Atitude do Profissional de Contabilidade em relação à fraude: uma abordagem apoiada em cenários

Abstract

Cases of fraud have occurred, often, in the world market. Several are involved in these cases, including the accounting class. The accounting scandals, especially the most famous, such as focusing on companies and Enron WordCom, kindled to greater concern about the ethical conduct of professional accounting. As a result, there is a greater demand on the transparency and reliability of information provided by these professionals. This concern is aimed, primarily, to maintain the confidence of businesses, investors, suppliers and society, among others, the ethical responsibility of the meter, denigrated by involvement in the fraud detected. Thus, this study aimed to verify the ethical conduct of accountants and accounting technicians in when, in the exercise of their professional activities, are confronted with issues related to fraud. This is considered some factors that can both come to influence the ethical decision making of an individual, demonstrated by the model of decision making, developed by Alves, as a motivated individual to commit a fraudulent act, as evidenced by the model called Triangle of fraud, developed by Cressey. Seeking to answer question guiding this study, performed to exploratory and confirmatory analysis of data, using non-parametric techniques. For exploratory data analysis were made tables of frequencies and calculated the measures of position and dispersion, by calculating the values of average, mode, median and standard deviation, where applicable. For the confirmatory analysis of data, were used non-parametric tests of Spearman and multivariate logistic regression. The results showed that the majority of accounting professionals, the sample, recognizing the moral issue included in the scenarios, disagrees the acts of agents of each scenario, and also classifies such acts as serious or very serious. However, we found that these accounting professionals tend to have a position more toward the teleological theory, since the intention to act is influenced by factors such as opportunity, rationalization and particularly the pressure. Some individual factors also had influence on the ethical position of the professionals interviewed in this research.