Ethics education and accounting programmes in Ghana: does university ownership and affiliation status matter?

Abstract

One very important remedy proposed for the wide-spread ethical failure of accountants in recent years is ethics education. Although ethics education has been variously explored in the literature, the nature of ethics education in accounting programmes and the factors that are associated with the integration of ethics education still remain largely unexplored, particularly in the context of developing countries and at university level of education. This study, therefore, ascertains the nature of ethics education and examines how two factors, namely the type of institution and the affiliation status of the institution, affect the structure and integration of ethics education in the accounting programmes of universities in Ghana. Drawing on primarily secondary data from twenty-seven (27) out of the thirty-four (34) universities in Ghana, results show that the content and structure employed in integrating ethics into accounting programmes are associated with the type of institution and the affiliation status of institutions.

Accounting Ethics Education Research

“…Ellis (2013) presents the advantages of a stand-alone accounting ethics course addressing specific ethics applications across the curriculum, and Caliyurt and Crowther (2006) call upon accounting academics to revise course materials to educate students on ethics by integrating ethics subject matter into diverse accounting courses. A large amount of literature supports the integration of ethics education in the accounting curriculum (see for example Blanthorne et al, 2007;Burns et al, 2015;Chen, Chen, & Chenoweth, 2013;Jackling et al, 2007;Langenderfer & Rockness, 1989;Levy & Mitschow, 2008;Mintchik & Farmer, 2009;Simpson et al, 2016;Sisaye & Lackman, 1994;Thomas, 2004;West & Buckby, 2018). Bampton and Cowton (2002) argue that integration provides an opportunity to expose students to a variety of ethical issues as well as reflect on broader ethical scenarios which accounting students may face in real life.…”

“…, the extent of teaching ethics and ethics subject matter incorporated in the curriculum(Ahmad, 2017;Marzuki, Subramaniam, Cooper, & Dellaportas, 2017;Onumah, Antwi-Gyamfi, Djin, & Adomako, 2012;ŞENGÜR, 2017;Simpson, Onumah, & Oppong- Nkrumah, 2016;Win, Ismail, & Hamid, 2014); the influence of ethics education on students' ethical attitude (including awareness, judgment, behaviour)(Fourie & Contogiannis, 2014;Ghazali, 2015;Saat et al, 2010aSaat et al, , 2012; and the relationship between ethics and accounting education to demonstrate that education is a valuable tool to improve ethics (Chafi, 2013) Win et al (2014). examine the accounting educators' perceptions on ethics education curriculum andAhmad (2017) andMarzuki et al (2017), studied the integration of ethics into accounting curriculum.…”