Coimbatore: Avinashilingam University will offer a certification course in ‘American Accounting and Tax Practices’ from September 2007. This will be offered in association with GKM Inc., an U.S.-based outsourcing provider, the company’s Director G. Karthikeyan told presspersons here on Friday.

The course would be on a part-time basis for four months and constitute 120 hours of class. Students would be taught U.S. accounting, tax laws and applicable software. Certification would be jointly awarded by the company and the university.

Mr. Karthikeyan said that the course, the first of its kind in the country, would aim at training people to match the context of a typical outsourcing environment.

He said: “The growing need for tax preparers for the U.S.-based tax payers is not supported by trained manpower during the peak tax paying season.