¶ … slew of accounting scandals including Enron can be attributed to a loss of moral reasoning and professional moral judgment. As with any profession, accountants should be held to rigorous moral standards of conduct. Accounting advice and decisions are taken seriously by the companies they serve and therefore those decisions should be made with as sound and just a moral reasoning as possible. Higher education is the primary means by which accountants formulate their professional ethical codes of conduct and therefore ethics should be a fundamental feature of the professional accounting training curriculum. However, students in accounting programs score lower than their counterparts in other professional courses on moral aptitude tests such as the Ethical Dilemma Instrument (EDI).

The Transcendaental Meditation (TM) method is proposed as a means to teach moral reasoning to accounting students without requiring any change in course curricular content. Students in China will be taught the TM procedure, which requires a twenty-minute meditation twice per day. It is hypothesized that regular TM practice will bolster ethical decision-making and ethical reasoning, especially as those skills relate to the accounting profession. Moreover, TM should have a measurable effect on personal value systems, measured by the Rokeach Value Survey (RVS). Moral judgment will be measured by the Define Issue Test (DIT) and the Socialmoral Refection Measurement- Short Form.

If, as hypothesized, TM creates a measurable effect on personal value systems and moral judgment in the population sample of accounting students, then this research has profound implications for the profession including the following. First, the effects of TM would improve the caliber of practice and therefore improve the reputation of the accounting profession. Second, educators could incorporate ethical discourse into accounting school curriculum and/or incorporate TM practice to accomplish the same goals. It is believed that an improvement in moral and ethical judgment will have a positive impact on the accounting profession and on the clients it serves.