Business Commons^™

Ethics And Auditing: Setting The Bar Too Low, Keith Hooper, Jing Wang

Faculty of Business - Papers (Archive)

Purpose - from a philosophical and empirical perspective this paper seeks to show how the big audit firms have managed to set the bar low so that they offer only opinions on whether financial statements meet accounting standards. It is argued that while the concepts of virtue ethics have now largely disappeared, ethical legitimacy has moved beyond consequential ethics to a form of social Darwinism. It is a Social Darwinism that is legalistic and technical as evidenced by the audit firms' widespread use of the Bannerman clause attached to their opinions. Design - to illustrate the shift of ethical positions, …