Ethical Codes of Professional Accountants: Barriers and Opportunities
Oluwafemi Bola AINA
This study is centered on the barriers and opportunities of ethical codes of professional accountants, focusing on qualitative approach using an Electronic Questionnaire to retrieve response. The study concentrated on 206 professional accountants who are all members of the Institute of Chartered Accountants of Nigeria (ICAN). The research found that professional accountant are faced with various self-interest and self-review threats for their accounting and auditing engagement, using the ethical codes of conducts, that ethical codes bring internal pressure from corporate governance mechanisms, and that some ethical codes contradicts the law of the land making professional accountants caught in the web of substance over form. Also external pressure affect the ability of professional accountants to explore and develop further since there is that fear of getting the judgment wrong but ethics is lifelong and practical endeavor. Accountant’s ethical codes focuses on morality, ignoring the most crucial ingredient of ethical behaviour which is the personal responsibility, and accounting ethics brings internal pressure from the profession to follow codes of professional conduct even though, those ethics are not applicable, and that ethical behaviour forces accountants to confront personal relations in case of fraud. The study recommends that the level of awareness of the ethical standards needs to be steeped up, a campaign by ICAN and the need to monitor members’ adherence to good ethical standards, ethical codes which contradicts the law of the land.
Keywords: Ethical codes, professional accountants, ethical codes barriers, ethical codes opportunities