Exploring Public Accountants’ Lived Moral Experience in Ethical Decision-Making within Corporate Audit Practice

Abstract

Accounting as a professional discipline operates within complex ethical, social, and organizational contexts where professionals must balance integrity, responsibility, and client expectations. In recent years, research has begun to acknowledge that ethical behavior in accounting involves not only compliance with standards but also the lived moral experience of practitioners when facing ethical dilemmas. However, existing studies have primarily employed normative or quantitative approaches, leaving limited understanding of how accountants subjectively interpret and internalize moral conflict in real practice. This study addresses that gap by exploring the lived experiences of public accountants through a hermeneutic phenomenological approach to uncover how they make sense of moral tension within their professional world.  To ensure methodological rigor, this study employed systematic semi-structured interviewing, iterative coding, and an audit trail throughout the analytic process. Using semi-structured, in-depth interviews with twelve certified public accountants from large accounting firms, data were analyzed using Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) to identify shared meanings and themes. The analysis revealed four essential dimensions of moral experience: negotiating integrity under pressure, emotional weight of ethical dilemmas, influence of organizational culture, and reconciliation of professional ethics with personal values. These findings show that moral reasoning in accounting is not merely a rational process but an interpretive and emotional engagement shaped by professional context and self-reflection. The study contributes a more humanized understanding of ethics in accounting by emphasizing how moral awareness develops through interpretation rather than rule compliance. Its implications extend to ethics education, organizational culture design, and future research exploring moral agency across cultural contexts.