The Role of Intent on Accounting Students’ Ethical Attitudes Towards Earnings Management

The purpose of this study was to investigate whether intent (primarily for selfish or unselfish benefit), an attribute of earnings management (EM), affected the evaluation of the level of ethical acceptability of other EM attributes reported by senior Canadian undergraduate accounting students. Extending work in the U.S. begun by Merchant and Rockness (Journal of Accounting and Public Policy, 13, 79–94, 1994) and Bruns and Merchant (Management Accounting, 72(2), 22–25, 1990), our results indicate that there were statistically significant differences in the assessments of ethical acceptability attributable to intent. There were also significant differences attributable to gender. © 2015, Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht.