Ethical attitudes of Romanian accountants: evidence from practitioners

The accounting profession, by its nature of public certification, should act in line with ethics and morality. Despite the theory that we all know, various financial failures of big companies are documented in the literature every year. Despite the fact that the accounting profession emphasises the importance of ethics and morality, a 'minima moralia' in the business world is needed more than ever. In this study accounting professionals were asked to assess in terms of ethical acceptance a large variety of questionable scenarios and factors influencing the ethical decision making. In this regard respondents were less-accepting of 11 of 26 vignettes; where the least accepted where the scenarios involving physical harm compared to scenarios violating the law. In terms of assessing the factors influencing the ethical decision making, most of the respondents rated the professional and regulation norms together with supervisory behaviour influence and peer group norms. Factors like religion values, cultural norms or personal standards and personal needs were ranked as having the least influence on the ethical decision making. Limits of the paper are presented and also the scope for future research.