Maintaining high ethical standards is imperative to uphold the integrity of decisions that are being made on a daily basis. Every organization makes ethical decisions every day. Accounting professionals handle sensitive information on a daily basis which requires adequate knowledge of the code of ethics for professional accountants in order to help guide their decision making. All accountants are required to follow the code of ethics, but some may not just to make it easier on themselves or because they were told not to. Not maintaining a high ethical standard in the accounting profession can lead to wide reaching negative consequences to those that are entrusting their financial wellbeing to the accounting decisions being made for them. It …show more content…
Accounting students become familiar with the ethical obligations in their accounting careers because of the codes of professional conduct, but ethical courses in the accounting curriculum teach students how to solve the ethical dilemmas they will encounter (Martinov-Bennie & Mladenovic, 2015). There is a significant difference between knowing what the ethical dilemmas are and how to actually handle the dilemma. Seeing as accountants could encounter ethical situations on a daily basis in their accounting career, students should be taught ethics so they can handle the dilemmas adequately (Loeb, …show more content…
Consequences could be almost painless, such as getting fired from the job. The more severe crimes, such as embezzlement or accounting fraud, most likely will result with more severe consequences. Accountants who make an unethical decision to embezzle money or help an executive by manipulating numbers more than likely will result in jail time, having to pay a fine, and/or having their accounting license suspended or taken away completely. For example, in 2006 Kaveh Niakan was sentenced to three years in jail and had to pay $300,000 for the fraud he committed in the company CIT (Michelman, Gorman, & Trompeter, 2011). Accounting fraud is a crime that the law does not take