Write an accounting ethics paper. Write a brief summary of the article, including why it's important to relevant to Accounting Ethics class. The summary is to be no more than three pages. I would like to see discussion of the strengths and weaknesses of t

Write an accounting ethics paper.

Write a brief summary of the article, including why it's important to relevant to Accounting Ethics class. The summary is to be no more than three pages. I would like to see discussion of the strengths and weaknesses of the article itself. Also, include opinions about the significance of the article to the class. ContentServer.pdf 

The Impact of CFOs’ Incentives and Earnings Management Ethics on their Financial Reporting Decisions: The Mediating Role of Moral Disengagement Cathy A. Beaudoin • Anna M. Cianci • George T. Tsakumis Received: 23 August 2012 / Accepted: 12 February 2014 / Published online: 7 March 2014 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2014 Abstract Despite regulatory reforms aimed at inhibiting aggressive financial reporting, earnings management persists and continues to concern practitioners, regulators, and standard setters. To provide insight into this practice and how to mitigate it, we conduct an experiment to examine the impact of two independent variables on CFOs’ discretionary expense accruals. One independent variable, incentive conflict, is manipulated at two levels (present and absent)—i.e., the presence or absence of a personal financial incentive that conflicts with a corporate financial incentive. The other independent variable is CFOs’ earnings management ethics (‘‘EM-Ethics,’’ high vs. low), measured as their assessment of the ethicalness of key earnings management motivations. We find that incentive conflict and EM-Ethics interact to determine CFOs’ discretionary accruals such that (a) in the presence of incentive conflict, CFOs with low (high) EM-Ethics tend to give into (resist) the personal incentive by booking higher (lower) expense accruals; and (b) in the absence of an incentive conflict, CFOs with low (high) EM-Ethics tend to give into (resist) the corporate incentive by booking lower (higher) expense accruals. We also find support for a mediated-moderation model in which CFOs’ level of EMEthics influences their moral disengagement tendencies which, in turn, differentially affect their discretionary accruals, depending on the presence or absence of incentive conflict. Theoretical and practical implications of these findings are discussed. Keywords Dispositional ethics Earnings management Incentives Moral disengagement Introduction Earnings management involves the manipulation of revenues and/or expenses to obtain a desired financial reporting outcome (e.g., Ball 2006; Healy and Whalen 1999; Schipper 1989). This practice has played a role in the downfall of some major corporations (e.g., Enron and Sunbeam) and led to a push by the accounting profession and standard setters for regulatory changes (Elias 2002; Lawton 2007; SEC 2008). For example, in his 2002 testimony before the UK Parliament Select Committee on Treasury, International Accounting Standards Board (IASB) Chair Sir David Tweedie decried the widespread use of aggressive earnings management (Tweedie 2002). Similarly in 1998, then Chair of the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), Arthur Levitt, warned that earnings management erodes investor confidence and undermines credibility of the financial markets (Levitt 1998), a view that is also reflected more recently by the SEC (SEC 2008). However, despite regulatory efforts to El