Accounting Education and Moral Competency of Accounting Students in Federal Polytechnic Ilaro, Ogun State, Nigeria

Moral competence serves as the bedrock of the accounting profession. This is critical for sustaining the profession's reputation and legitimacy. Due to the abundance of accounting scandals around the world during the past 20 years, its reputation and credibility have come under serious criticism. It was against this backdrop that this study examined the impact of accounting education on the moral competencies of accounting students enrolled at the Federal Polytechnic Ilaro, Ogun State. The study adopted a cross-sectional survey research design based on the Deontology theory whereby open-ended ethical scenario-based questionnaire were distributed to 175 HND 2 accounting students in order to collect information on their perceptions of accounting education at the Polytechnic in order to measure their moral competencies. Cronbach alpha of 0.81 for both questionnaires demonstrated their reliability as data collection instruments. Data on accounting education was also collected through a close-ended questionnaire survey of 12 accounting lecturers at the Polytechnic. Descriptive statistics was employed to analyse the demographic data of the respondents while multiple regression analysis was used to test the study's hypotheses. The ANOVA result for each hypothesis indicates sig.= .002b, .022b, .003b, .002b, .002b. The study found that accounting education had a considerable influence on accounting students' moral competencies in terms of their honesty, objectivity, competence, confidentiality and professional behavior. The study concluded that tertiary-level accounting education is a viable strategy to develop a new generation of morally competent accountants, and that the government should therefore focus more on training of tertiary-level accounting education.