditation provides formal recognition and demonstrates that the organisation is committed to the values and principles of the Commonwealth, as outlined in the Commonwealth Charter. It entails adherence to a set of rights and responsibilities in representing the Commonwealth name and brand. ICMA works with the Commonwealth and other Commonwealth accredited organisations to advance the management accounting profession and promote the values and principles of the Commonwealth.
The most consequential recognition came from New Zealand. The New Zealand Qualifications Authority (NZQA) assessed the CMA credential for equivalency on the New Zealand Qualifications and Credentials Framework at Level 9, master’s degree level, and assessed every stage beneath it from Level 4 upward. ICMA (ANZ) is the only accounting professional qualifications in the world that has an assessment of that kind across a full ladder.
The Halls of Fame
The Global Accounting Hall of Fame and the Global Management Accounting Hall of Fame were established in 2016 to mark the Institute’s twentieth anniversary. The Social Purpose Innovator Hall of Fame followed in 2022, recognising work driven by environmental and social purpose.
Fifty-nine people have now been inducted across twelve territories. They include a Minister of Finance, an Auditor-General, the former chairman of a national bank, and the journalist whose investigations brought about a Royal Commission into banking.
Nominees need not be members of this Institute. That was a deliberate choice: an award that can only be given to your own people is not really an award.
The Last Decade
The past ten years tested the model rather than confirming it. Covid closed the classrooms we had taught in for twenty years. We rebuilt the programme for delivery over Zoom, and our bi-annual Global Zoom Programmes now draw over 140 participants from 25 countries at a time.
We then went further and abolished the written examination altogether, replacing it with assessment applied to the candidate’s own workplace. That was not a concession. It is harder, and our members report that it has been more useful to them professionally than anything they previously sat. Artificial intelligence is a genuine challenge to that model, and we have rules in place. I would still rather examine an argument about a real business than an answer written in a hall.
Elsewhere, our regional offices continued delivering through conditions that would have justified stopping. Colleagues in Beirut ran full Continuing Professional Development programmes during a war. The Gulf office moved its thirty-third intensive programme online when hostilities closed the region to travel and ran it anyway with twenty-nine senior professionals from four countries.
Thirty Years
The Institute has 14,712 members. In 2019 it had 7,961.
Thirty years ago, we argued that management accountants were strategists and not scorekeepers. That argument has been won, comprehensively, and largely by people other than us. Chief executives now speak about cost structure and sustainable value creation in terms that would have needed explaining in 1996. The environment, society and governance (ESG) is now on everyone’s lips. As is the inevitable world of AI agents.
The work now is to keep the education ahead of the practice. That is harder than it sounds, and it is never finished.