In order to be a professional accountant, one needs ethics. Throughout history, accounting has partially reflected morals practice in the world of business. A successful accounting profession requires ethical knowledge and skills. The knowledge and skills helps the accountant to differentiate between right and wrong and build a personal fortitude to make the right decisions.
By keeping in mind ethical factors, accountants can easily manifest peer pressure. Accountants who practice high ethical standards, never focus on short term goals like keeping up revenue goals or satisfying investors, instead, they focus on the long term goals. This helps the company because successful companies manage for the long term instead for the short term.
Ethical behavior forces to confront personal relations in case of fraud. Concentrating on ethical factors makes the accountants to build an inner strength which forces them to make an ethical decision of not ignoring the fraud. Accountants, whose first priority is ethics, can easily deal with ethical dilemmas, areas that are not black and white. They feel comfortable dealing with grey areas. They never under represent their time for completing a job. They can easily go along with the crowd or do what their managers tell them to do, by never compromising with ethical factors.
Accounting students should understand that “ethics are not optional” because they equip them with behavioral patterns of good moral decisions. This helps them in making reasoned sound decisions in their future. Ethics build in them cognitive moral reasoning skills so that they can easily come to know how to get around the system or how to hear other people but rather to defend themselves against such underhandedness in future.
Business & Professional Ethics for Directors, Executives, & Accountants, 4e, Brooks - 2007 Thomson South-Western