'Technology throws up fresh ethical challenges for accountants'

Artificial intelligence and other emerging technologies throw up fresh ethical challenges for accountants who need to be aware of the pitfalls, says RMIT honorary professor of accounting Brendan O'Connell. Speaking on the latest Accountants Daily podcast alongside CPA Australia ethics policy senior manager Keddie Waller, Mr O'Connell said AI brought issues such as privacy and consent to the fore. "If you're using AI to solve a problem relating to a client, if you feed that into AI then it becomes a public document. So there's a privacy issue there," he said. "If you're analysing the data of a client, you want to make sure that you've got their consent to use it for particular purposes." Ms Waller said the accounting ethical principles, spelled out in APES 110, remained unchanged, but special guidance was being developed to cover emerging issues. "What the code has done over time in trying to respond to that is provide more guidance, more contemporary issues for … professional accountants to think about in how to apply those fundamental principles to the situations they're facing," Ms Waller said.