The Role of Perceived Pressure on Accountants' Ethical Beliefs in Financial Reporting

The purpose of this study is to investigate the effect of perceived ethical pressure on ethical beliefs in financial reporting (fraudulent financial reporting for significant and insignificant amounts, opportunistic and efficient earnings management). This research is an applied research. The statistical population of this research is people working in the accounting profession, including financial managers, accounting supervisors, and accounting experts of private companies and companies admitted to the Tehran Stock Exchange. The data of the research was collected through a questionnaire in a random way and using the structural equation model with the approach of Partial Least Squares (PLS) was analyzed. To determine the sample size, ten times the highest index of the measurement model was used, and 201 people were selected as the sample size. Findings show that perceived ethical pressure has a negative and significant effect on ethical beliefs. Ethical beliefs also have a negative and significant effect on opportunistic and efficient earnings management, fraudulent financial reporting for significant and insignificant amount. Therefore, the pressure perceived by accountants creates stress in them and prepares the ground to neglect ethical approaches and affects their performance. It also alters one's beliefs and causes questionable behaviors in financial reporting.Numerous studies have shown that companies manipulate financial statements to achieve their goals through Income management and fraud. But what is unknown; is behavioral factors that psychologically influence the person to manipulate the financial statements. Therefore, there is a need to better understand the moral nature of a person and the factors related to it that encourage people to abandon moral beliefs and participate in unethical behaviors. This study addresses this research gap in the literature by revealing this unknown aspect of behavior on which there are incomplete studies.