#professional-ethics

#professional-ethics

My husband of 20-plus years received a Facebook message from an old high school girlfriend. The message was wildly inappropriate (extremely risque) and ended with her offering to fly out and meet up if he ever wanted to. When my husband saw the message, he read it to me and to his best friend, who happened to be in town visiting. Those two guys were laughing so hard they were crying.

In the world of business, integrity is everything. There has to be a baseline level of trust, or the entire system collapses. That's why I make honesty a top priority in my professional life, even in situations where bending the truth a little would be to my personal benefit. For example, I would never misrepresent my level of expertise when applying for a job, even if I needed the work to keep my family from going hungry.

The move from the association came weeks after the emails became public. Summers, a former Harvard president and US Treasury Secretary under Bill Clinton, has faced sharp scrutiny in recent weeks after a trove of recently released emails detailed his years of correspondence with Epstein that continued until July 5, 2019 - the day before the disgraced financier was arrested on federal sex-trafficking charges.

My husband is a rising executive for an international company. He does a lot of interviews for new hires. The other day he said to me that he was planning to have lunch at Hooters with a potential employee. When I voiced my concern about his choice of restaurant, he patronizingly said he met his boss at a Hooters. I doubt that, but as he was dressing to go, I reiterated my concern. He left for work without even his usual kiss goodbye.

The pace of change in the business world is relentless, and accountants are continually challenged to adapt. Evolving risks, shifting business models, emerging technologies-especially the rapid adoption of artificial intelligence (AI)-and increasing regulatory complexity require professionals in this field to be agile lifelong learners and critical thinkers. The demands on accountants continue to evolve, but this is also what drives opportunity. Today, accountants are often expected to go beyond understanding the numbers by providing insights and interpretation within a rapidly changing environment.

With artificial intelligence integrating - or infiltrating - into every corner of our lives, some less-than-ethical mental health professionals have begun using it in secret, causing major trust issues for the vulnerable clients who pay them for their sensitivity and confidentiality. As MIT Technology Review reports, therapists have used OpenAI's ChatGPT and other large language models (LLMs) for everything from email and message responses to, in one particularly egregious case, suggesting questions to ask a patient mid-session.