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Ethical Standards for Management Accountants Essay

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Ethical Standards for Management Accountants

Ethics in any industry is important, but for Accounting professionals and those in need of their services, it is a particularly stressed element. Information provided by accountants is used to make major decisions, including investing, downsizing, expanding, etc, so accountants are expected to be competent, reliable, and have a high degree of professional integrity. Because of these high expectations, the professional accountancy industry, like many other professions, has adopted professional codes of ethics (Woelfel, 1986). These ethical codes go above and beyond the requirements for state or federal laws and regulations. There are several professional organizations within the …show more content…

According to Daniel F. Dooley (2008), a member of the Commercial Fraud Taskforce, financial fraud with private middle-market companies is on the rise. In fact, Mr. Dooley believes that he has seen more instances of fraud in the past two years than in the previous ten. He notes seven areas in which financial fraud has increased over the past few years:

• Borrowing Base Calculations for an Asset Based Loan

• Slow Processing of Accounts Receivable

• Raw Material and Components are being Supplied by Customers

• Short Payment of Accounts Receivable by Major Customers

• Untimely Clearing of Checks Paying “Customer” Contras

• Change in Inventory Valuation

• Financial Statements Not Consolidated using Accounting Software

On April 21, 2001, Lee Farkas, the former chairman of a private mortgage lending company, Taylor, Bean, & Whitaker (TBW), was convicted for his role in a more than $2.9 billion fraud scheme (Schoenberg, 2011). This action contributed to the failures of Colonial Bank, one of the 25 largest banks in the United States, and TBW, one of the largest privately held mortgage lending companies in the United States. According to court documents and evidence presented at the trial, Farkas and his co-conspirators engaged in a scheme that misappropriated more than $1.4 billion from Colonial Bank’s Mortgage Warehouse Lending division and

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