Accounting education and the developement of ethical maturity - Essay Example

One has to wonder if accounting firms whose parent company has a business relationship with a company they are auditing have lost the true meaning of independence when conducting those audits. The current trend toward corporate acquisitions of CPA firms poses potential threats to the autonomy and ethical standards of public accounting professionals. This recent consolidation movement suggests that for the first time a significant number of public accounting professionals are subject to the supervision and control of nonprofessionals.

(Shafer, Lowe and Fogarty 2002: 109) The question becomes are professional charted accountants prepared to handle these areas of ethical behaviour, have they been sufficiently trained to do so? In this new millennium even the practice of business has undergone drastic changes of focus that need to be addressed by the educational model. The focus of this research will be to analyse the old and new models and fathom what current education has done to address this situation. On of the difficulties in this area is that research in accounting ethics, as previously noted may not be getting the equal treatment it deserves in the educational setting.

There is evidence in the research supporting the theory that ethics in academia is not perceived to be an important area to the majority of accounting educators. Therefore ethics in education is in jeopardy of not receiving the necessary level of effort and interest needed for it to become a primary pillar in the academic accounting community. It has been noted that, ‘… accounting ethics research has traditionally been undervalued due to the use of a different research methodology and its relatively recent entry as an appropriate topic for accounting researchers.

’ (Bernardi 2004: 145) The first strategy is to view ethics not as a subfield of