The IMA (Institute of Management Accountants) is a professional association of management accountants with 100,000 members. It provides a panel for research, development, education, and knowledge for high ethics and best business practices in accounting for its members.
To maintain its forum, they introduced the IMA statement of ethical professional practices for the management accountants.
The IMA statement commits to advocating the highest standards of ethical business for the members of IMA and the other professions at large. This organization was found in 1919.
The IMA has developed the statement of ethical professional practice to guide the management accountants. These ethical practices are based on certain principles.
Standard requirements of IMA
- Competence: Strengthen the skills and knowledge of the members; perform the professional duties in obedience to the laws and regulations, make proposals that are exact and timely and recognize the risk and manage it.
- Confidentiality: The information should be kept secret unless it is said to disclose legally and stop oneself from using the confidential information illegally or ethically.
- Integrity: Avoid the conflicts among self and such conduct of activities that will prevent the ethical performance of the professional duties. Avoid all the activities that would discredit the profession and perform ethics that would increase professionalism.
- Credibility: Communicate fluently manner and provide the relevant information to the users that could influence their understandings of the report. If any delay then reports it to the organization according to the law or the organization’s policies.
Principles of the IMA Statement
IMA has developed these principles to guide the management accountants. The principles of the IMA statement of ethical professional practice are similar to the principles of AICPA.
These principles are:
- Honesty: The members and the management accountants should be honest about their work and ethics.
- Fairness: It has an important role in accounting. The auditor’s report presents fair results.
- Objectivity: The objectivity imposes that the reports of the accountants should be bias-free and judgments should not comprise of the conflict of interest.
- Responsibility: One of the basic requirements of IMA “responsibility.” The accountants and members of the IMA should be responsible for their work.
Resolution of the ethical issues
While performing the ethical professional practices, members experience some unethical issues. In such cases, they should not ignore these and find the resolutions for these issues.
When these unethical issues occur while practicing the IMA statement ethical practices, then the members should follow the policies established by his/her organization.
If the organization does not have the policies established then the members can follow:
- The issue should be discussed with the supervisor. If the supervisor is not involved or not available then present this issue to the next level. If then also the satisfactory resolution is not obtained then consider the issue with the next level of management till the satisfactory resolution is obtained.
- Consult an own attorney as to the rights concerning ethical conduct.
- Justify the ethical issue with the IMA ethics counselor or an advisor.