PricewaterhouseCoopers Funds Ethics Program

PricewaterhouseCoopers has sponsored funding for an ethics and professionalism program in the Department of Accounting of Information Systems at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. With this support, the department is implementing a three-year curriculum sequence to enhance sensitivity to ethical and professional issues and provide students with opportunities to develop a sound ethical and professional orientation to challenges they can expect to encounter in their careers.

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.