Is it Shameful to be an Accountant? GenMe Perception(s) of Accountants' Ethics

The function that accountants fulfil in the economic system is dependent on their ability to maintain the perception of high ethical standards. Building on the idea that birth cohorts, otherwise known as generations, are a useful proxy for the socio‐cultural environment of different time periods, we focus on the so‐called ‘GenMe’, that is, students and young workers born in the 1980s and 1990s. In particular, combining the accounting and business ethics literature, the purpose of our paper is to contribute to an increased awareness of the GenMe perceptions of accountants, with special attention given to ethical aspects. We believe that the perceptions of this age group are particularly crucial for the future of the accounting profession as it is these young people who will either become professional accountants or the accountants' future clients. Using an extensive database of 1,794 questionnaires, results show that the impression of the accountant as a corrupt professional is not dominant among GenMe and seem to suggest the existence of a multifaceted perception of accountants' ethics. Specifically, the factors that contribute to influencing GenMe perceptions of accountants' ethics are level of education, having attended an accounting course at high school level, gender, and belonging to the accounting profession. Finally, our study indicates that there is room for improving public perceptions of accountants' ethics through university courses in ethics, continuing education programs, and focused communication strategies by accounting firms and professional bodies.     

The joint influence of client attributes and cognitive moral development on students’ ethical judgments

Academic interest in the ethical quality of accountants’ judgments has produced a steady stream of research addressing the role of education in fostering ethical behavior. Although various studies have evaluated the cognitive moral development of accounting students, few studies have considered the influence of accounting contextual factors on ethical judgments. This study evaluates the influence of cognitive moral development and a contextual factor, client risk level, on both ethical judgments and behavioral intentions. Results from a study of auditing students indicate that students with higher moral development evaluate earnings management as less ethical and are less likely to accept earnings management by an audit client than are students with lower moral development. Students in a high client risk scenario evaluated earnings management as less ethical and were also less likely to accept earnings management by an audit client than were students in a low client risk scenario. The results also show an interaction between client risk and moral development.     

Accountants' Personality Typology and Perceptions of Job-Related Stress: An Empirical Study

This study attempts to relate accountants' perceptions of job-related stress with their personality variables. Based on the conceptual framework of C.G. Jung's psychological personality typology, it was found that judging, thinking and sensing personality profile satisfactorily discriminates among accountants' perceptions of job-related stress. Neither introverted nor extroverted accountants differ in their perceptions of stress.     

Level of business insights in the MD&A and nonprofessional investors' judgments

This study examines how the level of business insights in a firm's MD&A interacts with its current financial performance to influence nonprofessional investors' judgments. Following the observations and guidance of the ASIC and SEC to define low‐and high‐insight MD&A, this study finds that low‐insight MD&A, when provided for a negative earnings surprise, increases investors’ judgments of the negative earnings persistence and hurts management reputation more than if no MD&A had been provided. High‐insight MD&A, when including a plausible external attribution, increases investors’ judgments of management reputation in the negative earnings surprise condition and decreases investors’ judgments of positive earnings persistence.     

Moral will,accounting and the phronemos

This commentary examines the work of Everett and Tremblay (2014) and their contribution to critical accounting. They examine three key ethical dilemmas that confront modern accounting practice. They examine a set of in-depth interviews, the autobiography of the former Vice President of Internal Audit of WorldCom, Cynthia Cooper, and the documents of the Institute of Internal Auditors (IIA) to shed light on accounting and audit ethics. The dilemmas confronting the accounting profession are complex and multi-faceted, which they place in their socio-economic context using ideas from Pierre Bourdieu. I add ideas from Lovibond (2004),MacIntyre (1984) and McDowell (1993) as well as audit work by Jere Francis. My solution involves accountants acting like the phronemos. The phronemos is Aristotle's term for a wise and ethical person who has the capacity to judge and act appropriately. This ideal of the phronemos is used to examine the ethical ambiguities in accounting that involve analyzing the critical role that accounting curricula, education and pedagogy play in making better judgments. This critical accounting focus was also a focus in Chabrak and Craig's work on accounting education. They examined professional credentialing and professional education. Like Everett and Tremblay, they also point us toward the public interest role of accounting and our societal need for better and informed judgments. The comment concludes with the observation that Aristotle's notion of the phronemos is an ideal type that promotes virtue ethics to address the drift in accounting away from ethics and its public interest role.     

Ethical norms of CFO insider trading

Insider trading encompasses the buying or selling of stocks based on non-public information about the securities in question. Engaging in insider trading is particularly unethical for a Chief Financial Officer (CFO) who holds a fiduciary responsibility to shareholders and also typically is ethically obligated by his or her professional responsibilities. Although the Securities and Exchange Commission (1934) has expressly forbidden insider trading, the business press suggests insider trading continues. An application of Cooter’s [Cooter, R., 1997. Normative failure theory of law. Cornell Law Review 82 (5), 947–979; Cooter, R., 2000. Three effects of social norms on law: Expression, deterrence and internalization. Oregon Law Review 79 (1), 1–22] theory of the law and norms suggests that one explanation for the continuation of insider trading is that although illegal, norms may fail to consider insider trader to be unethical. Nevertheless, our knowledge of the norms regarding insider trading is limited. To address this gap, we examine the ethical norms regarding CFOs’ insider trading, and consider the extent to which contextual variables are associated with ethical perceptions of CFO insider trading. We find that insider trading by CFOs is generally perceived to be unethical but not by all participants, nor all ethical measures. Moral equity is particularly informative for understanding the ethicality of CFO insider trading. When relying on the multidimensional ethics scale (MES) measure of moral equity, our results reveal that contextual factors, including trading method used (stock options or share equity) and the direction of earnings surprise (favorable or unfavorable) are significant. We also found that participants that possessed more work experience or financial expertise had a greater tendency to consider CFO insider trading to be unethical than those with less work experience or financial expertise, which suggests the importance of training and education of the general public. In addition, our findings suggest that tougher sanctions will encourage compliance with existing insider trading laws. Implications of our findings for public policy are discussed.     

Ethics matters: the integration of ethical considerations in management accounting textbooks

This paper examines the integration of ethical considerations in management accounting (MA) education. Drawing on the work of Alisdair MacIntyre, it is argued that MA instruments such as performance measurement are not morally neutral, but instead bear moral implications. Therefore, this paper contends that MA students should be trained to take these moral implications into consideration alongside MA's technical aspects. A content analysis is carried out to examine the integration of ethical considerations in top-ranked MA textbooks. The findings indicate that these textbooks, particularly the introductory textbooks, marginally integrate ethical considerations. Furthermore, the findings point to the risk of detaching ethical considerations from the discussion of MA's technical aspects, which may weaken the potential of the ethical considerations and turn them into ‘afterthoughts’. Finally, this paper offers practical suggestions for the improvement of the integration of ethical considerations in MA education and concludes with directions for future research.     

HOW TO FIX ACCOUNTING—MEASURE AND REPORT ECONOMIC PROFIT

Bending accounting rules has become so ingrained in our corporate culture that even ethical business leaders succumb to the temptation to “manage” their earnings in order to meet analysts' demands for smoothly rising results. The author of this article argues that such behavior reflects not a general decline in ethical standards so much as executives' growing sense that accounting itself has become “unhinged from value.” For example, clearly valuable expenditures on R&D, customer acquisition, and employee training are generally expensed immediately against earnings. And reported corporate income is often further reduced by provisions for losses that most companies never expect to incur, by “book” taxes they never expect to pay, and by depreciation charges on assets that are actually increasing in value. At the same time, the opportunity costs associated with employee stock options and the corporate use of equity capital are not reflected in the accountant's measure of profit. To improve the quality of corporate governance and revitalize the public's faith in reported earnings, the author proposes a complete overhaul of GAAP accounting to measure and report economic profit, or EVA. Stated in brief, the author's concept of economic profit begins with an older, but now seldom used, definition of accounting income known as “residual income,” and then proposes a series of additional adjustments to GAAP accounting that are designed to produce a reliable measure of a company's annual, sustainable cash‐generating capacity. Besides expensing the cost of equity capital as well as stock options, the author recommends bringing off‐balance‐sheet items such as pension assets and liabilities back onto the balance sheet, eliminating reserve accounting, capitalizing R&D and other expenditures on intangible assets, and recording economic rather than accounting depreciation. Such changes, by replacing the accountants' current flawed definition of earnings with a comprehensive new statement of value added, could restore investor confidence in financial statements. Even more important, managers would be less likely to pursue their now common practice of boosting earnings by making value‐reducing operating and investment decisions and more likely to use financial reporting not to mislead the market but as an opportunity to communicate relevant, forward‐looking information.     

Accountants’ cognitive styles and ethical reasoning: A comparison across 15 years

Recent attention to accountants’ ethics in the news, in professional practice, and by academia leads to questions about the ethical and cognitive characterization of students selecting accounting careers. We employ the Myers/Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) for assessing cognitive styles, and the Defining Issues Test (DIT) for assessing ethical reasoning to study differences between two groups of accounting graduates and new hires entering the accounting profession across a period of 15 years. We show that the dominant cognitive make-up of accountants has not changed significantly over the study period, which is consistent with prior research. Also, we hypothesize and provide evidence that this dominant style is associated with lower levels of ethical reasoning (as measured by the DIT) than other cognitive styles. The ethical reasoning scores are lower for the 2005 sample than for the 1990 sample. This result may be attributable to age, gender, grade point average, or political orientation; however, incomplete data in our sample does not allow us to make definitive conclusions regarding these control variables. We discuss the implications of these findings for curriculum development and professional practice.     

Accounting and Auditing at the Time of Blockchain Technology: A Research Agenda

Blockchain is a distributed ledger technology expected to have significant impacts on the accounting and auditing profession. This study, applicable and timely for both accounting and auditing scholars and practitioners, explores blockchain technology and its main implications for the accounting and auditing profession. The research question addressed in this study is: What are the major themes emerging from academic research and professional reports and websites debating blockchain technology in the accounting and auditing context? A literature review of academic literature and professional reports and websites is performed to identify a taxonomy of emerging themes. The study finds that the most discussed themes in scholarly works and professional sources are governance, transparency and trust issues in the blockchain ecosystem, blockchain‐enabled continuous audits, smart contract applications and the paradigmatic shift in accountants' and auditors' roles. Based on these four themes, practical implications for accountants and auditors on how to approach the blockchain development are provided. Moreover, this study offers suggestions for future research on accounting and auditing in the blockchain era.     

审计职业怀疑研究综述

职业怀疑是注册会计师从事审计工作应有的重要素质,也是影响审计质量的重要因素,尤其是审计职业界日益强调在审计计划和执行工作中应该保持职业怀疑态度的今天,这一问题就显得更为重要。然而,国内外关于这一问题的研究都相对比较薄弱。本文首先对已有的关于审计职业怀疑内涵的不同观点进行了分析,按照时间脉络介绍和分析了在发展过程中逐步形成的四个审计职业怀疑模型,在此基础上从审计职业怀疑与审计人员的个体特征、审计职业怀疑与职业怀疑行为两个方面,梳理和评述了目前国外对审计职业怀疑的研究成果,最后结合上述研究成果和审计实践,指出了这一领域未来可能的研究方向,以期为我国审计职业怀疑的理论研究和实践活动提供借鉴和参考。     

An Historical Analysis of Ethical Pronouncements and Debate in the Australian Accounting Profession

This paper traces the forerunners of the present-day ethical rulings of the Institute of Chartered Accountants in Australia and the Australian Society of Accountants from the earlies professional Australian accounting bodies of the 1880s and 1890s. Various codes of ethics, articles, and memoranda of association, by-laws, charters, and professional publications are reviewed. Key Australian ethical issues are identified and their orientation over time considered. There is an early orientation towards overseas viewpoints and the issue of advertising is identified as a key impetus for ethical code development. The profession's self-interest is identified as an underlying rationale. This is presented as an historical case study of the development of accounting ethics with a view to identifying factors influencing change over time.     

On the Relation between Conservatism in Accounting Standards and Incentives for Earnings Management

This paper studies the role of conservative accounting standards in alleviating rational yet dysfunctional unobservable earnings manipulation. We show that when accounting numbers serve both the valuation role (in which potential investors use accounting reports to assess a firm's expected future payoff) and the stewardship role (in which current shareholders rely on the same reports to monitor their risk‐averse manager), current firm owners have incentives to engage in earnings management. Such manipulation reduces accounting numbers' stewardship value and leads to inferior risk sharing. We then show that risk sharing, and hence contract efficiency, can be improved under a conservative accounting standard where, absent earnings management, accounting earnings represent true economic earnings with a downward bias, compared with under an unbiased standard where, absent earnings management, accounting earnings represent true economic earnings without bias.     

Pro forma accounting disclosures: The effect of reconciliations and financial reporting knowledge on nonprofessional investors' judgments

Regulation G requires companies that report non-GAAP or “pro forma” earnings provide a reconciliation. While nonprofessional investors are a large, heterogeneous population with varying degrees of financial reporting knowledge, previous research treats them as a homogenous group. The study examines how differences in financial reporting knowledge and information viewing behavior affect the influence of reconciled pro forma earnings disclosures on nonprofessional investors' judgments. Lower-knowledge investors appear to incorporate information on differences between GAAP and pro forma earnings in their judgments as long as they view this information in the reconciliation. However, higher-knowledge investors appear to consistently incorporate information on differences between GAAP and pro forma earnings in their judgments regardless of the relative amount of time they spend viewing the reconciliation relative to other disclosures. Our results suggest that knowledge differences influence how nonprofessional investors acquire and use information on differences between GAAP and pro forma earnings.     

The effect of a potential borrower's reporting reputation and financial condition on commercial loan officers' estimates of forecast bias and subsequent loan recommendations

This paper investigates whether a potential borrower's reporting reputation and financial condition affect commercial loan officers' loan judgments and recommendations after receiving an earnings forecast that predicts improved financial performance. The results suggest that the earnings forecast is perceived as more credible in the presence of (1) a reputation for objective reporting, and (2) strong financial condition. Also, a reputation for objective reporting allowed the borrower to more credibly convey the expected improvement in performance when financial condition was weak. However, while financial condition predictably affects loan recommendations (likelihood of granting the loan, interest rate), reporting reputation does not. While we find that commercial loan officers discount forecasts under similar circumstances as stock analysts, results suggest that the consequences of developing a reputation for aggressive reporting (e.g., aggressive selection of accounting methods and estimates within GAAP) may be greater in a stock valuation setting (prior research documents lower stock prices) than in a loan setting.     

DOES IT PAY TO DISCLOSE MANAGERIAL EARNINGS INFORMATION EARLY?

Does it pay to voluntarily disclose the manager's private information about the firm's earnings prospects before the mandatory announcement date? This question has been a subject of much debate because prior research establishes both benefits and costs of early information disclosure. We provide evidence on the net effect of such disclosure by examining its impact on firm value. Using a large sample and correcting for self‐selection bias, we find that early disclosure of the manager's private earnings information enhances the end‐of‐period value of the firm.     

Professionalism vs Commercialism: The Association Between Non-Audit Services (NAS) and Audit Independence

This paper examines the relative information content of earnings and cash flows for security returns using a methodology incorporating contextual factors which may affect earnings and cash flow response coefficients. For our UK dataset, we provide evidence that the earnings coefficient is related to earnings permanence, growth and firm size and that the cash flow coefficient may be related to growth. Although our results emphasise the value relevance of earnings, they also suggest that both contemporaneous and prior period cash flow are positively related to security returns and that market-to-book and market value of equity have predictive power for returns.     

The Effect of Issuing Biased Earnings Forecasts on Analysts' Access to Management and Survival

This study offers evidence on the earnings forecast bias analysts use to please firm management and the associated benefits they obtain from issuing such biased forecasts in the years prior to Regulation Fair Disclosure. Analysts who issue initial optimistic earnings forecasts followed by pessimistic earnings forecasts before the earnings announcement produce more accurate earnings forecasts and are less likely to be fired by their employers. The effect of such biased earnings forecasts on forecast accuracy and firing is stronger for analysts who follow firms with heavy insider selling and hard‐to‐predict earnings. The above results hold regardless of whether a brokerage firm has investment banking business or not. These results are consistent with the hypothesis that analysts use biased earnings forecasts to curry favor with firm management in order to obtain better access to management's private information.     

Earnings characteristics and analysts’ differential interpretation of earnings announcements: An empirical analysis

This study provides empirical evidence on factors that drive differential interpretation of earnings announcements. We document that Kandel and Pearson's forecast measures of differential interpretation are decreasing in proxies for earnings quality and pre‐announcement information quality. This evidence yields new and useful insights regarding which earnings announcements are less likely to generate newfound disagreement among analysts and investors. Recent research suggests that investor disagreement can increase investment risk, increase the cost of capital, and cause stock prices to deviate from fundamental value. Therefore, our results support prior intuition that increasing the quality of earnings and pre‐announcement information can improve the efficiency of capital markets.