Apoorva Tiku: Financial auditing for government accountability

Apoorva’s journey

I was previously a public sector financial auditor at the Audit Office of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia. I contributed to holding government agencies accountable for their use of taxpayers’ money. Rather than just focusing on compliance, I also contributed to recommending ways that agencies could improve their current operations to become more efficient, effective, and economical with the use of taxpayers’ money.

I chose to study the Master of Accounting at Cambridge because I saw the potential in the programme to help me. Having gained adequate technical skills through my bachelor’s degree and CA studies, I soon realised that there had been a gap in my training. This gap related to the requisite leadership skills needed to apply technical expertise to complex, dynamic, and sometimes controversial accounting issues in the workplace. The soft skills were just as important as the technical skills, yet I had not received enough training in them.

Now that I have completed the degree, I wanted to apply what I had learnt to a financial analyst role within a large global corporation that was doing meaningful work for society. I knew that what I had learnt from the programme about future accounting issues put me in good stead to achieve my career goals.

The most rewarding part of the programme for me was meeting people from all around the world and learning about their varied perspectives—something that I do not think I would have been able to do if I had not studied at an international institution such as the University of Cambridge. This programme was very enlightening for me, and I returned to Australia with a changed perspective.