Professional Responsibility and Ethics for Accountants

This module helps you become familiar with the course, your instructor and your classmates, and the learning environment. This orientation will also help you obtain the technical skills required to navigate and be successful in this course.

This module is an introduction to and exploration of three concepts: professional, professions and professional responsibility. It begins with reflections on what it means to be professional and discusses why being professional is not always sufficient. The module covers what a CPA is, why professions exist, identifies the three characteristics of a profession, introduces the concept of professional responsibility and its three parts (identity, standards and judgment), and concludes with a professional association website exploration exercise introducing resources central to professional responsibility in accounting, CPA licensure requirements, and the AICPA Code of Professional Conduct.

This module is an introduction to values and ethics. It begins with reflections on values and how they are revealed by objects we keep and actions we take. The module covers what values and norms are and their distinction, the process of learning values and norms, why values may be influenced and changed throughout life, how most decisions about right and wrong are made, and why building ethical capacity is important. It introduces three areas of moral philosophy (meta-ethics, normative ethics and applied ethics), discusses three categories of ethical theories (deontological, teleological and virtue ethics), and introduces the Ethics Unwrapped website with videos on ethical theories including hedonism and utilitarianism.

This module introduces the debate over what the purpose of business is. It begins with discussion of legal liability in three basic legal forms of business (sole proprietorship, partnership and corporation) and includes clips from interviews with small business owners illustrating their work ethic. The module contextualizes capitalism's development as a response to mercantilism, drawing attention to capitalism's ethical roots, personal autonomy centrality, and compassionate connotations of self-interest. It explores the debate over what and to whom corporate management is and should be accountable, introduces two contrasting legal theories of firm (trust relationship through private property rights and public interest relationship between society and business), discusses how shareholder and stakeholder interests often conflict while management's responsibilities to corporate owners and society co-exist, provides insights into situational factors that can justify prioritizing broader stakeholder interests over shareholder primacy, and ends with discussion of the controversial belief that business's only moral responsibility is to maximize shareholder wealth.

This module introduces corporate governance as the system of rules, practices, policies, institutions and laws that directs and controls business and serves as a key mechanism through which society determines how wealth and prosperity is distributed. The module covers how hyper-norm beliefs about fairness and theories of distributive justice affect wealth distribution throughout society, introduces corporate governance elements that are external (laws and regulatory agencies) and internal (boards of directors, ethics and compliance programs and organizational culture) to a corporation, and discusses two sometimes competing themes that drive the need for and development of corporate governance. These themes extend from the debate over business purpose and management responsibilities introduced in the previous module. The module explains how corporate governance is often motivated by shareholder primacy and the need to protect private property rights in the context of incomplete contracting and information asymmetry, while also addressing how major economic downturns and large-scale corporate ethical lapses have driven significant US business regulation reform.