Accounting is a profession that many people find to be a hard nut to crack. But it remains to be one subject that surrounds everyone on a daily basis. Individuals who are not qualified accountants still find themselves calculating many things that involve money. Professional accountants may be few, but accounting concerns everything. It is also good to consider ethical requirements. Every accountant and accounting institution should adapt to new regulations. This paper will discuss these accounting values.
Ethics stands for right or wrong that is acceptable to an individual or a group of people. It is a group of principles governing morality and acceptable conduct (Sorensen, Miller & Cabe, 2015). It is a requirement of the military profession and health profession to practice high ethical standards. Ethics is about giving courteous service and support to both deserving and undeserving citizens.
For many years, the accounting profession did not consider ethics as an essential part of the job (Unerman, Bebbington & O’Dwyer, 2007). Most higher learning institutions concentrated on the hard facts of calculating and dealing with financials. It was up to the educated to know what, when and how to do accounting. As a result, the students and the graduates did not understand the basics of involving ethics in their work.
A restatement is a revised statement. The incidences of restatements have brought forth the fear that all is not well in the accounting profession. They serve as the proxy for fraud (Sorensen et al., 2015). Organizations should refrain from this practice at all costs. The Bentley University released a shocking report in 2014. It highlighted the fraudulent deals of a leading professor. Other reports also recalled the misgivings of midsized companies. The totals and accelerated filers continued to increase (Abdolmohammadi and Ariail 5).
Some companies have the practice of promoting the unethical behaviors of misreporting their financial status. They have for some reason used their records to evade paying taxes. Others want to record false income so that they can please the shareholders and pay dividends from income that does not exist (Unerman et al., 2007). The reports from the 1990s to the early 2000s indicated that there was a slight decline in misreporting of financial statements. The decline resulted from intense media campaigns against the practice of unethical reporting. Some of these institutions never even feared the consequences of their actions. They had loopholes in the law that allowed them the chance to cheat.
Employees of these companies also fear reporting the bad behaviors of their managers and other superiors. They thought that they could protect their employment by staying quiet. Some even assisted their seniors to doctor reports and made them look real. Some of these problems start in schools. Students cheat to get false results in their exams to project false results. The professors have on several occasions assisted such students to get away with it.
The case of Jennifer is not strange when compared to other institutions. Here is a lady who has only four years of experience and wants to build a career (Clikeman, 2009). She finds a job with a company dealing with auditing. One would expect such a company to be morally fit because it is working on other companies’ reports. Instead, the president of the business is the one promoting malpractice in the organization.
Jennifer is now stranded on what to do because she wants to be truthful. She also wants to instill her knowledge of accounting and good practice in making financial reports. Jennifer also has got a long way to go concerning her career (Jeffrey, 2012). She reflected on whether to press on with her idea of providing the correct report or the plan or become compromised and redraft her report. Such is the case many employees face (Abdolmohammadi and Ariail 5).
However, all is not lost. Many people have had to rethink the well-being of their accounting careers. Many academic thinkers and scholars have made it possible by introducing the subject of ethics in the accounting classes (Jeffrey, 2012). The curriculum would also include corporate social responsibility and sustainability. Some states in the United States of America have already passed that as law and are practicing it. The remaining ones are either working on it or are at the final stages of implementing it (Clikeman, 2009).
The law would also allow the already qualified graduates in accounting to retrain and study the ethics subject. There is also a chance for others who can participate in the shared knowledge through training workshops inside and out of school (Healy-Burress, 2011). Some companies have taken up the issue to train their workers at the place of work.
When it comes to teaching ethics, accounting has similar attributes to medical and legal professions. The applications for ranking the medical and juridical profession together with the accounting profession do not match well. The Defining Issue Test is a principles based test and typically gives the nurses a higher score than the accountants. It is because the nurses can improvise their services quickly to their patients. Most of the nurse’s findings deal with issues they can relate to easily. On the other hand, accounting deals with rules and already formulated procedures. Therefore, the trainers have to take a more formal approach when dealing with the accountants.
References
Abdolmohammadi, M., & Ariail, D. (2009). A Test of the selection-socialization theory in moral reasoning of CPAs in industry practice. Behavioral Research in Accounting, 21(2), 1-12.
Clikeman, P. (2009). Called to account. New York, NY: Routledge.
Healy-Burress, J. (2011). Ethics regulation by the accounting profession. Journal of Business & Economics Research (JBER), 2(9), 112-115.
Jeffrey, C. (2012). Research on professional responsibility and ethics in accounting. Bingley, United Kingdom: Emerald.
Sorensen, D., Miller, S., & Cabe, K. (2015). Developing and measuring the impact of an accounting ethics course that is based on the moral philosophy of Adam Smith. J Bus Ethics, 3(15), 300-320.
Unerman, J., Bebbington, J., & O’Dwyer, B. (2007). Sustainability accounting and accountability. London, United Kingdom: Routledge.