Evaluating ethical beliefs of accountants compared to non-accountants

Financial scandals and corporate bankruptcies, especially in the last two decades, have made the importance of ethical issues in the accounting and auditing profession more prominent than in the past and have attracted the attention of professional members, the academic community, and accounting researchers more than in the past. Emphasizing moral beliefs and examining its effects on various phenomena can help reduce financial scandals as well as the reputation of the profession. The main purpose of the current research is to evaluate ethical beliefs among professional accountants and non-accountants. This research was conducted in 1401 and its statistical population consists of expert (professional) accountants and non-accountants, from which 400 samples were selected. 200 of the statistical sample are accountants and the other 200 are non-accountants. In order to collect data, questionnaires were used, and structural equation modeling was used by Smart PLS3 and Spss25 software to test hypotheses. The findings of the research showed that with the increase in accounting expertise of people, their moral beliefs decrease. Also, the findings of the research indicate that non-accounting professionals have more moral beliefs than accounting professionals.