Analysis of the Relationship between Ethical Awareness and the Ethical Judgment of the Professionals in the public accounting profession to the Whistle-blowing of Financial Violations (Case Study of Guilan Province)

The decision to expose or silence a financial misconduct in the organization that the person working in the accounting profession is witnessing is a ethical dilemma.The purpose of this study was to investigate the relationship between ethical awareness and ethical judgment of accountants towards the Whistle-blowing of financial misconduct with the emphasis on the role of moral intelligence. For this purpose, in a web-based platform, questions in the form of a standardized questionnaire and researcher-made scenarios were provided to professionals in the public sector of Guilan province. The collected data from a total of 273 completed questionnaires were analyzed using structural equation method with partial least squares (second generation) approach. The findings from the final model indicate that ethical awareness does not directly correlate with ethical judgment in relation to the types of Whistle-blowing being investigated in this research, but ethical intelligence modulates this relationship to a considerable extent. In addition, moral judgment has a significant impact on types of Whistle-blowing, and ethical intelligence can also play a positive role in this regard.