Johannesburg — THE average salary for newly qualified chartered accountants in SA has risen between 11% and 15% over the past year, according to a new study released by international recruitment firm antonapps.

"Compared with their counterparts in London, Sydney and Edinburgh, South African chartered accountants are enjoying substantial annual increases," said Anton Apps, director and founder of antonapps.

"Given the inflation differential coupled with the relative scarcity of chartered accountants in a time of growth, this is to be expected."

For more senior chartered accountants, the increase has been more modest at an average 9%-10% between last year and this year. A newly qualified chartered accountant in the banking and financial services sector in Johannesburg would earn about R400000 -R450000 this year, compared with R360000-R390000 last year.

An accountant with more than six years' experience should expect to earn between R700000 and R900000 a year, compared with last year's salary of R64000 to R850000 .

Apps said entry-level chartered accountants were fairly generic from a salary perspective and the range was narrow and consistent across regions, gender and race groups, though there were fewer equity chartered accountants. As employees became more senior and had more experience, salaries tended to become increasingly divergent and less accurate.

Due to the demographics of the chartered accountant population, senior equity individuals were scarce and, in certain cases, attracted premium salaries. This was made worse by the fact that many senior black players were in proprietary positions .

Top international law firms are allegedly recruiting SA's cream of the crop law graduates at starting salaries upwards of $160000 a year. Young lawyers in SA cannot even hope to earn that kind of money.

According to latest figures provided by the Law Society of SA, the country has about 17800 practising attorneys, 3000 advocates and a further 3000 candidate attorneys at law firms and Legal Aid Board justice centres. About 30% of the attorneys are black, though roughly half the new candidate attorneys entering the profession are black.

Raj Daya, CEO of the Law Society of SA, said 17000 attorneys for a country with a population of 46-million is "woefully insufficient ". While emigration accounts from some attrition from the profession, hundreds more leave every year for a more lucrative future in commerce and in the public service. While the number of candidate attorneys is growing at the rate of 10% a year, the profession as a whole is growing at just 4% a year.

Skills shortages are also reportedly playing havoc with pay structures at all levels, particularly in the engineering, information technology and finance sectors. The cost of recruiting engineers from overseas has recently added an extra 15% to projects.