It’s tempting to think of your accounting staff as glorified mechanics, people with specialised talents needed to keep your company’s financial machinery functioning smoothly while you’re running a business. To some extent, this is correct, but accountants also serve as company watchdogs. They’re in charge of ensuring that businesses record their finances in a straightforward and consistent manner, which frequently puts them in circumstances that are ethically or legally questionable.
Ethical Issues Facing The Accounting Profession
Pressure to manipulate the figures
Running a business puts you under a huge amount of pressure, especially when things aren’t going so well, or at least not as well as you’d want. When this happens, it’s difficult to resist the urge to rely on your accountant to alter the figures. It’s a major issue for accountants, whether they’re in-house or recruited from a third-party firm. They have precise ethical guidelines to follow, and failing to do so might expose them to legal or criminal punishment, effectively ending their careers.
Issues of information access and confidentiality
Accountants, like doctors and lawyers, spend a lot of time dealing with confidential information. Inappropriate use of the information, as well as an inability to properly secure confidential information, are also ethical difficulties for an accountant. One of the most prominent difficulties is insider trading, which involves using confidential knowledge to profit from an impending increase or decrease in a company’s worth.
Blowing the whistle
The hard decision of when to blow the whistle on a company or division that is unethically manipulating or misstating its figures is one ethical dilemma accountants may encounter. If the accountant’s evidence is sufficiently harmful, a company could fail or lose a significant portion of its stock value overnight. Thousands of investors could be harmed, and the accountant’s colleagues and coworkers could lose their jobs, putting their finances at risk. Backlash and intimidation are very real risks, and a reputation as a troublemaker can be career-ending.
Why Is It Important?
Accounting ethics have grown even more vital in today’s international market, and accountants must act in a fair and transparent manner because businesses rely on them, and many lives are dependent on their honesty and integrity. Accounting ethics is significant enough that it has its own set of guidelines. Companies can use ethical codes to ensure that they meet the requirements for accurate financial reporting. Here are the 5 common codes of ethics that every accountant should demonstrate.
Conclusion
Accounting ethics is one of the most important principles, according to which everyone involved in accounting must follow specific rules and guidelines established by various regulating authorities with the authority to do so. These standards and guidelines keep the many powers granted to accounting professionals from being abused.
