Moral Accountability Research Articles

Accountant profession and ethics of its behavior

The article reveals important aspects of the profession of an accountant, the ethical norms of accountant´s behaviour, and the social and moral norms of behavior for individuals in this professional group. The main objectives of business ethics are highlighted, including key components of the professional accounting ethics, which were originally developed in the United States in the form of an ethical code for accountants. The essence of professional ethics for accountants and auditors is defined as a code of relevant rules that determine the behavior of specialists in the workplace, as well as norms that correspond to existing legislative and regulatory acts and official regulatory documents, professional knowledge, relationships in the team, a deep awareness of moral responsibility for performance professional duties. An important place in professional ethics belongs to consideration of the professional responsibility of a specialist in the field of accounting and auditing. The authors note that it is relevant for the domestic market to adhere to foreign practices, where violations of professional ethics, including the code of ethics for professional accountants and auditors, can lead to the revocation of a license to practice within the profession after review by special committees. The priority role in the education of highly qualified specialists and their compliance with ethical rules belongs to the sphere of education, particularly higher educational institutions, advanced training courses, webinars, conferences, etc. Science, education, and practical experience of specialists should create the basis for professional knowledge, skills, values, ethics, and attitudes toward the profession. The article describes the profession of an accountant as one of the most responsible professions, as errors in financial documents can result in significant fines for business owners. Competencies and personal characteristics of accountants in modern conditions and the realities of our lives are also mentioned.

Automating anticorruption?

The paper explores some normative challenges concerning the integration of Machine Learning (ML) algorithms into anticorruption in public institutions. The challenges emerge from the tensions between an approach treating ML algorithms as allies to an exclusively legalistic conception of anticorruption and an approach seeing them within an institutional ethics of office accountability. We explore two main challenges. One concerns the variable opacity of some ML algorithms, which may affect public officeholders’ capacity to account for institutional processes relying upon ML techniques. The other pinpoints the risk that automating certain institutional processes may weaken officeholders’ direct engagement to take forward-looking responsibility for the working of their institution. We discuss why both challenges matter to see how ML algorithms may enhance (and not hinder) institutional answerability practices.

A sustainable step forward: Understanding factors affecting customers’ behaviour to purchase remanufactured products

Despite its significant benefits, remanufactured products have very limited uptake in the customer market. Although prior research explored the main motivations of consumer remanufactured behaviour, there is a lack of investigation that explains the complexity of remanufactured consumption behaviour. Based on the complexity theory, our study developed an integrated model to explore factors affecting consumers to purchase remanufactured products. FsQCA was utilised to analyse the collected data. The findings indicated that there are six solutions that can lead to high level of remanufactured behaviour. The necessary condition analysis revealed that moral obligation, moral accountability, perceived risk, perceived risk, and cost knowledge are necessary antecedents for consumers’ behaviour to purchase remanufactured products. This study provides remanufacturer and retailers with meaningful practical implications to promote remanufactured consumption.

Feminist Approach to the Theology of Sin and Forgiveness in Intimate Partner Violence Within Marriage in the Anglican Church of Southern Africa

Intimate partner violence is a scourge that cripples’ families and society at large. The consequences of IPV are observed on emotional, physical, sexual, spiritual, social, and financial levels. Unfortunately, victimized women who are Church going may be forced to believe that their abuse is God's will. This arises in certain Christian homes where the Ephesians letter of Paul is utilized to force females to submit to their husbands as if they were submissive to the Lord. Here, only husbands’ views and practices relating to spiritual, financial, social, and sexual aspects are considered genuine and inspired by God. This paper aimed to explore a feminist approach to the theology of sin and forgiveness in intimate partner violence within marriage in the Anglican Church of Southern Africa. To achieve this purpose this paper looked at how a feminist approach can offer a new perspective to the Anglican Church of Southern Africa’s understanding of the theology of sin and forgiveness in intimate partner violence. This paper concludes that the understanding of sin and forgiveness in Christian Churches as well as in the Anglican Church of Southern Africa leaves no option for those who find themselves as victims of intimate partner violence within marriage. Whilst forgiving is noble and is what all Christians should conform to, victims should be given a chance to combine forgiveness with ethical accountability. This paper utilized secondary data and feminist analysis as a methodology. This paper has four proposals for the Anglican Church of Southern Africa which will see intimate partner violence being mitigated among the Church’s members.

A Comparative Analysis of Effect of Environmental Accounting Cost on Productivity of Oil and Gas & Industrial Goods Firms in Nigeria

This study examined comparative analysis of effect of environmental accounting cost on productivity of oil and gas and industrial goods firms in Nigeria. The specific objective of this study was to determine effect of environmental accounting cost on the productivity of oil & gas and industrial goods firms in Nigeria for the period 2009 – 2018. The study adopted three specific objectives: to ascertain effect of economic accounting cost on firm productivity; to determine effect of discretionary accounting cost on firm productivity; and to examine effect of ethical accounting cost on firm productivity. The study employed the ex-post facto research design and data were collected on the annual reports and financial statements of six sampled firms in the two sectors. The 3 Oil and Gas firms that were purposively sampled include Mobil Nig. Plc, MRS and Total Nig. Plc, while the 3 industrial goods firms are Berger Paints PLC, Dangote Cement PLC and First Aluminum Nig. PLC. Data were analyzed using SPSS V. 20.0 and findings revealed that economic cost and ethical cost had significant effect on productivity while discretionary accounting cost had no significant effect on productivity of oil and gas firms in Nigeria. It was also found that economic, discretional and ethical accounting costs had no significant effect on productivity of the industrial goods firms in Nigeria. The study recommended that management should consolidate effort on economic and ethical accounting costs in order to enhance productivity of the economy and to stabilize the communities where oil and gas as well as industries operate in Nigeria. Keywords: Comparative Analysis, Environmental Accounting Cost, Oil & Gas, Industrial Goods firms, Nigeria. DOI: 10.7176/RJFA/13-20-04 Publication date: October 31 st 2022

Treat me as a place: On the (onto)ethics of place-responsive pedagogy

This article engages with new materialist posthumanist philosophy to conceptually approach an ethics of outdoor environmental education with the focus on a pupil’s body. Thinking with place-responsive pedagogy, I aim to extend a conversation toward exploring a child’s body as a place. Place-responsive pedagogy, while it challenges a commonly endorsed child/brain/self/anthropocentrism by paying more attention to a place, its history, and human-nonhuman entanglements, still positions children as intellectual observers (of places) and multisensorial body-mind thinkers. I propose to attend to pupils/their movements as to ontogenetic phenomena. These phenomena necessarily emerge from the surplus of child-place relations. They are intelligent, complex, transmogrifying, attuning with the emerging ecologies, and growing with/from a place. Such conceptualisation disrupts an often-empty rhetoric that ‘humans are part of nature’, offering an account of an (onto)ethics.

A Relational Conception of Justice: The Theory of Recognition and Moral Injury -Proposals for a Practical Evaluative Framework-

Primarily developed within political philosophy, comprehensive theories of justice are often considered abstract and transcendental for sociological, political, or economic applications and thus, often require further conceptual and analytical clarifications. This need is apparent in recognition theory, a contemporary theory of justice pioneered by Axel Honneth. In it, he underlines the importance of recognition in intersubjective and mutual relations with significant others, legal institutions, and wider society, the denial of which leads to particular forms of injustice, conceptualised as moral injuries. To overcome the functional weakness inherent in recognition theory’s relatively abstract nature, this article clarifies the distinction between its “space” and “object” of evaluation to advance its practical usefulness in assessing disadvantage. In doing so, it first examines the theory of recognition as well as the concept of moral injury and addresses issues researchers and practitioners need to be attentive to concerning the categorisation of the good, the promise of recognition, and the pressing problem of unwarranted claims. Having taken these clusters of concerns into account, this article identifies (1) deformative identity formation, (2) invisibilisation, and (3) stigmatization as morally injurious acts and proposes three dimensions of evaluation, namely physical integrity, moral accountability, and personal autonomy, upon which certain forms of injustices that disadvantaged individuals or groups experience can be assessed within the normative framework of the theory of recognition.

Do virtues matter? Accounting ethics education in Hong Kong

PurposeThe purpose of this study is twofold: to investigate the correlation between the perception of respondent accountants (N = 164) on ethics elements and their demographic factors and to examine the gap between the expectations of employers (accountants) and the coverage of ethics in the education of professional accountants.Design/methodology/approachBoth qualitative and quantitative methods were used to collect the data. An analysis of the relevant documents (syllabi and codes of ethics) was conducted to generate and group appropriate items that represent ethics themes. This led to 17 themes such as integrity, conflict of interest, ethics theories and resolving ethical dilemma. Using inputs from the qualitative study and relevant literature, a questionnaire was framed for the quantitative phase of this study.FindingsWithin accounting ethics education, more emphasis and awareness is required on the themes of integrity, independence, corruption and insider trading. Four categories emerge for the ethics themes related to education in accounting: “Integrity to Accounting Profession”, “Regulatory Compliance”, “Practical Ethical Issues” and “Sense of Responsibility”. The results of this study reveal there are gaps between ethics education and accountants’ expectations. It is found that accountants perceive more virtue-related elements be put in accounting education.Practical implicationsThis study will make accounting educators, accountants and accounting professional associations to be more aware and work together to bridge this gap as well as contribute to a more effective ethics education for accountants in Hong Kong.Originality/valueEnd of education is character and not merely the acquisition of intellectual prowess. With Aristotle’s wisdom and the learnings from the many corporate scandals, it would be safe to conclude that education should result in nurturing hearts and character and not just the transfer of worldly knowledge. While there are many studies focusing on perceptions about ethics, ethics education of business students or academics, there are hardly any studies available on accounting professionals’ perceptions on ethics education, especially in Hong Kong. The authors found that accountants want more virtue-related ethics elements included in accounting education.

Ethical Modelling of the Accounting Profession Based on the Value Judgements of Romanian Accounting Professionals

There is a great contrast between the real role of accounting and its public perception. Accounting can be regarded as the language of business operations, but it is also the representative and manipulator of corporate operations and culture. The major challenge of accounting is whether it allows the most honest and knowledgeable managers to make outstanding reporting decisions while preventing the others on the other side of the honesty competence scale from distorting what they know about their company. This study presents the results of the authors’ empirical research about the opinions of accounting practitioners in Romaine on the values, career opportunities and ethical behaviour of the profession. The findings are interpreted at the various levels of accounting professions (administrators, accountants, auditors) by the number of years spent in accounting and groups of internal and external colleagues, focusing on causal relations. The conclusions are drawn through structural-equations-based causal models by the qualification of accounting professionals and the time spent by them in their jobs.Implications for Central European audience: The paper is examining the role and ethics of accountants within the small and medium-sized sectors. In Central Europe, we have a similar cultural and historical background which might be touchable even in the business environment. Accountants influence how business works and what is disclosed about it. For the aim of a clear view, accountants must behave ethically, and they have to learn about business ethics and professional ethic topics.

The Influence of Contemporary Neo-Liberal Capitalistic Practices to the Accountants’ Conceptualisation of Business Ownership: Towards a Common Good Centric Ethical Critique

Purpose: In our contemporary times, everything in the economy has come to be determined by money. The idea of ownership is thus inevitably replaced by money. Consequently, accountants have narrowly seen the concept of ownership solely in terms of the market and investors. The objective of this study is to provide an insight to the problem that is inherent to the conceptualisation of business ownership, by the accounting profession, as it excludes the role that is played by the stakeholders in the economy.
 Methodology: A theoretical approach was adopted and literature relevant to accounting and applied ethics was used.
 Findings: It was concluded that accountants are not giving due regard to their standards codes of ethics and conduct by not acknowledging everyone who has a stake in a business as part of the business owners for the benefit of those with a financial stake, that is the stockholders.
 Recommendations: It is recommended that accounting profession adopt the social and ethical accounting approach that accommodate all the stakeholder with their varied needs and expectations. Accountants must pursue their professional responsibilities within an ethical framework of the Common Good. In a world that has become sensitised to the reality of interconnectedness, it is argued that it is time that the accounting profession considers the implications of systems theory with specific reference to their conceptualisation of business ownership.

EMBEDDING A GROUP PROJECT INTO INTERMEDIATE ACCOUNTING TO TEACH THE ETHICS OF EARNINGS MANAGEMENT

We propose a novel pedagogic design to integrate teaching earnings management and accounting ethics at the undergraduate level. Earnings management is an extensive topic related to almost every topic in collegiate accounting education. Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP) give accountants discretion to exercise professional judgment on how to report earnings. The ethicality of earnings management has its profound pedagogical challenges. This flexibility exposes many ethical dimensions for professional training. The interaction of earnings management and accounting ethics offers a particular perspective to design a course project module to integrate the detection of earnings management schema and its ethicality. We follow the accounting ethics pedagogic framework (Apostolou & Schleifer, 2013) to demonstrate and validate our course design: (1) assess the need to embed the ethicality of earnings management in the curriculum; (2) articulate learning objectives; (3) identify the nature of the content; (4) select suitable delivery modes; and (5) conduct learning assessment. The paper has three contributions to accounting ethics education. First, the proposed course module offers a solution to relieve the limited space in the curriculum to train accounting ethics. Second, the ethicality of earnings management can act as a bridge to integrating ethical accounting decision-making and professional judgment. Third, the course design offers a virtual platform to engage the instructor and students in exploring the boundary of positive and fraudulent earnings management.

ETHICAL REQUIREMENTS FOR THE ACCOUNTANT PROFESSION

The article deals with issues related directly to the profession of an accountant, which is based on responsibility for acting in the interests of the organization where they carry out their professional activities or in the interests of the client, employer, employees and other persons. It follows that a professional accountant must observe ethical conduct. In his activities, he must comply with certain fundamental principles: decency; professional competence and due diligence; confidentiality; professional behaviour. To do this, we will consider the approaches and requirements for the professional ethics of accountants

The Virtues of Joint Production: Ethical Foundations for Collaborative Organizations

Organizations involve joint production where members engage in purposive coordination and cooperation with others. Scholars have often noted the importance of “moral factors” in facilitating such collaboration but previous research has not adequately explained the nature of these moral factors, how they are embodied within joint production, or why organization members willingly adhere to them. We draw upon virtue ethics to address these questions. We argue that joint production represents a distinct, organization-level practice embodying morally salient standards of professional excellence that contribute to the development of members’ virtues through habituation. We then elaborate microfoundations for this account, developing a virtue ethical account of human agency as directed toward human flourishing such that members willingly adhere to organizational norms and values when they coherently embody goods that contribute to human flourishing.

America's Religious Crossroads: Faith and Community in the Emerging Midwest by Stephen T. Kissel

Reviewed by: America's Religious Crossroads: Faith and Community in the Emerging Midwest by Stephen T. Kissel Jon Butler Stephen T. Kissel, America's Religious Crossroads: Faith and Community in the Emerging Midwest. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2021. 268 pp. $28.00 (paper). Stephen Kissel's new study of religion in the Old Northwest does almost exactly what its title describes. It demonstrates how the new nation's rapidly multiplying Christian groups shaped community among the European immigrants and White and Black Americans who flooded into the fertile lands of the Northwest Territory from Ohio to the Mississippi River between 1790 and 1850. One might regret Kissel's decision not to include Jews and Judaism or expand his discussion of religion and community among American Indians uprooted by unrelenting European-American migration; their experiences likely would have extended Kissel's argument that community was as much the work of religious as of secular forces throughout the Old Northwest. Still, the breadth of Christian groups in the region and the depth of Kissel's research provide a vivid portrait of the fluid means through which Christian groups shaped community in this first "Midwest." Kissel argues that Christian churches' emphasis on family, vigorous print cultures, education, congregations functioning as community centers; their promotion of morals and civic order; and their political engagement shaped the region's culture far beyond the specific spiritual ethos that defined each group (105, 127). Kissel's observations may be standard fare in denominational histories, certainly those of the past half-century. Readers [End Page 106] of Timothy L. Smith's still-vibrant and urban-focused Revivalism and Social Reform (1957) will recognize several themes—education, the role of women, and religious demands for broad social change. But Kissel's success in documenting the range of these values among the Old Northwest's largely rural Christian groups reveals how denominations that seemed so different shared strong cultural values, whether Catholics or Presbyterians, African American or White Methodist Episcopalians, and Baptists or Mormons. Kissel begins with home and family. Before sanctuaries could be built, he notes, settlers "packed private homes to attend prayer meetings, baptisms, weddings, and funerals." The practice bolstered their public authority and reinforced women's roles in family and public life (18). Denominations flooded the region with religious newspapers, tracts, and Bibles, turning Cincinnati especially into a national powerhouse of religious printing. Sunday schools led by Protestant laywomen and Catholic nuns proliferated amidst the common religious focus on education. Having become sites of community gatherings in the earliest years of settlement, congregations became symbols of community commitment as they proliferated. Religious groups that defended "civil order and moral accountability" in their disciplinary proceedings advocated the same values across society at large (105). When denominations' voluntary societies lobbied for temperance and the abolition of slavery in state legislatures, they bespoke their commitment to an "active faith" (127). Not all this activity produced happiness. African Americans employed clergy and congregations to support literacy and education, defend escaped slaves, and demand slavery's abolition. But White Christians segregated them in the Old Northwest, buttressing their beliefs about African American racial inferiority with biblical support. American Indians remained of interest to White Christians largely as subjects of conversion, although some Christian figures strenuously supported ethical treatment of Indians by federal and state authorities. Worse, violence rooted in religious tension rolled across the Old Northwest. A Presbyterian minister led a mob assault against a Shaker community in Union Village, Ohio. Protestant mobs relished attacks on Catholics. Cincinnati Whites, likely churchgoers, destroyed the city's first African American congregational home not just once but three times. Schisms set congregants against each other, and Joseph Smith was not beyond destroying the printing press of a rival Mormon group in his exasperation with Mormon dissidents. State authorities and vigilantes targeted Mormons [End Page 107] and murdered Joseph Smith in Illinois in 1844, the most consequential murder of an American religious figure until Martin Luther King Jr. a century-plus later. America's Religious Crossroads reads smoothly, with clear, crisp sentences set in well-organized chapters. Kissel's research is thorough, deep, and remarkably broad, especially for a first book. He has probed obscure...

The initial accountant competency of final year accounting students

<span lang="EN-US">The development of information technology towards the 4th industrial revolution era brought changes to business processes in various industries, which will eventually have an impact on jobs in the accounting field. Accountants must be adaptable and competent to work as accounting professionals. Therefore, this study aimed to analyze the perceptions of final-year accounting students regarding knowledge competence, soft skills, information technology capabilities, and perceptions of readiness to enter the workforce. It also analyzed whether these competencies affect students' readiness to enter the workforce. In this study, the soft skills competencies are dimensions of intellectual, personal, organizational, internal, and communication competencies, and ethics in accounting. The data was collected using a questionnaire based Google Form given to several universities in Indonesia that were willing to distribute the forms to their accounting students. A descriptive method was used for data and confirmatory factor analysis and data processing was performed with the help of statistical package for the social sciences (SPSS) and partial least squares (SmartPLS) programs. The results showed that soft skills competencies had a higher score compared to accounting and information technology competencies. Furthermore, there was a significant influence between competence and work readiness of accounting students. This study provides information in the preparation of the accounting curriculum to consider various competencies following industry needs.</span>

Transformational family science: Praxis, possibility, and promise

AbstractWe advance a transformational family science as an engaged practice that may serve social justice and an anti‐racist project. Our companion paper proposed epistemic revelatory interventions through which family science may re‐imagine itself. We highlight pillars of a transformational family science that (a) build with epistemological and paradigmatic stances of peripherals; (b) infuse an ethic of reflexivity, accountability, and responsibility in the pursuit of knowledge claims, and their validation; and (c) engage a critical interrogation of difference and power relations and the disruption of systemic and structural inequalities in which they are aligned. Informed by epistemic praxes, transformational praxes include inquiry, knowledge production, theorizing about structured inequalities, power differentials, and differences bound to social categories and social identities, as well as pedagogy and professional training. Transformative applications that are compensatory, reformative, restorative, reparative, and transformative may be used in multiple ways to advance social justice, anti‐racism, and social transformations.

Teaching good sex: The limits of consent and the role of the virtues

Abstract I offer an account of sexual ethics, and thus of an education in sexual morality, that tries to make some sense of how a view of consent as central to those ethics might be combined with an education in certain virtues. I do so by exploring what some see as the shortcomings of a standard of consent, namely, how it can deal with instances of prima facie bad sex. I consider and reject various attempts to show that consensuality is sufficient for morally good sex. I then show how a needed supplement to the standard of consent can appeal to a broader view of why consent matters. This in turn connects to those personal and interpersonal virtues that the 2019 Department of Education guidance on relationships and sex education suggests should be taught. Finally, I provide an account of why more than consensuality is needed in the case of sex. In short, I insist on the critical importance of consent but supplement the standard of consent by an appeal to why consent matters and does so especially in the case of sex.

Response‐dependence and normativity

AbstractA non‐normative, response‐dependent view about morality can avoid metaphysical extravagance and explain why the extension of some non‐normative concepts can non‐accidentally match the extension of moral concepts. These features make it a plausible reductive account of moral properties. However, some philosophers believe that a response‐dependent account of morality must contain an irreducibly normative component. I argue that it is impossible to defend such a position while retaining the response‐dependent nature of morality in the ordinary sense. However, I believe that philosophers' motivation for engaging in such a philosophical project should be taken seriously. The underlying concern is that the plausibility of a response‐dependent view makes people's strong commitment to irreducible normativity a puzzle that requires an explanation. I explain why people systematically fail to give up this commitment without claiming that they rationally cannot give it up, which means a non‐normative response‐dependent view is immune from such a challenge.

Quality of Ethics Education in Producing Ethical Future Accountants: A Conceptual Paper

Quality of Ethics Education in Producing Ethical Future Accountants: A Conceptual Paper

A Stressed Present and a Scared Future: An Autoethnography of a Migrant Scholar in Finland

As an international doctoral researcher with a new-born daughter by my side, I reveal, in this autoethnography, the struggles to survive in the academic labor market of a non-Anglophone country, Finland. This personal narrative combined with sociological theory of Marxism brings a bottom-up perspective of international doctoral students. The purpose is to look inward and expose my vulnerable self that has been affected, moved and refracted by the academic neoliberalism causing alienation and my resistance. Explaining academic work as labor through vignettes, I present four cases of Marxist alienation that corelates with the alienation of early career researchers from the product (research output), process (doing research), species-essence (the passion of research) and other workers (academic colleagues). The findings of this autoethnography reiterates that academic labor is indeed in crisis. I recommend as researchers we should recognize this estrangement of academic labor and bring change through personal agency and ethical accountability.