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Accountability
When do we hold the accountants accountable?
In the wake of accounting scandals at Enron and WorldCom, the question arose: how to hold accountants accountable, when it is they who are supposed to be the objective determinants of a firm's financial ethics? Merely having to 'sign off' on an audit was not enough to ensure that the accountants at firms as reputable as Arthur Anderson adhered to GAAP (Chartier 2002). The need for ethical accounting is vital to ensure that companies act with all due transparency: "Accounting fraud usually occurs when a company overstates its assets or revenue, or understates its liabilities and expenses. Companies feel the pressure to commit such acts because the market reaction can be harsh for companies if their revenue projections do not match actual earnings. In addition, senior corporate officials' compensation packages may be directly tied to hitting targeted earnings. Thus, this creates an insatiable need to ensure that the corporate earnings projections are precisely...
When senior management's salaries are yoked to the financial performance of the firm, this, statistically speaking, increases the likelihood of fraud. Financial statement fraud cases caused more than $4 million dollars in losses in 2012 (Tinker 2011). Additionally, private companies are not governed by the provisions of Sarbanes-Oxley or the standards of the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (PCAOB) so some companies are even less 'accountable' for potential abuses than others.
For companies that are affected by SOX, "which establishes corporate and criminal fraud accountability for certain willful violations" of accountants, "third-party claims may require evidence of fact-specific conduct and relationships between the third party and the accountant or auditor" (Smith 2002). Examples…
References
Chartier, John. (2002). Accounting fraud rising. CNN. Retrieved:
http://money.cnn.com/2002/01/11/companies/acct_scandals/
Smith, Colleen Duffy. (2003). Holding the accountants accountable. Trial. Retrieved:
http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1G1-115491966.html
Association for Financial Professionals. Retrieved:http://www.afponline.org/pub/res/news/Who_is_Responsible__Holding_the_Accountants_Accountable.html
232). In the final purpose of accountability, where the goal is to enhance the learning capacity and effectiveness of the executive branch, we should realize that what needs to happen in this situation is that public authorities act on feedback about their own performance (Deutsch, 1963; Luhmann, 1966; Behn, 2001 as cited in Bovens et al., 2008). Thus, a good accountability mechanism, from this angle, is one that illustrates how
Corporate Accountability The corporate scandals of the last fifteen years have brought the issue of corporate accountability to new light, adopting at times a center-stage discussion. When the Bernie Madoff scandal broke, many professionals turned to the accounting department at Madoff Securities along with the auditors who had audited the firm before. Madoff was the one who admitted to stealing $50 billion dollars during the decades that his firm was
Zhang was employed as a qualified accountant in a small accounting practice. Following an investigation, the disciplinary committee of the professional body to which Sam belonged found that he provided misleading sets of financial statements at the request of clients on several occasions, in return for substantial payments. This was done without the knowledge of his employer. Trust is an important part of the accounting profession. Accountants have an ethical
Information System holds in Accounting Industry's future? Looking through the glass and estimating what the future holds for any individual or profession is always a difficult exercise as the trends in any business or profession may change and so the path of development. It is better to look at the experience of some companies whose systems have changed over the past few years and thus try to estimate what is
However, they have also changed the face of the accounting profession in a way that will affect the education and conduct of accountants in the future. In the future, the accountant will have to do more than to balance the books. In order to understand the potential educational requirements for accountants in the future, we will examine how they have changed historically and then apply the changes that have
This leads to the inability to compare financial statements reliably with each other (Seay & Ford, 2010). A second concern is that the income statement will reflect increased volatility due to fair market writeups or writedowns. The third concern is the inconsistency in valuing some assets and liabilities at the current exit price. The fourth concern is whether price reflects the intrinsic value of the asset. It is suspected