The Dilemma of an Accountant
Daniel Potter is an accountant at Baker Greenleaf and has been chosen to be a part of an special auditing team for an huge account for the company. The team lead is Oliver Freeman and he is known for being a complete authoritarian on projects. The account that they are in charge of auditing is a company that they had always shared with another Big Eight accounting firm.
The issue is that Mr. Potter found some discrepancies while doing the audit on his part of the account. While he was able to work through most of them, he could not overcome some property that was on the books for $ 2 million dollars. He values the property at $100,000, considering that it ...view middle of the document...
Dan pointed out that if the report was altered and it was used to show prospective buyers in the future the value of the property in question, and the buyers later found out the real property value. Then Baker Greenleaf, Oliver, and Dan could be head legally responsible for the report.
After Dan kept pleading his case, he and Oliver could not come to a resolution on the disagreement. Dan later found out that Oliver went ahead and took out the pages and inserted a “clean opinion” and also gave Dan a negative review on his work with the audit.
In dealing with this issue Dan needs to use the Philosophical Approaches and Stakeholder Impact Analysis tools to find the proper answer to follow. He could report Oliver up the company’s chain of command if he feels that Oliver, having been there for six years now, would not have too much pull with the supervisors. The company does not have an independent review board for him to go and dispute his negative review and work on the audit.
First in the Philosophical Approach is consequentialism. Does putting a “clean opinion” really affect anyone outside that company that the audit is being conducted on? If it does say like in the scenario with the company using it to show a value of the property to be higher than what it really is, then does the consequences out weight the profit of keeping the account of the company and even getting more of the account from a competitor? If not and the legal ramifications are much greater than the profit, then should you go to your supervisors? With this one I think Dan should go to his supervisors and tell them what he found and how it was handled after he shown his work to Mr. Freeman. At least he can try and get it on paper that he tried to rectify the situation and if it does become a legal problem, then he kind of covered his own back. With the negative report he definitely wouldn’t get the promotion and probably his time in the company could be short lived, so he would have nothing to lose by going to the supervisors.
Deontology ask the question of is this right to do and is this the standard that I want to set? I think Dan showed that he will stand up for what he believes is the right thing to do and hopefully would set the standards for others to follow. If he was to bring the situation up to his supervisors and they did not know what was going on and were...
