Code of Ethics Paper
One thing that accountants take very seriously in our job training as an accountant is the rigorous code of ethics of the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA). This code suggest that accountants maintain independence from clients and they bear equal responsibility for reporting unlawful or misleading information when normal accounting practice would show to the accountant that such information was questionable or false.
Ethics has been defined as the study of moral judgment and standards of conducts while personal ethics vary from individual to individual, at any point in time, many citizens within a society are able to agree as to what is considered ethical and unethical behavior. In fact a society passes laws that define what its citizens consider to be the more extreme form of unethical behavior.
But much of what is considered unethical in a particular society is not specifically prohibited. So, how do we know whether or not we are acting ethically? Who decides what standards of conduct are appropriate? Is any type of behavior "ethical" as long as it does not violate a law or a rule of one's profession?
A good starting point for consideration ethics is to examine the context in which most ethical question arise, relationships among people. Any relationship between two or more individuals carries with it sets of expectations by each of the individuals involved.
Certainly, the relationship between accountant/CPA and a client offers a number of interesting challenges. While price fixing conspiracies, bribery, fraud and business collusion are not the norm of contemporary business practice, they occur far more frequently than we care to acknowledge and clearly more often than is permissible to gain the le ...