Abstract
Abstract This paper aims to provide a high-level overview of whether and how ethics is taught in Romanian accounting and business faculties, members of the Association of Economics Faculties of Romania (AFER), at Bachelor or Masters’ level (accounting, audit or business administration programs). While there are numerous research papers on how ethics is taught in general and some national surveys in other countries, this is the first analysis of its kind in Romania and it can be helpful for faculties to compare themselves to what their counterparts are doing to teach this important topic for professionals in accounting and business. We analysed the publicly available (detailed and most recent) curricula of 60 programs (22 bachelor and 38 masters) from 14 faculties in 8 Romanian cities. We found out whether ethics is included as a self-standing course or ingrained in the curricula (based on our own hypothesis which we then verified) and whether it is predominantly an optional or a mandatory discipline. We found that, with a few exceptions, the majority of programs analyzed approached ethics (academic or professional) and that the Ethics self-standing courses (or the courses where ethics is included as a secondary subject) have a relatively high importance (judged from the number of credits allocated to them). There are many other variables to analyze in order to make the research more relevant for professors that would want to update their ethics curricula. One would be for instance to analyze whether currently ethics is taught more towards senior years or at the beginning of students’ education.
Highlights
In a world of uncertainties and rapid change people are rightly wondering what remains a constant and what is the value added of the accountancy profession
We found that ethics has been intertwined with the accountancy profession since its very beggining when Luca Pacioli engrained Catholic Social Teaching in his Summa (Coate and Mitschow, 2018) ethics education for business did not catch up until early 20th century and it seems that it still raises controversies as to who, what should teach and what its impact is and it is not as present as it should be in either academia (Miller and Shawver, 2018) or professional bodies (Fleming, 1996; Spalding, 2019)
We decided to include this course as well as we deemed that any encounter by future accounting professionals with Ethics is relevant for their future development
Summary
In a world of uncertainties and rapid change (financial crisis, pandemics, automation) people are rightly wondering what remains a constant and what is the value added of the accountancy profession. The latter’s sense of morals and professional judgement should act as a steady compass through this storm. From the very establishment of the accountancy profession, at its roots, Luca Pacioli engrained ethics mentions based on the Catholic Social Teaching in his Summa (Coate and Mitschow, 2018). Ever since that very beginning, ethics has been intertwined with the accountancy profession and it has taken more or less a central stage depending on economic context, crises and general attitudes towards accountants. Many have tried to answer some overarching questions regarding ethics education in accounting: Can it be taught?
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