PricewaterhouseCoopers Ethics & Professionalism Program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison

Accounting students have the opportunity to enhance their ethical foundation thanks to the resources provided by PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC).  PwC has sponsored funding for an ethics and professionalism program in the Department of Accounting at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.  With this generous support, the department is implementing a three year curriculum sequence of activities, which will enhance sensitivity to ethical and professional issues and provide students with opportunities to develop a sound ethical and professional orientation to current and future challenges they can expect to encounter in their careers. 

Howard Carver, a retired partner from Ernst and Young, has committed an endowment to the Center for Advanced Studies in Professional Accounting to fund the ethics program after the PwC three-year grant.

For additional details regarding the program, click on the links below:

• Student Ethic Initiatives - including the Statement of Values and the Ethics Board

• Ethics & Professionalism Events - 2006 Fall Ethics Forum and the 2007 Spring Ethics Symposium

•        Ethicssu08 Integrity Program - Fall 2008 Ethics Assignment

• Ethics Research by Professors

The funding will help the department sustain and enhance a program to revise and reinvigorate the ethics curriculum.  A recent publication by PwC, Educating for the Public Trust:  The PricewaterhouseCoopers Position on Accounting Education, cited three areas that accounting education should address: 

• helping students understand what it means to be a member of the profession,
• emphasizing higher-level interpersonal and communication skills and integrating them throughout the curriculum, and
• fostering student’s ability to solve problems in complex business environments where the best answer is difficult to quantify.

The UW-Madison ethics and professionalism program addresses all three of those objectives:  (a) ethics is developed in the context of professionalism; (b) there is an emphasis on role-playing, group activities, and direct interaction with professionals in discussing ethics issues; and (c) in-depth discussion of business and ethical alternatives in business and tax situations. 

We have had experiences over the past two years that have been proven very successful.  These included:  professional meetings with practitioners and students engaged in discussion of ethical issues, students developing and enforcing a Statement of Values and Code of Ethics for our program, laboratory experiments examining ethical behavior in situations where reward structures do not encourage ethical behavior, and case discussions held outside of the classroom as part of the orientation of students who enter our program.  These activities are supplemented by in-depth coverage of corporate governance, risk, and ethical behavior in courses such as financial reporting and auditing.