Best Answer
Accounting ethics are incredibly important because accountants are entrusted with handling money for individuals, businesses, and other organizations. Unethical accountants can expose a business to financial risks and liabilities, even if their breaches of ethics do not amount to criminal behavior or involve intentional wrongdoing on the part of the accountant. Huge financial scandals, such as Enron, could not occur without ethical breaches on the part of the accountants because the financial structure of large organizations requires at least passive participation in wrongdoing by people at the accountant level. Accountant ethics are set up as an ethical framework with various components: integrity, objectivity, professional competence and due care, confidentiality, and professional behavior. A good thesis statement for your topic might focus on any one of these components.
Some suggestions for your thesis statement are:
Even if an accountant attempts to separate personal goals from professional ones, it seems inescapable that an accountant who has a personal interest in a business cannot maintain the requisite objectivity to act ethically as its accountant.
While the relationship between criminal activity and ethics may seem straightforward there are some circumstances where criminal behavior might not violate an accountant’s ethical rules.
Given the high-stakes involved in accounting, understanding what due care means and how it influences an accountant’s duty to a client, is critical to ensuring ethical behavior.
Confidentiality may be one of the most difficult components of accounting ethics to navigate; accountants who breach confidentiality could intentionally or unintentionally expose their clients to criminal or civil liability, but accountants who fail to expose wrongdoing that is revealed in a financial history may be placed in the role of an accessory or accomplice.
The guideline that accountants use professional behavior towards their clients is the least well-defined of all of the rules for ethical accounting, and, because it is so open to interpretation, it becomes the most dangerous rule for accountants in terms of professional ethics and responsibility.
