A survey shows that a surprisingly high number of audit professionals face ethical challenges in Asia.
Working in a finance department at a bank has never been easy.
You frequently start as part of a team trawling the murky depths of consolidated and unconsolidated ledger entries, thanklessly tallying credits and debits into a coherent whole for an internal management report, an external income statement, or maybe a balance sheet.
Stiff Winds of Resistance
You might then choose the path of a policy specialist, and end up working at a large, global institution. But it doesn’t get much better - and you find yourself often exposed to the stiff winds of resistance from the lack of understanding related to a new accounting standard - or incisive regulatory queries about past practice.
But although it has never been easy, a survey by the Association of Chartered Certified Accountants (ACCA) published Tuesday shows that something else may be afoot given the «troubling rise» in lapses and scandals in the business community in recent years.
Harder to Resolve
As part of that, it revealed that almost two-thirds of accountants based in Asia Pacific had indicated that ethical dilemmas had become harder to resolve in the past three years.
But the problem was not isolated to the region alone as, internationally, more than half of all accountants surveyed had witnessed unethical behavior in their career while almost a quarter had been asked to do something unscrupulous in the past three years.
Familiar Pain Points
The pain points here in the region were familiar ones to anyone who has spent any time working in the financial services sector.
That included the pressure to manipulate accounts as well as questions of audit quality due to time and resource constraints, and the prevalence of cultural factors such as an unwillingness to challenge authority.
The Challenge of AI
An interesting point that the survey recorded was that the challenges, particularly the ethical ones, were becoming more complex.
They were compounded by globalization, regulatory demands, and technological advancements, such as that posed by AI, something finews.asia has reported on previously.
«As businesses expand their operations across diminishing borders, managing ethical standards in different regions is becoming increasingly intricate. Our results demonstrate that each region presents its own set of ethical challenges, influenced by cultural, legal, and economic factors,» the ACCA wrote.
The survey received over 1,100 responses from 135 countries. Almost 40 percent of participants came from Western Europe, 19 percent from Africa, and 17 percent from the Asia Pacific region.
Malaysia led regional inputs with 55 responses, followed by China (41), Pakistan (33), and Singapore (30). 59 percent of responses were male and were evenly balanced between small practices (less than 10 people) to large organizations (more than 10,000 employees).
The author of the survey is Sarah Lane, Head of Ethics and Assurance in ACCA’s Policy and Insights team.
