About 10 days ago, I received a rather stern show cause letter from the UK institute of Chartered Accountants. It included a screenshot of my profile in Linked-In and without reservation accused me as "passing off" as a Chartered Accountant. Not only that, it asked me to sign an undertaking letter not to use the designation "CA" (Chartered Accountant) in my profile.
I wrote back stating that I earned the CA designation from 2 different premier professional institutes, and the CPA and Fellowship designations from other global institutes and that it was free to independently verify this assertion. I asked the UK Institute as to how they deemed me to be "passing off" when the description was 100% factually correct. I also enquired how come the Institute was scouring social media to suss out the pretenders or was this letter the result of a complaint.
A couple of days of silence ensued and then the Institute replied "After carrying out further checks, we confirm that no misrepresentation had taken place and we are closing this case. Due to data protection act, we are unable to reveal the details of the complainant".
Did the above reply mean to say "We are sorry, we rushed off a show cause letter to you, a senior member of the accounting fraternity, without a thorough investigation of a poison pen letter" ? If so, this is indeed is a strange way of saying "We apologize".
I informed the UK Institute that they ought to be more conscientious in future and in the interest of goodwill, was letting this ride. While I know mistakes can be made sometimes, a professional body (especially one that has vast resources to hire professionals to verify claims) should first thoroughly check each allegation, especially those that come from picking up random bits and pieces from social media posts.
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