APES110 Code of Ethics for Professional Accountants

6 Pages1743 Words108 Views

Added on 2020-06-04

APES110 Code of Ethics for Professional Accountants

Added on 2020-06-04

BookmarkRelated Documents

APES110DemonstrateCode

APES110 Code of Ethics for Professional Accountants_1

Trust is a necessary requirement of every business as an organisation cannot survive for a longperiod of time if people do not have faith in them. Accounting profession is considered as the mainreason that people are aware of various activities that are performed in and out of a company. Thissystem helps in checking the accounts of a firm which reveal details about fairness in a business (Brooksand Dunn, 2011). This essay will discuss about the contribution of codes in developing trust amongpublic. Accounting Professional & Ethical Standards Board issued APES 110 Code of ethics forProfessional accountants. All the members of this institution have to follow rules that are mentioned inthis code. Most of them belong to Australia but some are running their business in other nations. Theyalso have to comply with norms unless there are provisions against these regulations in the countrywhere a company is operating. These ethics do not detract responsibility of an accounting professionalwhich is stated in law. They have to work according to auditing standards made by AUASB. Variousnorms and provisions present in this code are amended in regular interval of time because of thechanging business environment and complexity in businesses. Sometimes, people follow rules by the words written in a rule book, this concept do not run inAPES110 Code of ethics. Accountants have to understand the spirit of ethics instead of focusing onwords which is written in code. Companies feel that these morals are extra burden on their business, it isincreasing their cost of operation and creating various kind of hindrances in achieving short and longterm targets. But they fail to understand that these norms are the prime reason that trust of public inprivate sector is enhancing. These ethics cannot be imposed on every organisation as there is a certainrequirement for coming under the area of obligation but one can adopt these rules at an early stage ofbusiness. In this era, pubic want to buy products from an organisation who is known for their fair practiceand they develop their commodities without doing any harm to society. Volkswagen is an auto-mobilecompany who did unethical work by installing a software in their car which showed less amount ofpollution compared to actual one. Senior accountants of organisation knew about this scam but they didnot do anything about it. This blunder can be considered as the prime reason that accounts departmentis facing lot of trouble in bringing enterprise out of financial problems.If this act is analysed from a different angles than it can be easily found that they did not commitanything wrong. Section 140 of APES 110 Code of ethics clearly state that an employee can not revealany confidential information without taking permission of a specific authority. When they wereconducting this unethical practice, at that time they were not aware about its consequences because1

APES110 Code of Ethics for Professional Accountants_2

they had committed same mistake before 3 or 4 decade and they were charged with small amount offine (Duska, Duska and Ragatz, 2011).Enron Corporation was an American energy company, JeffreySkilling was president of this firm who made a team which helped him in hiding billions of dollars byusing accounting loopholes and poor financial reporting. CFO and other key people of organisationmislead board of directors as well as audit committee. They asked them to ignore small issues becausethey do not make any huge impact on performance of company. This unethical act results in bankruptcyof Enron corporation and most of their executives went to jail for this wrongdoing. If company is doingsomething illegal and unethical than accounting professional has to depicts this in their report. APES 110codes says that the spirit of rules is more important than words. (Sources: Comparing the Codes of Ethics and Conduct, 2017)Laws made by government generally talk about what is legal or illegal. They do not coverimportant elements like ethics which is getting popular in today's world. Organisation hire companysecretary and a team of lawyers who have better understand of the regulation which is present inbusiness environment. But they do not have much knowledge about moral values which is alsoimportant in terms of fair trading. In present time, number of financial scandals are increasing which isbreaking the trust against accounting professionals (Klimek and Wenell, 2011). They were supposed to2Illustration 1: Codes of Ethics and Conduct

APES110 Code of Ethics for Professional Accountants_3

End of preview

Want to access all the pages? Upload your documents or become a member.

ACC305 Auditing Assignment (Solved)

|2041

|154

APES 110: Contribution towards Trust Building in Accounting Profession

|1655

|326

3102AFE: Auditing Assignment

|1150

|54

Ethics and Governance: Application of Theories, Ethical Decision-Making Model, and APES 110

|10

|3024

|73

Individual assignment on Boeing Company 2022

|726

|22

Assignment: Ethics Reporting System

|30

|1133

|56

APES110 Code of Ethics for Professional Accountants