After the 2025 Merger: What the PO & RMS Accountant Exam Leads To Now

For decades the PO & RMS Accountant exam was also a door to a promotion line of its own: LSG (Accountant) and HSG-II (Accountant) posts under their own recruitment rules. On 11 February 2025 the Directorate closed that line. The exam survives, and it still decides who may work the accounts branch, but a candidate deciding whether to spend a year on it should know exactly what passing buys now.

Existing holders of LSG and HSG (Accountant) posts continue where they are. For the common seniority list the letter places an LSG (Accountant) below the LSG (PO) officials who were senior to them in the PA cadre and above those who were junior, so nobody jumps a queue on the merger. It applies to RMS in the same way as to post offices.

The same letter restates two facts about the exam itself. It "is only qualifying in nature", and under the Directorate's letter of 23.12.1999 Accountants are borne on the PA/SA gradation list, with no change in PA/SA seniority on passing.

Reading the two letters together (our reading, not the letters' words): passing still qualifies a PA or SA to be posted to an accounts post at the PA/SA level, and it is what later lets a general-line LSG or HSG official man an accounts post at that level, because the letter restricts those posts to officials who "had earlier passed". Combine that with the letter of 19.02.2019, which bars LSG officials from sitting the exam, and the practical advice follows: pass while you are still a PA or SA. After promotion to LSG you can no longer take it.

What passing no longer buys is a separate ladder. There is no promotion to LSG (Accountant) or HSG-II (Accountant) any more. Any page that still sells the exam as a fast track to an Accountant LSG post is describing the rules before 11.02.2025.

This is the question every candidate asks, and the honest answer is that we could not find an official document. What is reported, and only reported:

Every row is from an official letter quoted or enclosed in a circle notice or in the letter of 11.02.2025. Read in order, the dates tell the story plainly: a separate ladder built in 1976 and 2011, an exam that stayed the same while the rules around it were rewritten, and in 2025 the ladder folded back into the general line while the exam itself carried on. The letter of 11.02.2025 gives the reason it had to be settled: circles had been following different yardsticks for filling Accounts line posts, and two channels of promotion were being operated.

On the official record: it is short (two open-book papers), it is qualifying rather than competitive, a 60% paper carries for two sittings, and it is the only way to be posted to accounts work, which runs through every level of the general line after the merger. On the other side: it no longer leads to a separate promotion, and nothing official we found attaches money to it. If you are a PA or SA who likes the accounts branch, sit it before any LSG promotion. If you are looking for promotion itself, the exams that lead there are the IP LDCE and, later, the PS Group B LDCE.