Professional Ethics Standards and Trust in Financial Reporting Systems

Abstract

This research investigates the underexplored intersection of formalized professional ethics
standards and the computational trust mechanisms within automated financial reporting
systems. While extensive literature exists on ethics in accounting and on technical trust
in information systems, a significant gap persists regarding how codified ethical principles—specifically those mandated by professional bodies like the AICPA and IFAC—can
be operationalized as explicit, measurable inputs to enhance the perceived and actual reliability of algorithmic financial reporting platforms. Current approaches to trust in financial
technology often focus on cryptographic security, audit trails, or data integrity checks, treating ethical considerations as an external, human-centric overlay rather than an embedded
system attribute. This paper posits a novel methodology: the Ethical Trust Quantification
(ETQ) framework, which translates discrete provisions from major professional ethics codes
(e.g., integrity, objectivity, professional competence, confidentiality) into quantifiable metrics that can influence system behavior, user interface design, and transparency reporting.
Through a mixed-methods approach involving a simulated financial reporting environment,
we model how the explicit integration of ETQ metrics affects stakeholder trust perceptions
among three distinct groups: auditors, financial analysts, and institutional investors. Our
results, derived from controlled experiments and survey data, indicate that systems featuring
visible, ethics-based trust indicators elicit a 34.7% higher mean trust score compared to systems with identical technical robustness but without explicit ethical signaling. Furthermore,
the research identifies a previously unreported moderating effect: the impact of embedded
ethics signaling is most pronounced in scenarios involving complex, judgment-based financial
estimates rather than routine transactional reporting. The study concludes that the formalization and system-level integration of professional ethics standards represent a critical, yet
largely untapped, lever for building trust in increasingly autonomous financial ecosystems.
This cross-disciplinary contribution bridges accounting ethics, human-computer interaction,
and trustworthy AI, proposing a concrete path to harden the socio-technical fabric of financial reporting.