The accountancy profession must be “sensitive and responsive to calls for change”, the president of Chartered Accountants Ireland Austin Slattery said last night.

Reform is “inevitable”, Mr Slattery told the organisation’s annual dinner in the Shelbourne Hotel in Dublin last night.

Speaking before his address, Mr Slattery said accountants had to be “open to change” in light of the poor practices exposed in the fallout from the banking crisis.

“We certainly have suffered, rightly or wrongly, some reputational damage as a result of the financial crisis,” he said.

The “narrow function” of audits, cited by Peter Nyberg in his report on the Irish banking sector in 2011, has created an “audit expectation gap” in which it was assumed that an audit guaranteed “a clean bill of health forever” rather than simply a check of the company accounts at that point in time, Mr Slattery said.