Majority of accountants agree AI is profession’s top ethical challenge
- Key insight: Find out how artificial intelligence transformed the ethical landscape for global accounting professionals.
- What’s at stake: Accountants risk losing professional judgment, accountability, and public trust as technological pressures mount.
- Supporting data: 61% of surveyed professionals identified one primary issue as their leading ethical challenge.
A comfortable majority of accountants agree that artificial intelligence represents the foremost ethical challenge to the profession today. This is according to recent data from the
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The survey found that AI use in 2026 was cited by 61% of respondents as accounting’s leading ethical challenge, a dramatic leap from 2024 when only 32% said so, blowing ahead of the previous top items of ethical leadership and ethical culture; both had been cited by 41% of 2024 poll respondents. However, they remain major ethical challenges, with ethical leadership ranked second at 43% and ethical culture ranked third at 39%.
The report noted these top three issues may not be as separate as they seem. Many AI concerns were simultaneously leadership and culture concerns as well, as they had less to do with the technology itself and more with how it is used in an organization and to what ends. Practical concerns center around accountability, transparency, explainability, bias, confidentiality and the preservation of professional judgment. Current ethical risk is shaped not only by new technologies, according to the ACCA, but by the organizational environments in which decisions are made.
“Both our quantitative and qualitative findings suggest that these challenge areas should be read as a connected risk picture rather than a simple ranking. AI use stands out as the most consistently selected challenge — but ethical leadership, ethical culture, geopolitics and fraud remain strongly present around it. This matters because it indicates that the profession is not dealing with a single-issue AI use problem. Instead, AI use has become the leading expression of a wider ethical landscape shaped by governance, accountability, commercial pressure and organizational behavior. While the use of AI is the most consistent ethical concern across our research, secondary pressures vary by context,” said the report.
This lines up with ACCA research, which identified ethical AI pressure points like overreliance, weak verification, unclear accountability, confidentiality risks, limited explainability, and inadequate governance. This connects with wider findings that identify opacity and the accountability gap as core ethical risks in AI-enabled accounting, pointing to the value of clearer governance, documentation and assessment where AI systems influence decisions. Human accountability and transparency, therefore, are vital to ethical AI use, according to the ACCA.
Similar thoughts emerged during the accompanying roundtable discussions. While accountants recognized the value in AI use, participants were clear that responsibility remains human. AI-assisted outputs still require review, challenge, documentation and the ability to explain how conclusions were reached. In that sense, accountants said AI increases the need for professional judgement — rather than reducing it.
And so in the face of these challenges, accountants were not looking to discard AI entirely — the poll found that 72% of the respondents agree that AI tools enhance the quality and efficiency of their work as an accounting professional. Instead, they believed the answer lay in training, education and professional skepticism: 89% said they apply professional skepticism and ethical judgment when using AI in their work, and 72% said strong AI literacy helps them use AI responsibly, recognize ethical risks, apply fundamental principles and maintain professional standards.
The ACCA report, overall, found that technology changes how professional judgment is exercised and does not replace the need for it, so stakeholders need to work toward building ethical capability for technology-enabled work. The report said there is a shared responsibility among professional bodies and educators, who should strengthen learning on AI use, technology risk, skepticism and judgment; employers and firms should establish clear policies, controls and lines of accountability for the use of AI and related technologies; and policymakers and standard setters should continue updating principles-based standards and guidance to ensure they remain workable as technology develops.
“The ethical challenge is not whether it will be used, but whether organizations and professionals can use it in ways that preserve judgement, accountability and trust,” said the report.
Other challenges
AI was not the only ethical challenge in accounting. Poll respondents also cited the geopolitical environment (34%), fraud (33%), sustainability and greenwashing risk (21%), whistleblower protections (21%), technology in general (18%), data analytics (9%), health and safety (6%) and globalization (6%).
Whale confidence in their ability to meet ethical challenges remains strong, it is not as strong as it has been before: Survey data shows that 89% of respondents agree they have the skills to identify, assess, evaluate and minimize threats to the fundamental principles, but this is lower than the 94% who said the same thing in 2024. This might be connected with another poll finding, which is that 50% of respondents agree ethical challenges have become more difficult to resolve in the last three years, and 53% report witnessing unethical behavior in that period. One in four (22%) report having been placed under pressure to act unethically.
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