How Do the Accounting Profession and Higher Education Currently Approach Ethics Training?

ABSTRACT Given the recurrence of ethical scandals in the accounting profession, the importance of ethics training continues to grow. We hand-collected data and performed a survey to investigate what measures are being taken by the profession and academia to ensure that accountants receive ethics training throughout their careers and before entering the workforce. We find variation across the CPA jurisdictions, such that the majority require candidates to pass an ethics exam for CPA licensure and mandate several hours of ethics CPE for renewal, whereas relatively few require individuals to pass a college-level ethics course. In response, accounting programs adopt numerous approaches to teaching ethics with half of our sample of schools offering either a standalone accounting or business ethics course, about a third offering both accounting and business ethics courses, and the remaining schools integrating ethics into coursework. Furthermore, approaches vary based on undergraduate versus graduate programs and state CPA requirements. Data Availability: Data are available upon request.