Practicing Accountants’ Views of the Content of Accounting Ethics Courses and Course Effects on Attitudes and Behavior

Abstract

We use data from a survey of 215 experienced practicing accountants to provide their level of agreement with various content categories of accounting ethics courses. Our results indicate that top choices of content include current ethical issues, professional codes of conduct, ethical judgment and decision-making processes and models, corporate codes of ethics, whistleblower protection, record retention, and theories of ethics. The respondents also somewhat agreed that ethics courses can influence attitudes and behavior, but they were neutral on whether ethics courses can reduce instances of Enron-like fraud. We discuss the implications of these results for accounting education and research.