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American Accounting Association2006 Midwest Region MeetingMarch 30 – April 1
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Friday, March 31, 4:00 p.m. to 5:40 p.m.
Concurrent session 4F - Teaching and Thinking about Ethics (Teaching and Curriculum, Public Interest)Title: Ethical Decision Making in Principles of Accounting: Moving Students from Simply Following the Rules toward Making Ethical Choices
Jeanne M. David
University of Detroit MercyPatrick T. Wirtz
University of Detroit MercyABSTRACT: As accounting educators, we are responsible for educating the next generation of accounting professionals. With all the recent publicity, negative as much of it has been, surrounding the profession, we should strive to ensure that those leaving our institutions will bring with them the highest ethical and moral standards. Only in striving for this, can we move toward reestablishing the dignity once afforded to our profession.
First, the authors discuss some of the materials available for use in the classroom with accounting and business students. The main focus is on the principles or introductory level of accounting and is applicable for all students in the class, but especially so for accounting majors. If early accounting classes minimize the ethical focus or treat the subject with a tunnel-vision approach, accounting students will tend to follow this thinking in later classes and beyond. The instructor should challenge them to think out of the box, and not settle on overly simplified responses to "ethical problems" presented to students in their texts. Next, the authors discuss a methodology for furthering the ethical issues and problems that are presented in the introductory level accounting texts. By drawing on a variety of levels of ethical decision making, students are encouraged to look deeper and further into the problem. The authors give an overview of various "levels" of ethical analysis, from simply considering the legality of an issue, considering compliance with generally accepted accounting principles, to issues of professionalism, social responsibility, and stakeholder models. Finally, these are used as a basis for expanding on sample textbook problems.
Ethics is far more than just walking that straight line and not crossing over to the wrong side. Ethics is far more than simply keeping things legal and following GAAP or GAAS as the case may be. The instructor should challenge their students to think out of the box, and not settle on overly simplified responses to "ethical problems" presented to students in their texts.