2026 Ethics Symposium

Stay tuned! Speaker announcements coming soon.

Panel 1 — TBD

Panel 2 — TBD

Practitioner discussants — TBD

Thursday, September 17

Paper One:  Do Public Firms Prioritize Domestic Shareholders Over Foreign Stakeholders:  Evidence from Regulatory Arbitration

ABSTRACT

Corporations increasingly use investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) to challenge foreign regulations through international arbitration, raising concerns about corporate influence over government policymaking. Using comprehensive data on 1,023 ISDS cases, we document three findings. First, among firms that file ISDS cases, public firms are more likely than private firms to challenge industry-wide regulations, while showing no differential propensity to challenge firm-specific rules. This pattern is consistent with public firms having larger industry stakes that reduce free-riding incentives. Second, industry-wide challenges filed by public firms take significantly longer to resolve. This difference persists under identical investment treaties, a pattern more consistent with regulatory delays than case complexity. Third, cross-sectional tests reveal these patterns are strongest in countries with strong shareholder protections and for regulations protecting foreign stakeholders. Stock markets respond positively to ISDS filings, particularly for challenges targeting stakeholderprotective regulations. Our findings suggest public firms use ISDS in ways that prioritize domestic shareholder interests over foreign stakeholder welfare.

Paper Two: Professional Judgment in Technology-Mediated Auditing: The Symmetry of Justification 

ABSTRACT

Technology-mediated auditing increasingly relies on analytical tools that generate and evaluate audit evidence, yet the conditions under which technology-generated outputs provide sufficient support for professional judgment remain unclear. Synthesizing the Population Testing (PT) literature through the Technology–Organization–Environment framework, we identify three justification pillars—Evidence Suitability, Evaluative Capacity, and Accountability Frameworks—that collectively support auditors’ reliance on technology-generated outputs. When all three pillars provide sufficient support, professional judgment achieves a Symmetry of Justification. When any one pillar is insufficient, the resulting asymmetry creates an Ethical Tension Zone: Technological Stagnation, Accountability Decoupling, or the Responsibility Gap. The framework reframes technology-mediated auditing as a problem of professional justification rather than technology adoption alone and extends beyond PT to emerging audit technologies. It identifies coordinated responsible action by audit practitioners, accounting educators, standard-setters and regulators, and researchers as necessary to preserve professional judgment and, ultimately, public trust.

Paper Three: Auditing the client’s black box: The effects of client AI tool human likeness and disclosed model settings on auditor skepticism

ABSTRACT

Technology-mediated auditing increasingly relies on analytical tools that generate and evaluate audit evidence, yet the conditions under which technology-generated outputs provide sufficient support for professional judgment remain unclear. Synthesizing the Population Testing (PT) literature through the Technology–Organization–Environment framework, we identify three justification pillars—Evidence Suitability, Evaluative Capacity, and Accountability Frameworks—that collectively support auditors’ reliance on technology-generated outputs. When all three pillars provide sufficient support, professional judgment achieves a Symmetry of Justification. When any one pillar is insufficient, the resulting asymmetry creates an Ethical Tension Zone: Technological Stagnation, Accountability Decoupling, or the Responsibility Gap. The framework reframes technology-mediated auditing as a problem of professional justification rather than technology adoption alone and extends beyond PT to emerging audit technologies. It identifies coordinated responsible action by audit practitioners, accounting educators, standard-setters and regulators, and researchers as necessary to preserve professional judgment and, ultimately, public trust.

Paper Four: Enforcement Against Unfair Competition and Peer Firms' After-Tax Return Maximization: Evidence from the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act

ABSTRACT:

This paper examines whether enforcement actions against firms engaged in unfair business practices affect peer firms' ability to maximize after-tax returns, which captures the overall effectiveness of both firms’ operating and tax planning decisions using limited resources (Scholes et al., 2014). Prior work studies operating performance and tax planning separately, yet shareholders bear their combined effect and firms trade one against the other to maximize after-tax returns under limited resources. Peer firms represent a larger group than the enforced firms but have been less studied and largely overlooked in policymaking. Exploiting Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) enforcement actions and using a stacked difference-in-differences design that accommodates staggered enforcement timing, I find that peer firms become more effective at maximizing after-tax returns following enforcement. I further examine the mechanisms and find that, operationally, peers become more competitive and less financially distressed. From a tax planning perspective, peers' average tax planning level does not change significantly, but their tax planning becomes more efficient after I control for operational efficiency and effective tax rates, suggesting reduced non-tax costs of tax planning. These findings indicate that enforcement targeting firms’ unfair behavior has positive externalities on peers’ overall performance through both operational and effective tax planning strategies. Notably, the paper highlights the importance of considering both direct and spillover effects when assessing the trade-offs of regulatory enforcement, showing that enforcement against unfair competition generates positive externalities for peer firms. These findings also speak directly to the ongoing debates over FCPA enforcement.
 

Friday, September 18

Paper Five: Green Public Procurement: International Evidence

ABSTRACT

Green public procurement functions as an accountability mechanism through which governments embed environmental obligations into contractual relationships with supplier firms. Drawing on accountability theory and governmentality, we analyze 27,173 firm-year observations across more than 50 countries. We identify three dynamics governing contract award: accountability capture (political connections secure disproportionate access), purposive accountability (contracts target higher-emitting firms for transformation), and procedural accountability (prior procurement experience confers institutional legitimacy). Green public procurement participation is associated with subsequent reductions in carbon emissions and the disengagement from non-compliant suppliers, a pattern we theorize as cascading governmentality, in which accountability obligations propagate through supply chains. A difference-in-differences analysis around the EU Renewable Energy Directive corroborates the emissions findings. We contribute by demonstrating that GPP constitutes a distinctive contractual accountability mechanism, that environmental accounting information actively shapes the procurement process, and that contractual accountability propagates through supply chains.
 

Paper Six: Monkey see, monkey don’t: Celerity, certainty, and severity of tax evasion punishment

ABSTRACT

Tax authorities rely in part on a deterrence approach to encourage tax compliance. However, little is known about the key elements that form perceptions of deterrence and how these elements independently and jointly influence taxpayers. In a tax evasion setting, we examine the trio of elements in perceptual deterrence theory – celerity, certainty, and severity – and how they influence observers’ tax compliance reporting intentions. Celerity refers to the swiftness of punishment implementation; certainty is the notion that an authority will enforce the law; and severity pertains to propriety of punishment. We conduct two 2x2x2 experiments using adult Canadians as subjects. In the first experiment (n=403), an individual is punished for tax evasion. In the second experiment (n=404), a corporation is punished for tax evasion. When an individual is punished, we find a positive impact of certainty on observers’ tax compliance intentions. When a corporation is punished, we find an interactive effect of all three elements. We interpret this latter finding to mean that when corporations are punished leniently, individuals’ compliance increases when certainty is high, regardless of celerity. However, when corporations are punished harshly, individuals’ compliance increases when certainty is high and when celerity is slow. A follow-up survey (n=489) suggests that observers respond favourably to lengthy corporate tax evasion prosecutions when the punishment is severe and certain because they know corporations have more resources for legal defenses and that individual decision makers in corporations can dilute or shield their personal accountability.
 

Paper Seven: The Effects Anxiety and Internal Audit Oversight on the Fraudulent Decision-Making of Subordinate Employees

ABSTRACT

While personal characteristics can influence unethical behavior, accounting research has not explored how anxiety impacts fraudulent judgments, despite the prevalence of heightened anxiety in modern society, including in organizational settings. Motivated by psychology theory linking anxiety and unethical behavior, this paper experimentally examines how both trait anxiety, a fixed dispositional personality component, and state anxiety, which increases in response to various external stimuli, influence fraudulent decision-making by lower-level employees. We find that higher state anxiety, elicited from supervisor pressure to meet company goals, increases fraud likelihood. However, trait anxiety moderates this relationship such that fraud likelihood is highest when individuals with low trait anxiety experience higher state anxiety, suggesting these individuals are especially prone to the detrimental effects of heightened state anxiety on behavior. A second experiment finds that strong, relative to weak, internal audit oversight is associated with lower state anxiety and lower fraud likelihood when supervisor
pressure is high. A third experiment finds that strong internal audit oversight reduces anxiety and fraud likelihood at both high and low levels of supervisor pressure, but that the reduction is most pronounced in participants who report higher levels of psychological comfort from the internal audit presence. This study provides insights on traits influencing fraud and on mental health characteristics in the workplace, while highlighting the importance of internal audit as a mechanism to reduce anxiety and unethical behavior. It also contributes to the growing research on the complex interaction of trait and state anxiety, which has broad organizational implications.
 

The Centre for Accounting Ethics was established in 1991 through a grant from the Auditing and Accounting Development Fund. The Centre supports projects designed to enhance the teaching of ethics to accounting students and the research of ethical issues in accounting. The Centre also organizes biennial symposiums and annual workshops on accounting ethics.

We look forward to receiving your submissions and seeing you at the symposium!

Sincerely,

Krista Fiolleau
Associate Professor and Director
Centre for Accounting Ethics

Call for PhD Research Presentations from Canadian Doctoral Students:

The Centre for Accounting Ethics invites students presently registered in a Canadian Doctoral Program to submit a short proposal for consideration for inclusion in a PhD Research Presentation Session at the Symposium. We encourage students who have a research project focused on any accounting ethics topic to submit a proposal.

Submission Guidelines:

The proposal should be up to 1000 words, and address one or more of the following:

• A research project for which data has already been collected at least in pilot form.
• A research project design that includes a description of the literature from which the project flows.
• A theoretical problem with proposed research design directions.

Papers should be submitted electronically as a PDF file to Jenny Rothwell at jrothwell@uwaterloo.ca by June 1, 2026. Abstracts (proposals) will be subject to blind review and notice of acceptance will be sent by July 15, 2026. Should the abstract be accepted, students will be expected to prepare a poster for the Symposium and be available at the Symposium to make a brief 5-minute presentation during the conference and to discuss its contents during a poster session. The students will be invited to attend the full Symposium and reasonable financial support will be available for those attending from outside of Toronto.

About the Centre for Accounting Ethics

The Centre for Accounting Ethics was established in 1991 through a grant from the Auditing and Accounting Development Fund. The Centre supports projects designed to enhance the teaching of ethics to accounting students and the research of ethical issues in accounting. The Centre also organizes biennial symposiums and annual workshops on accounting ethics. For more information about the Centre, please visit https://uwaterloo.ca/centre-for-accounting-ethics/ .

We look forward to receiving your submissions and seeing you at the symposium!

Sincerely,

Krista Fiolleau

Associate Professor and Director

Centre for Accounting Ethics