Álit: tímarit löggiltra endurskoðenda - 01.01.1993, Page 14

leaders’ attention will become more and more
focused on the membership negotiations and the
fundamental challenge that we face of bringing the
new countries of the east and central European
continent into a wider European architecture.
Of course there will be residual problems in
establishing a genuinely frontier-free single market.
And one of the cases in point is precisely your
profession. So let me be so brave as to venture just
one comment on accountancy and the auditing
professions and say that it is in this area that the
commission perhaps has so far shown singular
failure to bring those professions into the intemal
market. We have so far failed miserably to persuade
member govemments that those professions could
be part and parcel of the single market. But also
your profession, in Europe, in the member state
countries, is riven with considerable disagreement
itself and you could see this in the failure of the
Accounting Advisory Forum, which has been
meeting for the last two years, to agree on
practically anything.
The third comment which I would address to you
is perhaps not covered either and that is a word
about the growing importance of the lobbying
elements as regards the Community institutions. We
now have about 2000 lobbyists and consultants in
Brussels. Nearly all of the major companies, the
major accounting firms, major auditing firms are
represented in the Belgian capital. But unlike the
law or the engineering profession or medicine, until
very recently there were no particular guidelines
and certainly there does not exist a MBA course in
lobbying, but lobbying will represent, in my view, a
considerable growth area in the future. And that is a
reflection of what I was referring to earlier, which
was the greater intervention of the Community, in a
whole number of areas.
So finally, the EEA is both a signpost of how far
we have come, but also a signpost of how far we
still have to go. And I was thinking if you look
back, historically, we have already had a frontier-
free Europe and a single market, centuries ago.
Students, just as we are trying now with the
Erasmus program, were able to move easily from
university in one country to university in another
country. We had a single language and language is
already becoming a major headache with us, and is
becoming worse when we have to take in Swedish,
Norwegian perhaps, Nynorsk perhaps, Finnish. But
Latin was the lingua franca, centuries ago.
Craftsmen, soldiers, painters, musicians were all
able to offer their skills and services throughout
Europe. We had a common currency. Gold and
silver coins. You could change them wherever you
travelled in Europe in those days. They might have
been called marks or florins or whatever, but gold
and silver coins you could change with ease
anywhere. And we also were able to travel without
showing an identity card or a passport. Passports
were only invented and introduced in the 19th
century. So maybe we have both got a bit to leam
from history and face the challenges of the future.