Search results

Accounting is a social science. Recent developments in society have necessitated new regulations in accounting and required accountants to apply these regulations. In this context, it is argued that accounting academics should revise their course material to educate students more appropriately to the current environment. After several accounting scandals in the world, especially in the USA, ethics course in business schools have become required by accounting related institutions like the American International Certified Public Accountants (AICPA) and the Association of Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB). It is aimed to educate more ethical students by integrating ethics into accounting programs and thereby it is hoped / expected that it will be possible to reduce the level of fraud in the accounting world with more ethics educated accountants. A similar level of pressure is not seen with regard to fraud education in business schools. We argue however that even if an accountant behaves ethically, he/she should know how to behave when faced with fraud in the business environment and so needs knowledge about fraud detection, fraud prevention, fraud investigation and fraud reporting. In the business schools of USA and Europe, fraud education has started to take its deserved place in the curriculum and research centers on fraud are being opened by universities. The Association of Certified Fraud Examiner (ACFE), which is the largest nongovernmental organization in the world with 31.000 members, supports universities and accounting academicians with different facilities like courses and books. ACFE supports 295 universities where there is at least 3 credit courses under the name of fraud examination in USA. The other nongovernmental organization which supports fraud education in the accounting programs is the American Instituation of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA). Turkey, IFAC member and candidate member of the European Union, tries to follow recent developments in the world of accounting. Even if there is no pressure by any institution, Caliyurt (2003) noted that 55.3% of the accounting academicians teach about ethics in their accounting courses. This study aims to determine the importance of fraud education as taught by Turkish accounting academicians to accounting students in public and private business schools. As the result it is found that 50% of the accounting academician teach about fraud in their accounting courses but, unfortunately, only 7.1 % of them had education on fraud during their personal education.

Ethics education in accounting has become more of an issue after the Enron collapse. The aim of the study is to evaluate the importance given to accounting ethics education in business schools in Turkey and to discuss the possible problems by comparing the results with developed countries.

For the evaluation of the ethics education in Turkey, a questionnaire was sent to all accounting departments of business schools.

In this study low rates of ethics education in Turkey were found but, if an academician has received accounting ethics education, he/she is shown to be more likely to teach ethics.

These experiences would be a good guide for Turkish academics for development of ethics education in accounting programmes of business schools.

Across the European Community the demand for organically produced agricultural produce of all kinds (corn, fruit, vegetables etc) continues to rise at an exponential rate and the supply of locally produced organic products, although increasing slowly, is considerably less. Consequently organic produce is imported from around the world in order to satisfy demand; the average journey from farm to consumer of organic produce is 4,000 kilometres, with associated pollution effects of transportation. At the same time the European Commission openly espouses the free market philosophy which supposedly matches supply with demand while continuing to maintain its controversial Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) which is supposedly designed to support local farmers in producing the products demanded by local consumers, with the cost being incurred by those consumers in the form of higher prices. EC policy would therefore seem designed to promote locally grown organic produce but this is not happening; instead chemically based agriculture continues to predominate. The purpose of this paper is to examine the reasons for this through a review and critique of the European regulations concerning the support of farming. In doing so we argue that there are both intended and unintended consequences of the application of CAP throughout the EC and that one of the unintended consequences is that Rachel Carson's Silent Spring is increasingly becoming the norm across Europe. In considering the causes of this we argue that one major cause is predicated in accounting and its persistent failure to adequately account for externalities.