Why young people no longer trust in the honesty of accountants
Recent accounting scandals have placed the issue of ethics squarely on the table: what impact have bloated balance-sheets, managers devoid of moral scruples and swindled investors had on the public perception of professionals in business administration? Is the the profession still perceived as able to protect and serve the public interest?
To such questions, which are vital for the survival of the profession itself, some answers come from a recent study conducted through a questionnaire completed by over 1,700 university students and professional accountants.
At first glance, the association between 'accountants' and 'corruption' is marginal among interviewees (3% of the sample). Scandals seem not to have dragged the reputation of the profession into the mud. Is all well, then? Honor is preserved and accountants are off the hook?
A more attentive analysis highlights the fact that most opinions are close to neutrality (on a scale from 1 to 5, 3 is the indifference point and the mean of the sample is 3.3) and that opinions vary for subsets of the sample with respect to the accountants' perceived integrity. For instance, women's answers, when compared to men's, give a more positive image of the profession, while older people tend to have a more favorable perception than younger people.
Also, those who have studied accounting in high school are more sensitive to the ethical issue that those have studied accounting in college. Such evidence stresses the need to address the issue of professional ethics in a more explicit fashion, with the aim of providing tools to recognize morally ambiguous situations and act accordingly. Lastly, those who have longer experience working in accounting have a less favorable opinion of the profession compared to those who have just started working in business administration. Is this a matter of hands-on experience? Anyway, the signal is that ethics should the object of educational emphasis and continuous retraining.
The study also looked into actual spheres of behavior that are associated with the abstract notion of ethics. At the aggregate level of the sample, these aspects not surprisingly include respect of the law, confidentiality and commitment to work. There is however a perception gap among those who are practitioners and those who are not. For instance, for those who work for auditing consultancies, to be ethical means respecting the law and being honest. However those who do not practice and do not have the intention of practicing accounting have a larger view of what it means to be ethical, adding personal traits that go beyond a generic call for the respect of norms.
What's being questioned is the idea of professionalism and correctness linked to the command of technical and specialist skills, as people underline the necessity of certain soft skills, such as team-building and the ability to share information and knowledge, to be put at the service of the rest of society.