Management accountants play a pivotal role within an organization in terms of influencing prolonged success. They have numerous ethical responsibilities with regard to helping their organizations achieve various objectives.
First, management accountants have the ethical responsibility of ensuring the confidentiality of financial information within a business. For example, they should not disclose such information to competitors, as it can easily compromise the future of a business. Second, management accountants have an ethical responsibility to promote high standards of integrity by avoiding mixing personal and professional interests. For example, management accountants should avoid letting their individual goals compromise their ability to fulfill organizational goals.
Time set aside for working should not be used to pursue other objectives that are not related to their duties. Third, management accountants have an ethical responsibility to promote credibility by remaining truthful to various principles of accounting. For example, it is unethical for management accountants to combine records of business transactions made by a business with those of the sole proprietor. The obligations of management accountants are very different from those of financial accountants. First, management accountants prepare financial records for use within an organization, while financial accountants focus on managing financial information for review by stakeholders in the external environment. Second, management accountants have the ability to influence the decision-making process within an organization compared to financial accountants due to the fact that the latter have limited access to the activities of various departments.
The ethical standards of management accountants are higher than those of financial accountants because the former has a chance to get a share of an organization’s stock, thus reducing their chances of lying and getting away with it.