Ethical Rights and Obligations From the Perspective of Accountants and Auditors

Please prepare a response to the following post:

Distinguish between ethical rights and obligations from the perspective of accountants and auditors. Give 3 reasons to support your answers.

Ethical rights and obligations sound like they could be used interchangeably, however they are both quite different. When looking through the perspective of accountants, ethical rights have more to do with, well, ethics! For example, ethically, I am responsible for ensuring that I have integrity, that I act objectively, and that I act in due care. For me, I interpret that as ensuring that I am honest, upfront, and transparent when I am doing my job. I am obligated to alert the powers-that-be if I find fraudulent activity. I am also obligated to protect the company’s assets, and through my job, this is where my ethics come in. If I am not ethical, then I would not necessarily feel obligated to protect the company’s assets, I would be only concerned with my own wants.

Consider the ethical principle of praising the good and ignoring the bad. Is this a good way to foster ethical behavior? Give 2 reasons to support your argument.

I do not believe that praising the good and ignoring the bad is a good way to foster ethical behavior. The bad is typically the part that people want to know about. They want to know how we act and what we do in those situations. For me, if I saw that everything was only ‘good’ that would actually cause me concern because I would think, what are they not telling me? To foster ethical behavior, there should be constant communication and discussions about different situations, and how to approach them. I appreciate those because ethics really deal with the gray area. I appreciated the example in the book where it spoke about whether a driver of a vehicle, to avoid a child in the road, goes right into more children, or crosses the double line and head on into opposite traffic. This is something that we will all be faced with at some point, obviously not the exact same situation, but where we have to make a choice on the lesser of two evils. I either risk hitting a child/children, or I can hit an oncoming vehicle.