Maintaining ethical standards is one of the biggest challenges facing accountants. Maintaining our objectivity and independence is crucial if we expect the public to trust accountants. Some of the biggest areas of ethical challenges as we perform our job as accountants are:

Pressure from Management to make deadlines, to be profitable, to make the client look good, etc

Accountant as Whistleblower discovering accounting violations

Effect of Greed putting personal finance goals over professional responsibilities

Omission of Financial Records asked to omit or leave out information to make business look better

Discuss (1) how these ethical failures are impacting the accounting industry (be specific), and (2) how you plan to prepare yourself when faced with these types of challenges in the workforce. Give examples if you have seen this behavior personally or use a current event in your discussion.

For each discussion topic, each member should have a minimum of 1 individual response (200 words) to the overarching question(s) and 2 individual postings for feedback (50 words) to other class members comments. The deadlines for discussion postings and replies will be posted online. You must ensure that you meet the deadlines for all of the required discussion postings. If there is nothing submitted, there will be no credit given for the posting.