Career Corner
Career Corner
Financial analysts offer investment advice to their clients—banks, insurance
companies, mutual funds, securities firms, and individual investors. This advice
usually comes in the form of a formal recommendation (buy, hold, or sell). Before
giving an opinion, analysts develop a detailed understanding of a company’s
operations through discussions with management, analysis of competitors, and
projections of industry trends. They also develop a detailed understanding of a
company’s financial statements, including its earnings quality. Analysts typically do
not recommend companies with lower-quality earnings.
Understanding a company’s earnings quality comes from having a good
grasp of accrual-basis accounting. This is why many finance majors and MBA
students, pursuing careers as financial analysts, take additional accounting-related
courses when earning their degrees and even after graduation.
Ethical Dilemma
Ethical Dilemma
Suppose that shortly after finishing this course, you were sent to prison for a crime
you did not commit. While in prison, the warden learns that you have taken financial
accounting and are really good at “keeping the books.” In fact, you are so good at
accounting that you offer to teach other inmates basic financial skills that they’ll use
someday after being released. You find that teaching others these skills is quite
rewarding.
However, the warden has a sinister plan and asks for your help. He plans to
use his position of authority at the prison to steal money. He first uses prisoners as
low-cost labor to do projects around town. Because other legitimate companies
cannot compete with these low costs, they bribe the warden not to bid on jobs. The
warden asks you to use your accounting skills to participate in a financial scam by
falsifying documents and creating a false set of accounting records that will allow the
warden’s bribes to go undetected by state prison authorities. In other words, he wants
you to “cook the books.”
When you object to helping with this scam, the warden threatens to end your
tutoring sessions with other inmates and sentence you to solitary confinement. To
further sway your decision, he promises that if you’ll help, he’ll make your prison
life easy by giving you special meals and other favors.
What would you do in this situation? If you help the warden steal money,
you benefit personally and the other prisoners benefit by your continued tutoring
sessions. However, the warden often physically abuses the other prisoners, and
helping him steal money means that he’ll remain in his position for a long time,
continuing his abusive behavior.
Key issues
Benefitting personally vs. seeing others abused
Option 1: Continue to falsify the accounting records
You need to take care of yourself in prison. Prison life has a different set of rules.
You are not the one actually taking the bribes. You are merely following orders.
You are not the one abusing other inmates.