Ethical awareness and ethical judgment among audit professions across countries: India, Sweden and Vietnam

Sammanfattning: The auditor is seen as the guardian of the market. However, several scandals have resulted in the public’s suspicions of auditor ethics. Therefore, the need of investigation of ethical awareness and ethical judgment among auditors should be taken into a deep consideration. The aim of this thesis is to investigate the differences in ethical awareness and ethical judgment of auditors across nations, including Sweden, India and Vietnam. In order to reach our research purpose, a positivistic philosophy together with deductive and quantitative research method was employed. Seven hypotheses were derived from five different theories such as theory of profession, theory of legitimacy, cultural theory, moral reasoning ability and institutional theory. The focal idea of these hypotheses is to test the existence of the homogeneity in ethical sensitivity of auditors. It was theoretically assumed that the main influential factors include national culture system, firms which auditors work for, gender, age, education and experience. However, empirical findings indicate that auditors’ ethical awareness and ethical judgemnt are maily influenced by their national cultures, as well as age and experiences. Meanwhile, education and gender failed in being regarded as the important variables which can bring an impact. Moreover, the results also show that the level of ethical sensitivity is homogeneous in all audit firms regardless of their size, as the effects of legitimate and mimetic isomorphism from different firms. That also reveals the image of the consistency and uniformity of the audit profession, which strongly supports to the explanation power of professional theory. To sum up, our results indicate that the most significant signals belonged to culture, firm size, age and length of experience. Such these findings can be used as supportive evidents for the explanation strength of the theories mentioned above.