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In the shadow of Wall Street crime and savings and loan failures, the role of ethics in the U.S. business environment has come under greater scrutiny. Accounting professionals, often the bulwark of ethical conduct, have not been immune from criticism.
Most notably, CPAs have been the subject of numerous ethical investigations, primarily due to their audit function. Management accountants and CMAs have received less public attention. Yet, their unique positioning as key components of management teams may place them in a greater number of ethical conflicts than CPAs in public practice. Moreover, all members of the Institute of Management Accountants are required to follow the IMA's standards of ethical conduct in addition to any general or specific corporate code.
Even though much has been written about ethics and appropriate ethical conduct, some persons may yet be unclear concerning when and if their conduct is being ethically compromised.
BEING ETHICAL
We conducted a mail survey in the fall of 1990 to determine how people perceive the behavior of management accountants in eight cases containing ethical dilemmas. Comparison groups included 43 randomly selected CMAs from companies across the United States, 72 randomly selected professors specializing in managerial accounting representing universities nationwide, and 203 senior-level business and nonbusiness majors from one midwestern state university.
Our results suggest that not everyone agrees concerning what constitutes unethical behavior. Nor was there complete agreement regarding how to educate students anticipating a career in management accounting about the importance of good ethical conduct in the workplace. All groups did agree, however, that an ethics crisis exists in American business and that increased emphasis should be placed on ethics education.
In responding to the survey, the participants were asked to rate the acceptability of the management accountant's behavior in each case using a seven-point rating scale. If they felt that the accountant's ethical behavior was totally unacceptable, a score of one would be assigned to the case. If the ethical behavior was...