The International Ethics Standards Board for Accountants (IESBA) is on a mission to make ethics a top priority on the agenda of all players in the financial and non-financial ecosystem.

During a recent visit to Australia, IESBA chair Gabriela Figueiredo Dias said she’d like to see members of the accounting profession become “ethical champions” – taking ethics into the centre of everything they do and embracing the opportunity to make a difference.

Here, Figueiredo Dias shares her thoughts on the current state of the profession and IESBA’s key priorities for the future.

What is your view on the application of ethics within the profession right now?

We’re somewhere in between being a little bit concerned about the urgent need to uphold ethics in the profession and being very positive about the awareness of the importance of ethics in the profession. Discussions are being held, developments are being observed, and I think we can be positive and optimistic about the future.

The IESBA's Strategy and Work Plan for 2024–2027 has recently been finalised; what are some of the key takeaways that accountants in Australia and New Zealand should know about?

What I think firms and professional accountants should retain is, one: the importance of trying to set a very robust and good culture and governance, so as to avoid unethical behaviours getting a space there, to flourish there, because the right instruments and the right tools and the right culture are not in place.

The second, which is related, is that non-professional accountants (who offer sustainability assurance services) be subject to the code of ethics. IESBA develops ethics standards for professional accountants, but there are other people doing the same services. It’s in the interest of everyone, namely the profession, the users of the information and for the public interest, that there is a common, consistent framework applying to all of them.

What is IESBA doing in the tax-planning space?

New international ethics standards for tax planning were recently published and we are now making professional accountants aware of the existence of these standards and making them understand how they work.

The idea of these standards is to provide all professional accountants with a very robust framework to help them navigate the ethical dilemmas that they may face when providing tax-planning services. It’s not about what’s forbidden or what’s legal; our space is what’s in between, what we call the grey area, which speaks to those moments when the tax-planning provider knows that something could be considered legal or illegal, but beyond the legality of the situation, there are ethical considerations to be taken.

This is exactly what we are trying to help professional accountants with and to protect them – to protect the public interest, of course, to protect their clients and to protect themselves against the consequences of any situations where they provide tax-planning services that could be considered not only illegal but, more than that, unethical.

What impact do you think these new standards will have on accountants, day to day?

I think they’re going to have a very positive impact. There are some situations where professional accountants may think that this is an additional burden, but it’s really about putting in a very objective and clear way a certain approach that they should take to avoid significant problems.

Hear more from IESBA chair Gabriela Figueiredo Dias on this episode of the Small Firm, Big Impact podcast.