Auditor’s Ethical Decision-Making Research- Based On Ethical Evaluation Orientation

Due to numerous conflicts of interest between information users, auditors frequently encounter ethical dilemmas. In the professional judgment, auditor needs to face a lot of ethical decision-making situation. When making ethical decisions, auditors will take different ethical evaluation to judge the ethical issues from different dimensions. In determining how individuals should act to make it more ethical, ethical evaluation provides some principles and standards.When it comes to the different ethical evaluation criteria, most researchers tend to discuss deontological evaluation and teleological evaluation. Deontological evaluation and teleological evaluation both affect ethical judgment and teleological evaluation independently affect ethical intention. To some extent, it can explain that audit staffs have clearly judged some behavior unethical but still engaged in auditing unethical behavior. In addition, audit staffs of different locus of control make ethical decisions by different orientation of ethical evaluation. Reward and sanction for behavior are also expected to affect the auditor’s ethical decision-making. We build a theoretical model of ethical decision-making in the audit environment and make a few assumptions. Then, use scenario simulation and questionnaire to get research data, use SPSS 17.0 and Amos 17.0 for statistical analysis, and finally draw the main conclusions as follows:(1) Auditors deontological evaluation has a significant positive impact on ethical judgment and teleological evaluation has a significant positive impact on ethical intention. Teleological evaluation of auditors of external control has a significant positive impact on ethical judgment but deontological evaluation of auditors of internal control doesn’t.(2) In the formation of ethical judgment, auditor of external control based more on teleological evaluation than auditors of internal control and auditor of internal control based more on deontological evaluation than auditors of external control; In the formation of ethical intention, auditor of internal control based more on ethical judgment than auditors of external control and auditors of external control based more on teleological evaluation than auditors of internal control.(3) The auditors expected reward and sanction have a significant impact on ethical intention, but they don’t impact ethical judgment significantly.Based on the above conclusions, we suggest accounting firms develop ethical ethics, strengthen training of the audit guide and guide deontological evaluation orientation of audit staff; accounting firms should measure the individual locus of control when hiring audit staffs, and recruit, retain and enhance the more internal control-oriented auditors; Suggest accounting firms/Certified Accountants Association/China Securities Regulatory Commission and other institutions should strengthen the supervision and inspection of the auditors and set appropriate penalties for auditors.