Covid-19 poses new ethical challenges for professional accountants

ACCA (the Association of Chartered Certified Accountants) has launched its white paper ‘Ethics in a Covid-19 world’ exploring the role of ethics against the backdrop of the pandemic. This is part of ACCA’s focus on how we can, globally, rethink business for a sustainable recovery.

The Covid-19 pandemic has led to the most challenging environment any of us have experienced in modern times. And while businesses recover, professional accountants are faced with new and intense ethical dilemmas, which require them to exercise all their professional expertise and moral judgement.

The paper reveals one in five respondents has directly or indirectly, via a work colleague, encountered a situation where as a result of Covid-19, ethics were at risk of compromise. Among those who had experienced such compromise, a quarter of issues related to the use of technology.

The report author, Narayanan Vaidyanathan, ACCA’s head of business futures says: ‘For accountancy and finance professionals, ethics has always been at the core of the profession but in times of pressure, it is all the more important. Ethics isn’t a new agenda for accountants, but Covid-19 certainly has created new challenges, which can create the risk of compromise to ethical behaviour.

‘While everyone is responsible for ethics, leaders have a key role to play because tone from the top really matters. Organisations look to their leaders to demonstrate authentically ethical, values-based leadership and transparency – doing so creates a cascading positive effect through the organisation.’

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