Richard Doornbosch: Speech - Annual meeting of the Dutch Caribbean Accountants Association

Speech by Mr. Richard Doornbosch, President of the Centrale Bank van Curaçao en Sint Maarten, at the annual meeting of the Dutch Caribbean Accountants Association, Willemstad, 4 March 2021.

The views expressed in this speech are those of the speaker and not the view of the BIS.

Central bank speech  | 
04 March 2021

Good afternoon ladies and gentlemen,

It is a pleasure and an honor to be a guest at your general membership meeting. Dear Chairman, dear Christiaan, thank you for the kind introduction, and on behalf of all the colleagues at the CBCS, I would like to thank the DCAA members for their cooperation over the years. This cooperation will also be the central theme of my speech today. Cooperation can mean different things, in different situations to different people. In English, there are around 100 synonyms for the word cooperation, so it is only appropriate to reflect on our cooperation regularly.

The tasks of both the CBCS and external auditors are becoming more and more demanding. In many ways, your work and mine are complementary. You provide assurance in financial information that we as supervisors rely upon. We also face similar challenges. For example in assessing compliance with rules and regulations and assessing risks and risk controls.

We cannot be complacent about this. We only need to look at a number of financial entities in the Dutch Caribbean with serious incidents of malpractices. We all know the examples. Although the root cause might have been different for each entity, they have one thing in common: they were supervised by the CBCS and audited by a member of DCAA. It means we both have lessons to learn.