Artificial Intelligence, Accounting Ethics, and Trust in Financial Reporting: Developing an Ethical AI Governance Framework

Abstract

Artificial intelligence (AI) is fundamentally transforming accounting practice by displacing traditional data-processing tasks, augmenting auditing functions, and reshaping the professional competency requirements of financial reporting. While these technological developments generate substantial efficiency gains, they simultaneously introduce unprecedented ethical challenges, including algorithmic opacity, accountability diffusion, bias propagation in automated judgment, and the erosion of professional scepticism — that threaten the integrity of financial reporting and the public trust upon which the accounting profession's social licence to operate ultimately depends. This paper develops a rigorous, theoretically grounded analysis of the intersection between artificial intelligence and accounting ethics, drawing on institutional theory, agency theory, virtue ethics, and the stakeholder trust framework to diagnose how AI adoption reconfigures the ethical architecture of financial reporting and to prescribe the governance, professional, and regulatory responses required to safeguard ethical standards and trust in this transformed environment. The paper makes three original contributions: first, it develops a multi-dimensional taxonomy of AI-related ethical risks in accounting, distinguishing technical, professional, and systemic risk categories; second, it proposes the Ethical AI Accounting Governance Framework (EAAGF), an original implementation model that integrates algorithmic governance, professional ethics renewal, regulatory adaptation, and stakeholder assurance mechanisms; and third, it situates these contributions within a comparative empirical analysis of AI adoption experiences across major accounting contexts, integrating evidence from surveys, regulatory reports, and case illustrations. The paper argues that the central challenge is not whether AI will transform accounting — this is already occurring — but whether the profession, regulators, and organisations can collectively construct the ethical governance infrastructure required to ensure that transformation advances rather than undermines the accountability, transparency, and trust that constitute the profession's foundational social purpose.