The Necessity of Fraud Education for Accounting Students: A Research Study From Turkey

Accounting is a social science. Recent developments in society have necessitated new regulations in accounting and required accountants to apply these regulations. In this context, it is argued that accounting academics should revise their course material to educate students more appropriately to the current environment. After several accounting scandals in the world, especially in the USA, ethics course in business schools have become required by accounting related institutions like the American International Certified Public Accountants (AICPA) and the Association of Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB). It is aimed to educate more ethical students by integrating ethics into accounting programs and thereby it is hoped / expected that it will be possible to reduce the level of fraud in the accounting world with more ethics educated accountants. A similar level of pressure is not seen with regard to fraud education in business schools. We argue however that even if an accountant behaves ethically, he/she should know how to behave when faced with fraud in the business environment and so needs knowledge about fraud detection, fraud prevention, fraud investigation and fraud reporting. In the business schools of USA and Europe, fraud education has started to take its deserved place in the curriculum and research centers on fraud are being opened by universities. The Association of Certified Fraud Examiner (ACFE), which is the largest nongovernmental organization in the world with 31.000 members, supports universities and accounting academicians with different facilities like courses and books. ACFE supports 295 universities where there is at least 3 credit courses under the name of fraud examination in USA. The other nongovernmental organization which supports fraud education in the accounting programs is the American Instituation of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA). Turkey, IFAC member and candidate member of the European Union, tries to follow recent developments in the world of accounting. Even if there is no pressure by any institution, Caliyurt (2003) noted that 55.3% of the accounting academicians teach about ethics in their accounting courses. This study aims to determine the importance of fraud education as taught by Turkish accounting academicians to accounting students in public and private business schools. As the result it is found that 50% of the accounting academician teach about fraud in their accounting courses but, unfortunately, only 7.1 % of them had education on fraud during their personal education.