Examination of Practicing Industry Accountants and Accounting Students

Article Review and Critique
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Article Review and Critique
Summary of the Article
Krista Fiolleau and Stephen Kaplan, are the authors of the article, Recognizing Ethical Issues: An Examination of Practicing Industry Accountants and Accounting Students. The authors’ main motive is to explore the roles of accountants in economic systems, especially in facilitating decision making among stakeholders. According to the authors, accountants are bound to an organization as employees and have to adhere to the professional code of ethics. For that reason, accountants should consider both the ethical and economic implications of their decisions. Arguably, accountants in the practicing industry are involved in various practices and the process of making relevant decisions in an organization. The professionals acquire relevant skills in professional responsibilities. In contrast, accounting students may have relevant knowledge of their obligations, but have limited exposure to commercial business aspects. Practicing industry accountants have lower ethical sensitivity than the accounting students.
The authors conducted research to assess the ethical sensitivity of accounting students and practicing industry accountants. Substantially, ethical sensitivity is an individual’s recognition of the existence of an ethical situation or issue. Fiolleau & Kaplan (2017) posit that practicing industry accountants encounter different forms of business decisions that have numerous ethical implications on others. However, they might encounter different challenges since they lacked a chance of acquiring recent and reinforced education. Additionally, the authors argue that a company’s reward structure has a close connectedness to ethical implications and attainment of set objectives. Predominantly, ethical sensitivity is lower for the organizations that have a reward structure that is focused narrowly on financial goals as compared to organizations that have a broad structure of benefits. For this reason, it would be more appropriate for the top executives to increase awareness among the various stakeholders through incorporating non-financial objectives in their reward structures.
Article Critique
Fiolleau and Kaplan conducted a comprehensive research in writing the article about ethical issues among accounting students and practicing industry accountants. One of the concepts in the article is that accounting practice is significant in the global economic system, especially in facilitating the process of making decisions. For this reason, it would be imperative for accounting professionals to adhere to ethical and moral standards. The authors contend that unethical conduct might influence the failure of the economic system. However, the authors should have provided enough evidence to support their argument (Feil, Diehl, & Schuck, 2017). Besides, it would be appropriate to provide a comprehensive overview of ethical sensitivity among professionals.
The researchers in the article have realized that ethical issues or the actions of a professional might cause harm or benefit other stakeholders. Besides, they argue that ethical sensitivity is lower for the corporations that have a reward structure that focuses narrowly on the financial objectives than t...