The Effect of Auditors’ Commitment to Public Interests and Independence Enforcement on Professional Values (Ethical Values) in Audit Firms

The purpose of this study is to answer the question of whether auditors' commitment to public interest and independence requirements can affect the professional values of auditing firms.  

The aim of this study is the practical type and the present study in terms of the nature of data and the analytical methods is a descriptive survey. in order to test research hypotheses, the information of partners, managers, and supervisors of trusted auditing firms of central insurance organization of Iran with the purposive sampling method in 2020 are gathered and analyzed furthermore, the questionnaire is used to gather the required data that its validity is confirmed by professional experts. Questionnaire questions consist of two parts, general and specific. The public sector questions include the general characteristics of the respondents including gender, place of employment, level of education, age and occupation and etc... the specific part include two variables (attitudes) and auditors ' commitment to the requirement of independence which includes by 11 items, and the commitment to public interests to which includes by 5 items, and analyzing purposes mainly with respect to the model of structural equation and the ratio of three groups ranging from Kruskal-Wallis test and the AMOS 24 and SPSS24 software are used.  

The results of the study confirm the role of auditors’ commitment to public interest and its effect in reducing the level of moral acceptance of unprofessional behavior and the level of participation in unprofessional behavior, as well. In addition, the results show a significance positive relation between auditors’ tendency towards independence enforcement and their public interest commitment. Also considering the results of the Kruskal-Wallis test for comparing the three groups, partners, managers, and supervisors of audit Firms are ranked first to third, respectively, in terms of commitment to public interests and the requirement of Independence enforcement.  

The findings show that auditors’ tendency towards independence enforcement has no meaningful relation with both of acceptance of unprofessional behavior and the level of participation in unprofessional behavior. the more audit Firms in the organization 's strategies and procedures should pay more attention to the principles of ethics and ethics and the more efforts to develop ethical codes and professional behavior, the more attention of employees to the organization is expected to improve the performance of auditing Firms. accordingly, it is suggested that auditing Firms alongside the supervising and governing bodies of audit profession , disciplinary measures, economic actions and workshops about auditing and auditing profession and auditing ethical rules specifically for members of certified public accountants and training courses at the level of directors and supervisors in respect of public interest and more efforts to this ethical issue.