The Impact of Ethics on the Behaviour of Accounting Practitioners

Following the various financial scandals, the nobility of accounting as a discipline has been called into question. Indeed, these various events have tainted the political and economic sphere on an international scale. Thus, the subject of ethics is now a topical issue. It should be noted that ethics can be defined as a systematic and continuous analysis to verify whether the human conduct adopted, notwithstanding the sector of activity, meets the criteria of morality. In particular, it should be noted that, according to the academician Jean Jacques Nilles, ethics is nowadays a professional competence. Thus, having observed that some accounting practitioners take advantage of their discretionary powers to “embellish” reality by adopting unethical behaviour, the subject of ethics has become self-evident. In this article, we will analyse, based on a rigorous review of the accounting literature, how the practitioner’s level of ethics conditions their behaviour. By referring to two types of determinants, individual and organisational, we will show how the behaviour of the accounting practitioner is dependent on these determinants.