Ethical issues in the Digital Age and Impacts on Professional Accountants
We explore the conjunction of ethics and accounting information systems (AIS) with advanced technologies, and their impact on the accounting profession. Ethical considerations evolve among individuals, organizations, and society, and rapid changes in technology influence ethical judgments, ethical decisions, and actions. Some have questioned the ability of the accounting profession to deal with emerging, even disruptive, technologies, seeing such technology as both an opportunity and a threat, and ask accountants to use ethical judgment and professional skepticism when dealing with data, technology, and decisions. Our research question is: How is ethics considered with regards to advanced technologies, and how do these technologies impact professional accountants?
To answer this question, we conduct a review of the academic and practitioner literature on ethics and AIS. We analyze our findings using the ETHOs framework. We then offer a discussion on the impact of disruptive technologies on professional accountants, suggesting that human and machine, instead of competing, would benefit by working together.
Bitcoin : A Accounting Regime
The Bitcoin blockchain is a payment system designed to disintermediate financial transactions and create a financial order free of financiers and accountants. While many professional accounting bodies have sounded the alarm about the potential for blockchain technology to render accountants redundant, few academic articles have been able to transcend high-level conceptual descriptions and dig deeper into the technological nuances of blockchain technology to assess whether or not, and if so, how, blockchain can undermine the accounting profession and its practices. Drawing on a netnography of the early Bitcoin community from the technology¿s formation in 2008 through to the disappearance of its founder in 2011, this paper aims to explore the role of accounting in the development of a new financial system. More specifically, this paper aims to address two primary research questions: (1) How does Bitcoin challenge the traditional routines and interpretative schema embedded in accounting systems? and (2) How does Bitcoin challenge the relevance of accountants and their hold on accounting knowledge? We propose that Bitcoin is more than a form of digital currency, but rather a new accounting regime that effectively takes accounting away from accountants. Using sophisticated cryptography and advanced computer programming, the Bitcoin blockchain has created new interpretative schema for measuring and recording financial transactions. Bitcoin relies on new types of experts, namely computer programmers and cryptographers, and a new form of expertise that fuses technological know-how with accounting concepts. We find that Bitcoin programmers are able to co-opt accounting knowledge because these concepts do not constitute a sufficiently esoteric knowledge basis to protect the jurisdictional boundaries of the profession.
