Ethical Knowledge, Ethical Decision: A Gap Of Ethical Behavior Development

Abstract

The central standing-point of accounting professional in most ethical violation scandals of corporate collapse has led public to question about standard of ethical behavior in this profession. Although accountant has been introduced ethical standard –code of conduct along their study in university, ethical violations in business and accounting keep happening persistently and massively. To restore public’s trust to accounting profession, an insight of future accountant’s behavior should be obtained. The current research aims to investigate whether future accountant understands and implements code of conduct in the ethical dilemma situation of accounting professional works. Using purposive sampling, data was collected by survey method. Totally, 572 undergraduate accounting students from six universities, located in three provinces of Indonesia have participated in answering a closedended questionnaire. The result of statistical test using Pair-T test has provided empirical evidence that future accountants have a high level of ethical knowledge, that indicate their well understanding of code of conduct in accounting profession. However, their ability to implement ethical knowledge to solve problem in ethical dilemma situation is only in moderate level. This empirical finding indicates that a gap exists in ethical development process, thus ethical knowledge does not develop to ethical behavior. The current research produces an important note for accounting academician that it is an urgent to rethinking and redesign ethics subject in accounting department. A sustainable innovation of method to internalize code of conduct to future accountant in the emerging digital era is a must be.