Are Accountants Honest and Ethical?
My goal in this blog is to discuss why the ratings of accountants for honesty and ethics in the latest Gallup Poll is in decline. As an accounting educator and professional, I am quite concerned. In part, because of the changing scope of services provided by accounting professionals as discussed below. But first, we need to understand why other professions or fields of service are ranked higher.
The ‘Helping’ Professions Rank Highest
According to a Gallup Poll during December 2-18, 2024, three in four Americans view honesty and ethics of nurses very high or high, making them the most trusted of 23 professions rated in Gallup’s annual measurement. Grade-school teachers rank second, with 61% viewing them highly, while military officers, pharmacists and medical doctors also earn high trust from majorities of Americans. The 14% differential between nurses and grade-school teachers is stunning. There are no such gaps elsewhere in the rankings. The public’s trust in nurses has been maintained over decades, even amidst declining trust in other fields.
The least trusted professions, with more than half of U.S. adults saying their ethics are low or very low, are lobbyists, members of Congress and TV reporters. This is not surprising to me as government officials and politicians increasingly have been caught involved in improper behavior including theft, fraud, and claims of sexual harassment, and then there is the ‘fake news.’
According to Gallup, “Nurses have outpaced all other professions since being added to the list in 1999, with the exception of one year, 2001, after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, when firefighters made their lone appearance. Before 1999, pharmacists and clergy members were typically the most highly rated professions for their ethics. What has happened to the clergy to cause the rating to decline to 30%? I think we know the answer.
Are Accountants Trusted?
The new poll comes with a broader warning label: Americans’ ethics ratings have fallen across many occupations, and the average across Gallup’s core set of professions has slid to a historic low.
I’m always interested in the rankings of the accountancy profession, which is reported in the survey but not on the graph. Only 35% view the honesty and ethics of accountants as very high or high. According to CPA Trendlines, “accountants are not isolated — but they are exposed. Their work is built on trust, and their public standing appears to be eroding at the exact moment the profession is asking clients and regulators to accept more complex roles for CPAs, including AI-enabled advisory services, outsourced finance, and expanded assurance responsibilities. It is concerning that last year’s poll shows that 41% rate accountants’ very high or high in honesty and ethics. This is a decline of about 15%. It could be reflective of a general decline in ratings of business executives. There is bound to be some spillover effects.
My background in accounting and ethics led me to believe that accountants would be rated very high or high in honesty and ethics in the latest Gallup Poll. After all, they have a public service obligation that underlies professional services. I was surprised that not even 50% rated them as such. There may be many reasons for the relatively low ranking including that all businesspeople were similarly rated or lower. The never-ending flow of business fraud, investment schemes, and the like are largely to blame.
Expansion in the Scope of Professional Services
I have come up with what I consider to be other explanations for the relatively low rating for accountants:
- The growth in non-audit services has created a clash of cultures between auditors, who must adhere to strict standards of ethics including being completely independent of client management, whereas consultants and advisers are driven more by commercial factors.
- Increased pressure from CFOs and CEOs to report profits the way they want to instead of in accordance with GAAP.
- Challenges that result from expanding services in state-of-the-art fields such as technology, AI, and crypto currency transactions. The crypto market can be confusing with terms like ETFs, blockchains, stablecoins and the like, that makes the topic challenging to navigate.
- New equity forms of ownership in accounting creating various structures that reflect changes in business practices and regulatory environments., such as special-purpose acquisition companies (SPACs).
- Personal relationships with client management that compromise objectivity and independence
As an accounting educator for many years, I’ve witnessed how difficult it can be to make changes in the accounting curriculum. Some accounting educators are territorial and want to protect their courses. This doesn’t bode well for educating aspiring accounting students in these complex arrangements, especially in technology/AI and new forms of ownership. Things move slowly in academe.
Concluding Thoughts
Integrity is the backbone of professional ethics. This entails being objective, and independent when providing audit services and not allow a clients’ wishes to dictate proper accounting. Auditors, especially, should not accept the words of a CFO or CEO on how a transaction should be reported and disclosed. They must do whatever is necessary to attest to the accuracy and reliability of the financial statements. The guiding philosophy for all accounting services is “trust but verify.” It is the essential feature that makes accounting a profession.
The SEC has said on many occasions that independent auditors play an important gatekeeper role in supporting high-quality financial reporting and the protection of investors. A critical aspect of this role is an independent auditor’s responsibilities with respect to fraud detection during the financial statement audit. However, the traditional “expectations gap” is still alive. This is the difference between what the public believes is the ethical obligation of accountants to detect fraud versus what many in the profession say that it’s ‘only’ to detect errors that may exist because of material misstatements in the financial statements. Increasingly, forensic accountants are playing a bigger role in fraud detection, and that is a good thing.
My final observation is that the decline in honesty and ethics might be attributable to the fact that most accounting educators today have not worked in public accounting. They may have graduated with a PhD and gone directly into the workplace. This is particularly true because there is a much higher percentage of PhD graduates from foreign countries entering academe. There is nothing wrong with this, but the reality is that since most educators do not have any practical experience, or a minimal amount at best, they haven’t been exposed to the culture honesty, ethics, and independence that are the foundation for the profession.
Posted by Steven Mintz, PhD, aka Ethics Sage, on May 7, 2026. You can learn more about Steve’s activities at: https://www.stevenmintzethics.com/.