DILEMMA AND ETHICS IN ACCOUNTING
Millions of people have seen a decline in their quality of life during the past few years as a result of financial problems in the United States and other countries.
It is well known that people facing financial troubles, or even just the threat of facing them, will occasionally look for innovative, unethical, or illegal ways to make ends meet.
A client’s insistence that an accountant participates in unethical behavior is one temptation that accountants must be prepared to withstand.
We’ll examine some of the unethical demands made on accountants in this article.
Experiment with numbers
One of the most typical unethical demands made by clients to their accountants involves allowing them to tamper with the books in order to falsify a person’s or company’s overall financial picture.
An accountant may face a particularly challenging choice in response to this request: risk losing the client or comply with the unethical request.
Of course, acting morally is always the best course of action, even if it results in losing a crucial client.
Blindly Ignore –
Another frequent request that is unethical is to demand that an account just ignore any unethical or unlawful accounting or business activities.
Once more, a scenario like this could put the accountant in a challenging lose-lose predicament.
However, because accountability and honesty are two of the fundamental principles of the accounting profession, most accountants will be aware of what is proper and wrong action to do in such circumstances and must carry out the moral course of action.
Give a terrible idea the seal of approval – Sometimes a party will ask for an accountant’s opinion to persuade another party that a specific financial course of action is prudent.
The accountant should never, as in the other situations, merely concur to provide their seal of approval to a financial transaction if they are not confident that the course of action is financially healthy.