Accountants urged to uphold ethics
The President of the Institute of Chartered Accountants, Ghana (ICAG), Professor Kwame Adom-Frimpong, has challenged accountants to distinguish themselves by exhibiting high moral standards and organisational ethics in the performance of their professional responsibilities.
He said accountants were the backbone of every organisation and failure to apply high morality in their work, could affect the company greatly and eventually lead to lack of public confidence in their profession.
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Prof. Adom-Frimpong gave the advice at the 2019 Presidential Luncheon of the ICAG in Accra.
The luncheon, which is an annual event, was on the theme: ‘Organisational ethics and workplace culture.’
“As accountants, we cannot take organisational ethics for granted. This is because a lot of responsibility lies on us as gatekeepers and protectors of the company’s purse,” he said.
Accountants’ fate
Speaking to the media later in an interview, Prof. Adom-Frimpong, affirmed the council’s resolve to meet and decide on the fate of accountants whose actions and inactions led to the collapse of many microfinance companies, savings and loans and finance houses in the country recently.
He said the nature of the situation was such that the council had to take its time to investigate all the issues raised and come out with a comprehensive report, noting that the necessary actions would be taken after investigation was completed.
That, he said, were all part of measures to sanitise the system and further enhance public confidence in the profession and not necessarily going after anybody.
Ethical behaviours
In her address, a Human Resource practitioner, who was the guest speaker at the event, Dr Mrs Irene Stella Agyenim-Boateng, stated that accountants were custodians and gatekeepers of key resources in business operations and were obliged to put up ethical behaviour in their professional duties.
“Accounting profession is and must be synonymous with ethical behaviour and ensure that members keep an eagle’s eye which can spot every detail that is not congruent to acceptable organisational and workplace behaviour and standards,” she said.
Dr Agyenim-Boateng, who is the Human Resource Director at the Volta River Authority (VRA), indicated that the price one was likely to pay for being unethical could be so high that it becomes obviously unattractive to be in that boat.
“Sometimes, it could lead to permanent reputational damage, job loss or facing the full rigours of the law.
“However, where the workplace culture wobbles with no solid ethical foundation, such behaviours go unnoticed because everybody does same, or gets unpunished since there are no strict rules or even where there are rules, they have been made to rest peacefully in the bosom of shelves and cabinets and nobody dares disturb their quiet,” she added.
Workplace ethics
Dr Agyenim-Boateng explained that it was only when an organisation was not ethically grounded that one was likely to find some stakeholders (internal or external) pushing their accountants to falsify figures and or to make the books look good.
“It is in such loose environment that people are recruited not based on their skills and competencies, but rather because of other inappropriate reasons.
“Research has also shown that many companies have collapsed due to indiscipline and unethical behaviours,” she said.
As business leaders and professionals, Dr Agyenim-Boateng challenged them not to forget to consistently and systematically drum into the minds and hearts of their stakeholders, the need to uphold organisational ethics in high esteem.