Research on Professional Responsibility and Ethics in Accounting

Charles Richard Baker is Professor of Accounting at the Willumstad School of Business, Adelphi University, New York. His main research interests are focused on the public accounting profession, in particular: the history of the accounting profession, comparative systems of regulation, ethical issues, independence, and legal liability. Professor Baker has published over 120 academic and profession articles and he is a member of the editorial boards of seven academic and professional journals. He received his Ph.D. from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and he is a Certified Public Accountant (CPA) in New York State.

• 1. Making Crime Pay: Timing of External Whistleblowing; Andrea M. Scheetz and Joseph Wall 2. Factors that Affect CPA's Personal Applications of Ethical Tax Standards to Ambiguous Positions; Laura Clifford, Amanda M. Grossman, Leigh R. Johnson, and Wayne A. Tervo 3. Sustainability Reporting in U.S. Government and Not for Profit Organizations: A Descriptive Study; Fatima Alali, Zhou Chen, and Yue Liu 4. The Need for New Psychological Contracts in the Auditing Profession; Cecily Raiborn and Michael Stern 5. Survey Research on Earnings Quality: Evidence from Japan; Masumi Nakashima 6. External Auditors, Client Ethics, and the Continuance Decision; Carolyn Conn, Linda Campbell, and Cecily Raiborn

The six papers in this slim collection assess the impact of award timing on reporting fraudulent activity, identify factors affecting how CPAs interpret ethical tax standards, examine sustainability reporting in the U.S. government and not-for-profit organizations, and propose a client ethics evaluation checklist for external auditors. A paper from a Japanese academic surveys the chief financial officers of public firms in Japan concerning earnings quality.