Personality and moral character traits and acknowledging the principles of management ethics, auditing and accounting ethics

Abstract

In the world, based on recent frauds in financial reporting of partial deregulation of the financial system, as some of the causes for the latest economic crisis, there is once again a growing distrust in external audit, which yields the growing distrust of the public and investors of the entire financial system. In recent years, even before the latest economic crisis, the emphasis in overlapping the gap in the quality of financial reporting was put on developing a model of internal audit functioning. Even besides the undoubtedly positive effect resulting from developing various models of internal control, sometimes catastrophic consequences of fraud were not avoided. International standards and code of ethics represent some of the instruments for securing of independence and objectivity of auditors and professional accountants in regards to management demands. The objective of conducted interdisciplinary research was to point out the important role of personality traits and morality in acknowledgement of  ethic principles by management, auditors and professional accountants in organization of corporate financial business operation, implementation of the systems of internal control and evaluating their functionality. This paper presents the results of personality trait research, evaluated by the questionnaire “Big five plus two“ and of the morality of management, auditors and accountants from 15 companies (public, joint stock, limited liability, middle and big companies and auditing houses). The research was conducted on the sample of 95 respondents (of both sexes, aged between 25 and 60). The results of this research have shown that, ethics and morality in education of managers, auditors and accountants have a key role in acknowledging ethics principles in the course of performing their regular business and professional activities. Based on the conducted research, introducing an adequate education on basic concepts of ethics and professional code of ethics in high schools and higher education of managers, auditors and accountants is suggested, all leading to the goal of securing an unhindered implementation of the mentioned code of ethics within the model of corporate governance, as a key factor in the process of business decision making.   Key words: Financial report, internal and external audit, audit risk, code of ethics and morality, personality traits.