Abstract

The strengthening of the process of the regulation of accounting and auditing, as well as the improvement of the structures of corporate governance, aims, fundamentally, to involve the various professionals that work in business organizations in a global process whose principal objective is to provide more ethical and responsible accountability practices. Hence, encouraging ethical stances is crucial in seeking to overcome the present financial crisis, and in preventing and changing the paradigm of the business model of capitalist society: the ethical principles related to the business environment should be assumed by all those intervening in the process of accountability. In this context, the goal of this research is to ascertain whether, among professionals working in this field in Portugal, there exists an appropriate perception of behaviour and ethical attitudes, and whether there is control and promotion of these attributes. In particular, we seek to locate significant associations between the responses to the questions raised, and to do this, we use, among other statistical instruments, Spearman's correlation coefficient. The results obtained reveal certain specific characteristics of the groups questioned.

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