Jean and Praneel are Senior Auditors at PWCC Charted Accountants (PWCC). Both started employment at PWCC five years ago as Graduate Accountants. Their job performances are extremely overwhelming and within one year of employment were promoted as Auditors. They are in their current position for the past twenty-six months. They do have mutual respect, however are highly competitive. Last year, Jean married Anna and bought a house and a car via a bank loan. On the contrary, Praneel is single with no commitments. There is now a vacancy for an Audit Supervisor due to the sudden resignation of Ahmed who was holding this post for the past thirteen years.

Both, Jean and Praneel are potential candidates for promotion and that they are aware that there is only one Audit Supervisor position available in the organisation. A week ago, Jean replace Praneel on the audit of Fiji Sugar Limited (FSL). The mere reason for replacing Praneel was that another audit assignment came with a long-standing client of PWCC which Praneel was handling and the audit client requested for Praneel to take responsibility for this audit assignment.

While Jean was going through the current work on FSL’s audit he noticed that the client called the Audit Manager – Thomas and mentioned that they were not impressed with Praneel and he has not sorted a number of issues within the audit and was arriving at work late. These comments were not discussed by Thomas to either Jean or Praneel.

However, after going through the audit work that Praneel has completed, Jean realised that Praneel had done an excellent job and had identified a number of audit issues that he thinks that he may have missed. Jean also suspects that Praneel and the client had a personality conflict and that the client has misled Thomas.

Jean realises that he can finish off the audit of FSL, resolve the issues the client has highlighted and obtain a good review from the audit assignment, which will help him in the promotion stakes. He also knows that Thomas is unlikely to bring the client’s unsupported allegations to Praneel’s attention.

Required:

Based on the information provided, discuss how Jean will respond under each of the three main categories of the ethical theory? Make appropriate assumptions in each of the categories where necessary.