Question

Explain ethical considerations in relation to tax practitioners conflict of interest, confidentiality and disclosure requirements

Answer 1

Ethical consideration and tax pratitioners:
The determination of expense issues introduce noteworthy moral predicaments for impose professionals. The nature and degree of moral concerns has essential ramifications both for the assessment calling and expense organization. The motivation behind this paper is to research whether there are noteworthy contrasts in the moral view of expense operators and Big 4 specialists. Plan/system/approach – A mail poll was utilized to evoke information with regards to the recurrence and significance of a scope of moral issues in impose hone. Discoveries – Both gatherings evaluated very those issues which relate essentially to the lead of expert duties. Guaranteeing "sensible enquiries" were taken, keeping up a proper level of "specialized capability" and "proceeding to act" for a customer, when not fitting, were of most worry to professionals. Research restrictions/suggestions – The paper centers around the assessment calling in Western Australia, so the results may not be generalisable somewhere else in either Australia or whatever remains of the Asia-Pacific locale. Reasonable ramifications – There was a noteworthy distinction between the two gatherings as to "escape clause chasing". This has suggestions for customer desires of elective parts: as "charge exploiter" for the Big 4, and as "assess implementer/consistence" for the expense operator. Innovation/esteem – There have been couple of exact examinations announcing the scope of moral issues experienced in assess hone. To date the writing tends to regard the assessment calling as a homogenous gathering, while this examination exhibits contrasts in moral viewpoint between sole-experts and substantial worldwide open bookkeeping firms.
Ethical considerations can be addressed at individual and at societal
levels. The way that individuals are affected by the conduct of others merits
ethical consideration. The effects on a person of being informed that his
father died of Huntington's disease (and that, therefore, there is a fifty
percent chance that he has inherited the genetic mutation) can be personally
and profoundly harmful. The risk of harm to that person becomes an essential
ethical consideration in deciding what information to disclose and how to
disclose it. That risk will need to be balanced against the ethical interests
in respecting the autonomy of the person affected, and their choice about
whether to know or not.
Revealing genetic information has important ethical implications for
individuals as family members. They are vulnerable to the effects of the
information on their self-perception and disclosure of information on familial
relationships and sense of privacy. A grandfather’s discovery that he carries
the genetic mutation that impairs his grandson may change and harm his
perception of himself and his relationships with his descendants. He may also
be concerned about how the privacy of this information will be protected and
that the information not lead to differential treatment of himself or his
descendants. In these ways, individual interests are related to family and societal
interests.
The way that a society governs the disclosure of such information and
the extent to which its laws or other regulatory frameworks control what can be
disclosed, express the way that a society balances personal risks and interests
against other family, community or societal risks and interests. To prohibit
disclosure of genetic information, in order to prevent the kind of harm that a
person at risk of Huntington's disease might suffer, may not adequately reflect
the needs of others. From balancing ethical considerations, flexible solutions
may be derived that accommodate the interests of individuals and the needs of
families and society.
In this way, ethical considerations reflect the kind of society in which
we live or would choose to live. As DP 66 explained:
While the term ‘ethics’ is used
in a wide variety of senses, its meaning consistently relates to an ‘ethos’ or
‘way of life.’ The way of life of a society or community can be reflected in the laws
it makes.
The basis for those laws can be described as the ethos of the society so that
they express that society’s ethics. Indeed, the answers to some of the
questions posed in this Inquiry are already provided by existing laws. For
example, privacy laws prohibit the collection, use or disclosure of genetic
information without consent, except in limited circumstances. Similarly,
anti-discrimination laws prohibit the reliance on genetic information in ways
that are unfair
It can be argued that ethics expresses the fundamental considerations
that inform any societal decisions. Ethics brings together and integrates
relevant interests, individual, familial, community and societal. Ethics can
have an integrative function in the context of biotechnology:
Ethical judgements are not
stand-alone judgements, rather they are integrative, holistic, or ‘all things
considered’ judgements. The Canadian moral theorist Thomas Hurka put this point
well in a book on the ethics of global warming:
An ethical judgement about climate policy is not just one
judgement among many, to be weighed against economic, political, and other
judgements in deciding how, all things considered, to act. It is itself an
all-things-considered judgement, which takes account of economic and other
factors. If a climate policy is right, it is simply right; if it is ethically
wrong, it is wrong, period.
That is, in making an ethical
judgement about global warming or biotechnology, ‘ethics’ is not one factor to
be considered alongside other factors, like legal, scientific
Ethics also contains statements about the kinds of justifications that
are used in normative statements. For instance, respecting a person’s autonomy
is a principle of ‘principlist ethics’. Acting to achieve the best outcome is,
on the other hand, a justification based on consequences and not on principles.
These justifications are referred to as ‘consequentialist ethics’. Much of the
content of this chapter uses normative statements. The chapter describes the
range of ethical considerations that are likely to be drawn on in making and
justifying decisions about genetic information. The regulatory responses
recommended in this Report to protect genetic information reflect a balance
among these considerations.