An Empirical Examination of Undergraduate Accounting Students’ Ethical Judgment: Malaysia Evidence

Abstract

Several highly publicized financial disasters in the past decade have brought into question the auditors’ integrity and credibility especially related to their ethical judgment. More specifically, misconduct of auditors, has drawn significant attention to the importance of ethics and integrity in public accounting. As a result, accounting firms have taken actions to re-establish credibility within the profession. In the wake of the aforementioned accounting scandals, many authors have argued that ethics education should start early in an auditors career, even before joining the profession. Noting the importance of moral intensity construct and ethical orientation dimensions in shaping the auditors’ ethical judgment, this current study provides further evidence by investigating these two variables on future auditors’ ethical judgment. The Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) technique is used to silmutaneously analyze the data as to establish a behavioral model of future auditors’ ethical judgment. The findings showed that the moral intensity and ideologistic ethical orientation influences the future auditors’ ethical judgments, but not the relativistic ethical orientation. Implications of the findings and future research are discussed in the paper. The findings could contribute to the existing literature on ethics within the academic curriculum and, in particular, to accounting ethics in Malaysia.