ABSTRACT
Accounting principles are a set of ethical constructs that primarily serve to shift accounting towards the locus of ethical judgment. As such, principles help putting the ethical accountability at the “fields” of the entities and provide judgmental relationships or “fit” between ethical consideration and standards as well as various practices of accounting in innumerable ways. However, the current research debates of the ethical issues in accounting have been discursively shaped upon a set of distinctions that researchers make between two sets of dominant standards. These standards are drawn from the contexts of U.S, respectively International Accounting Standards Board (IASB) codifications. This notion should be added that these standards are uncritically defined as being either rules-based or principles-based. In fact, the current accounting debate treats the ethical issues in accounting through the focus on the technical features of the standards. This study will argue that the ethical problem of accounting cannot be adequately approached by the repeated references into the technical natures of the rules-based and principles-based standards. By highlighting the ethical roots of the accounting principles, we will emphasize that analysis of the standards and ethical issues in accounting needs to be judgmentally associated with the propositional promises of the accounting principles.
Keywords
Accounting Principles, Accounting judgment, Accounting Representation of the Substantial Events.