PROFESSIONAL ETHICS AND ACCOUNTING PROFESSION: EMPIRICALEVIDENCE FROM THE BIG FOUR AUDIT FIRMS IN NIGERIA

Abstract

The accounting profession being associated with unethical business practices has brought a
lot of attention to public confidence in the profession with respect to upholding ethical
standards. The study therefore, examined professional ethics and accounting profession. The
adopted a survey research design and data were randomly collected from two hundred (200)
respondents across the Big 4 accounting firms (PriceWaterhouseCoopers, Deloitte, KPMG,
and EY) in Nigeria. The reliability of the instrument was tested with Cronbach’s Alpha Test,
Multiple Regression Analysis, Canonical Correlation Analysis, and Analyses of Variance
were used by the study to analyzed the data. The result showed that ethical threats (β = -.603,
P<.01), confidentiality (β =.265, P<.05), and professional competence and due care (β
=.325, P<.01), thus suggesting that except professional behaviour (β =.001, P>.05), jointly
and independently predicted financial reporting and auditing quality. The study concludes
that professional ethics has significant effect on the accounting profession in Nigeria and
recommended among others that accountants should avoid inappropriate relationships that
would influence their professional judgment in practice.