The need for informed, credible, and consistent advocacy across borders for our members has never been greater. The AICPA and CIMA have a responsibility to represent our members and promote the value that our profession brings to individuals, businesses, and economies. In serving the public interest, global advocacy is about helping to shape the policy conditions to support resilience, competitiveness, and trust.
Economic uncertainty, geopolitical fragmentation, rapid technological change, and increasing regulatory complexity are redefining how organisations operate and compete. In this environment, the policies that governments design and the standards that regulators and rule-setters adopt can either support long-term value creation and growth or unintentionally undermine it. Ensuring those frameworks are informed, coherent, and workable has never mattered more.
Across the world, governments are prioritising growth through industrial, business, and skills strategies designed to boost productivity, ease cost-of-living pressures, and strike the right balance in regulation. At the same time, businesses are navigating volatile tax and trade policies, new or enhanced sustainability-related reporting requirements, and the accelerating impact of artificial intelligence (AI) and other emerging technologies. These pressures are layered onto geopolitical tension, regional instability, conflict, and growing economic policy divergences. Energy security, trade and supply chain volatility, inflation, and interest-rate uncertainty all remain pressing concerns. This is a challenging environment and one that presents both risks and opportunities for the global accounting and finance profession.
What global advocacy really means
Advocacy is sometimes narrowly understood as engagement with policymakers on discrete issues. In reality, global advocacy is the deliberate, co-ordinated effort to help shape policy frameworks, regulatory approaches, and fiscal direction across jurisdictions, grounded in evidence, technical expertise, and real-world insight.
For the AICPA and CIMA, global advocacy is part of who we are and our purpose as a global professional body. Representing both public and management accounting across world regions, we are uniquely positioned to offer informed, practical, and credible contributions to policy debates at national, regional, and global levels. Our advocacy spans issues that are central to economic performance and professional relevance: finance skills, technology adoption, productivity, business policy, taxation, sustainability, corporate governance, reporting, audit, and assurance.
In a crowded policy landscape, where many voices compete for attention, the accounting profession plays a distinctive role. We translate policy into practice. Our practical insights, shaped by our members’ expertise, help to identify unintended consequences early, highlight trade-offs, and propose solutions that better align policy ambition with operational feasibility. In doing so, advocacy adds significant value across sectors and geographies.
Advocacy as a foundation of public trust
One of global advocacy’s most important contributions is its role in building and sustaining public trust. Acting in the public interest is a core principle of the profession. By translating our member insight into regional influence, the AICPA and CIMA have helped shape fiscal policy, business, and tax policy across the US, Canada, the UK, the EU, Africa, and Asia, securing a number of important policy wins.
In 2026, we expanded tax advocacy beyond the US, strengthening engagement in the EU as it progresses a tax simplification agenda with implications for global business. By bringing a broader perspective to these discussions, we hope to help policymakers balance competitiveness, compliance, and fairness.
We have also continued to champion productivity as a critical driver of long-term growth, across both public and private sectors. With government debt increasing worldwide, productivity in public services has become an important topic.
Our Public Sector Productivity Toolkit, recently shared with governments across multiple regions, provides practical guidance on performance management, decision-making, and resource allocation to help public services deliver greater value for money. Management accountancy is fundamentally about organisational performance, and our advocacy reinforces the profession’s contribution to better public outcomes.
Amplifying business interests — responsibly
Businesses operate at the front line of policy impact. Recent global advocacy efforts have focused on the management accounting profession’s contribution to building resilient and sustainable businesses. Our SME Global Outlook Survey, for example, provides insight into the priorities of the enterprises that underpin local economies worldwide. It also reveals how sensitive SMEs are to policy uncertainty, taxation, trade, tariffs, and supply chain disruption.
Over the coming months we hope to bring local and global perspectives to many important policy decisions impacting the SME sector, presenting our members’ views and perspectives in a responsible way that enhances the long-term credibility of our profession and shapes workable policies.
Global co-ordination
While local policy decisions matter, many of today’s most consequential rules are shaped at a global level and cascade into domestic law. For multinationals, or even increasingly for SMEs within global supply chains, inconsistencies across jurisdictions create complexity, cost, and, sometimes, uncertainty.
Without effective dialogue and advocacy, regulatory divergence risks creating unnecessary complexity in some jurisdictions. Global advocacy plays a critical role in highlighting these risks and promoting coherence where possible. A good example is sustainability reporting and assurance. The AICPA and CIMA have repeatedly advocated for globally consistent frameworks for sustainability reporting and independent assurance, with minimal jurisdiction-specific changes. Similar co-ordination will be essential as new assurance opportunities emerge, including for AI and crypto assets.
Navigating politics with neutrality
In an increasingly political environment, the value of a neutral, trusted, and evidence-based voice cannot be overstated. The AICPA and CIMA engage with governments, political parties, and institutions, bringing evidence-based insight and professional rigour to policy debates, without alignment to partisan agendas.
Our strength lies in convening diverse stakeholders, sharing independent technical insight, and maintaining credibility. Effective advocacy requires patience, consistency, and trust. It is rarely transactional, and relationships are developed over time, grounded in trust and respect.
Advocacy, disruption, and resilience
The connection between advocacy and organisational resilience is important. When businesses encounter external or internal challenges — whether that is economic uncertainty, shifting policies, or financial instability — it is the finance team (or a specialist grouping) that is often asked to help guide the organisation.
Finance has a deep understanding of the business and expertise across areas that include strategy, risk management, treasury operations, cash flow, cost transformation, and budget control. advocacy ensures that those realities can be reflected back to policymakers. Our recent guidance and thought leadership have supported members and businesses in responding to disruption and been shared with the wider business community as a helpful resource, while also informing wider business and policy discussions.
Advocacy as leadership
Global advocacy is ultimately a show of leadership. It demands cultural intelligence, long-term thinking, and the ability to engage constructively with institutions that operate very differently from the private sector.
By continuing to listen to our members, and converting insights into influence, the AICPA and CIMA will continue to promote our profession through informed, credible advocacy that contributes to better outcomes for businesses, for economies, and for society as a whole.
Michelle Mullen is vice president—Global Advocacy at the Association of International Certified Professional Accountants. To learn more about the AICPA and CIMA’s global advocacy work, visit aicpa-cima.com/globaladvocacy or contact globaladvocacy@aicpa-cima.com. To comment on this article or to suggest an idea for another article, contact Oliver Rowe at Oliver.Rowe@aicpa-cima.com.
