I suspect we will always have UK variant papers, because for ACCA to be officially “endorsed” in the UK as a Recognised Qualifying Body, it has to show that UK required laws and regulations are in the syllabus and being tested. That means UK audit standards, UK ethics, UK corporate governance, UK law.
The switch to IFRS works (for UK streams) because the UK listed companies are using the actual IFRS (unlike auditing, ethics etc. where the UK is using UK versions of the international standards).
The annoying thing is that UK audit standards, ethics etc are virtually identical to international. The UK retains control by having its own standards, but so far is basically just copying the international ones.
But laws will always be country specific, so any paper affected by laws (and audit and FR papers always will be) is likely to keep its own variants.
My preference would be for anything legal to be pushed down to lower level papers, so we can at least scrap the UK variants on P2 and P7 - but I seem to be in a minority on this one!
The addition of Insolvency to the P7 (UK) syllabus is interesting. The syllabus has only 1 additional sub area, and only 5 additional learning outcomes. Given there are approximately 120 learning outcomes, and the Insolvency ones look fairly knowledge-based (if you can explain them, you will be ok I suspect, not much application needed), I doubt the UK paper will be noticeably harder.
Although time will tell!
Happy studying
Paul
