Professional Documents
Culture Documents
ESR L6 Student
ESR L6 Student
LMS briefing for lockdown browser do not be late for class and bring your
laptop.
An opinion poll carried out by Gallup in 2005 asking the public in the US to rank
professions on a 5 point scale like ours, showed only 6 out of 21 professions were
considered to have high or very high ethical standards:
1. 82% 9. 39%
2. 67%
3. 65%
4. 64%
5. 61% 28%
6. 54% 7%
[Taken from the book Accounting and Business Ethics by Ken McPhail and Diane
Walters, Routledge, 2009]
Activity #1:
1. Write a brief description of your image of the good accountant.
From this documentary, what do you think are the possible contributors of
Enrons financial scandal?
Most people are the product of the context they find themselves in. They tend
to look up and look around, and they do what others around them do or
expect them to do.
[Taken from Managing to be ethical: debunking five business ethics myths by Linda
Trevino and Michael Brown (one of your reading for last lecture)]
The Public Interest and Self Interest (taken from Accounting and Business Ethics
by McPhail & Walters)
The accounting profession does claim to be operating in the interests of the public.
Accountings Big Four need more competition (Financial Times, 24 August 2016)
https://www.ft.com/content/7f4b8b8e-69e2-11e6-ae5b-a7cc5dd5a28c
In August last year, in Florida, there was a case brought by the trustee of a failed US
mortgage lender, Taylor, Bean & Whitaker (TBW) against PwC. The plaintiff was
Low LC ESR Term 2 Jan Apr 17 3
seeking $5.5 billion in damages from PwC for failing to detect a massive fraud
perpetrated by TBWs own executives in cahoots with another lender, Colonial Bank,
which collapsed in 2009.
While the case is complex, it raises familiar questions for the accounting profession
one that stretch back at least as far back as the Enron fraud about 15 years ago.
What duties should auditors have placed on them for rooting out bad behaviours?
How can this oligopolistic industry be overhauled to prevent firms slipping into
complicity with their clients?
And there are also calls to break up the Big Four Accounting Firms.
Oligarchs of the Treasure Islands is an article that claimed that the Big Four are the
masterminds of multinational tax avoidance.
Although presenting as the guardians of commerce they are unregulated and
unaccountable; they have infiltrated governments at every level and should be
broken up.
(http://www.michaelwest.com.au/oligarchs-of-the-treasure-islands/)
Do you think that a Code of Conduct and Ethics can prevent unethical
behaviors?
Question: How can a company protect itself against this?