In a major policy speech, Government finance minister Mrs Wei Yttria said that the audit and assurance industry’s work should always be judged by the effect it has on public confidence in business. She said that it was crucial that professional services such as audit and assurance should always be performed in the public interest and that there should be no material threats to the assurer’s independence. Enron and other corporate failures happened, she said,because some accountants didn’t understand what it was to act in the public interest. She stressed that it was important that firms should not provide more than one service to individual clients. If a firm audited a client then, she said, it shouldn’t provide any other services to that client.
Mr Oggon Mordue, a financial journalist who had worked in audit and assurance for many years, was in the audience.
He suggested that the normal advice on threats to independence was wrong. On the contrary in fact, the more services that a professional services firm can provide to a client the better, as it enables the firm to better understand the client and its commercial and accounting needs. Mrs Yttria disagreed, saying that his views were a good example of professional services firms not acting in the public interest.
Mr Mordue said that when he was a partner at a major professional services firm, he got to know his clients very well through the multiple links that his firm had with them. He said that he knew all about their finances from providing audit and assurance services, all about their tax affairs through tax consulting and was always in a good position to provide any other advice as he had acted as a consultant on other matters for many years including advising on mergers, acquisitions, compliance and legal issues. He became very good friends with the directors of client companies, he said. The clients, he explained, also found the relationship very helpful and the accounting firms did well financially out of it.
Another reporter in the audience argued with Mr Mordue. Ivor Nahum said that Mr Mordue represented the ‘very worst’ of the accounting profession. He said that accounting was a ‘biased and value laden’ profession that served minority interests, was complicit in environmental degradation and could not serve the public interest as long as it primarily served the interests of unfettered capitalism. He said that the public interest was badly served by accounting,as it did not address poverty, animal rights or other social injustices.
Required:
(a) Explain, using accounting as an example, what ‘the public interest’ means as used by Mrs Yttria in her
speech. (5 marks)
(b) This requirement concerns ethical threats. It is very important for professional accountants to be aware of ethical threats and to avoid these where possible.
Required:
(i) With reference to the case as appropriate, describe five types of ethical threat. (5 marks)
(ii) Assess the ethical threats implied by Mr Mordue’s beliefs. (8 marks)
(c) Assess Ivor Nahum’s remarks about the accounting profession in the light of Gray, Owen & Adams’ deep
green (or deep ecologist) position on social responsibility. (7 marks)