In a passionate address to Friday's meeting, Seamus Farrelly, careers and placement officer at the institute, accused partners in the top accountancy firms of deliberately falsifying the training records of students to hide their lack of experience.

"Students are not being trained to become chartered accountants, " he claimed.

"We're doing them a disservice, we're doing ourselves a disservice and we're doing business in Ireland a disservice by not producing chartered accountants in the way we should."

Farrelly claimed that many students spend their entire training pigeon-holed in highly specialised areas of tax or audit so that they get no experience of other aspects of the accountancy profession.

Some spend years auditing hedge funds and nothing else, he said.

"How can we, as a profession governed by professional ethics, produce booklets for schools and colleges pretending that we are training students in these areas when they are not being trained in these areas?" he asked.

Farrelly alleged that some students' training records are being falsified "to give the impression they have trained in areas in which they have not. If they are falsifying these records, are they falsifying other records? We have a major issue with ethics, " he claimed.

Farrelly's statements shocked some at the AGM.

"A minimum standard of experience should be set for students, " said John Kenny, a former chairman of the Leinster Society of Chartered Accountants. "It's appalling to think of students stuck in hedge fund accounting or capital gains tax for their entire training contracts."

The institute's outgoing president, John Greely, said allegations of a cover-up were without foundation.

"There's no evidence of falsifying training contracts, " he told the meeting.

Incoming president Martin Wilson, who was chief executive of Ulster Bank until 2004, said training had to be flexible to encourage companies to train accountants.

"We have to live in the real world, " he said.

"People will only train chartered accountants if our requirements are competitive compared with the other accountancy bodies.

The danger is we'll lose ground to the ACCAs [certified accountants] or CPAs [certified public accountants] if we're not entirely flexible in our approach to education."

Meanwhile, Greely confirmed that the institute has signed a 50m contract for a purpose-built headquarters and education centre on Dublin's Pearse Street.

The planned 50,000 square foot premises, which is awaiting planning permission, will be financed from the institute's internal resources without recourse to the 15,000 members.