Accounting in the Public Interest

An Historical Perspective on Professional Ethics

Steven Mintz, PhD, CPA

In BriefThe commitment to serve the public interest in accounting has eroded, as personal and business relationships with clients and client management increasingly create conflicts of interest. Many such relationships have created barriers to objective and impartial decision making and threatened the independence of the audit function. The 2014 recodification of the AICPA Code of Professional Conduct attempts to deal with a conflict of interests when providing attest services through a threats-and-safeguards approach. The problem with this approach is that conflicts may still be permissible as long as they can be sufficiently mitigated by safeguards—creating a situational ethic rather than an outright prohibition when such conflicts exist.