Accounting Faculty Ethical Codes: A Time for Action?
AACSB eligibility standards state that accounting academic units must establish expectations for ethical behavior by faculty and administrators. Obviously, this requirement can be met in a variety of ways but the most direct is to establish an accounting faculty ethical code. This paper reports on a two phase empirical study of 70 AACSB accredited accounting doctoral programs in the U.S. The purpose of the study was to determine the extent to which the accredited accounting doctoral programs have adopted separate faculty codes of ethics. No separate codes for accounting academic units were found. Implications of these findings are discussed in this article. We believe the lack of specific ethical codes for accounting educators is of concern given the importance of ethics in both the educational process and in the business world. There is a need for a serious dialogue in the accounting academy about this issue.
Research Falsification in Accounting Literature: A Survey of the Most Prolific Researchers' Actions and Beliefs
Incidents of research misconduct, especially falsification, in the hard sciences and medicine have been widely reported. Motives for misconduct include professional advancement and personal recognition. Accounting academics are under the same tenure, promotion, and recognition pressures as other academics; and, without the life-and-death issues of medical research, rationalizing misconduct in accounting research seems much easier. It is reasonable to assume that dishonesty has occurred, even if little evidence exists about its prevalence. Further, accounting research can influence tax policy and market conditions, affecting people’s lives. This study is, to our knowledge, the first attempt to survey accounting researchers directly as to their ethical practices; it uses the randomized response technique of addressing sensitive questions. To maximize its relevance to the most respected accounting research, this questionnaire was sent only to the most prolific researchers at US colleges and universities who have published in the “top 30” accounting journals. The results indicate that serious misconduct has occurred among these established accounting researchers. The estimated percentage of seriously tainted articles in the top 30 accounting journals, based on self-reporting, is about 4 percent, while the respondents on average believe that about 21 percent of the literature is tainted. Faculty who were tenured more recently provide higher estimates of the falsification rate, and attribute more of the cause to external factors like tenure pressure. The paper concludes by discussing implications and offering policy recommendations.
Data disclosure and data sharing in scientific research.
Data sharing is examined for its bearing on (i) quality assurance and (ii) extensions of results in scientific research as well as (iii) part of a tradition of openness in science. It is suggested that sharing can be accomplished in a simple manner that is also sufficiently flexible to fit varying individual situations by asking authors of data dependent articles and grant proposals to footnote (a) whether they are willing to make their data available to others and, if so, (b) how the data may be accessed. Appendices report results from a survey of current policies and practices in professional societies and in Federal government fund granting agencies. Emphasis is on the social and management sciences.