Investigation of accounting professionals' perceptions, attitudes and behaviors about professional ethics: An application in TRB1 region

The accounting profession is seen as one of the few professions with a predominant social responsibility aspect. The role of members of the profession practicing the profession is extremely important for users of accounting information. Because the information they provide helps managers, investors, creditors, government and other information users make critical economic decisions. Information provided by professionals who have a responsibility to act in the public interest must be presented in a timely, complete and accurate manner, regardless of the interest of a particular client, employer or organization. Otherwise, information users will not be able to make sound decisions on critical issues, and they will not be able to benefit from the accounting information presented and suffer damage. This, in turn, may lead to the loss of trust in the accounting profession, accounting and auditing scandals as it happened in the last quarter century, and also it can cause entire society to suffer. It has been understood that only technical knowledge and expertise are not sufficient in the accounting profession, and that the ethical dimension of the subject is more important than technical knowledge. Thus, the issue of ethics in the presentation of financial information has now been accepted as the biggest issue of the accounting profession and has gradually become one of the important research topics of the accounting profession. The loss of trust in the accounting profession in the world and in our country and the company scandals brought a great scrutiny to the accounting profession and forced the governments to make new regulations. The most important regulation that stands out among the laws, regulations and written notices on professional accounting ethics in Turkey has been the regulation on "Ethical Principles to be Followed by Certified Public Accountants and Certified Public Accountants in their Professional Activities". In the regulation, the basic ethical principles that are the subject of this study and that all members of the profession must comply with are included. These principles are; integrity, objectivity, professional competence and care, confidentiality and professional behavior. The aim of this study is to examine the perceptions, attitudes and behaviors of professional accountants about professional ethics with a series of statistical methods. In addition to these, the factors that lead and deter unethical behaviors; The ranking of the basic ethical principles according to the degree of importance and the solution proposals against unethical behaviors constitute another aim of the study. For these purposes, a face-to-face survey was conducted with independent accounting professionals operating in the TRB1 Region (Malatya, Elazig, Bingol, Tunceli), the data obtained were analyzed with various statistical methods and the results were shared. Keywords: Ethics, Accounting, Accounting Professional Ethics