In this paper, I report on the results of an empirical examination of cultural influences on professional judgments of Australian, Indian, and Chinese-Malaysian accountants in relation to whistle-blowing as an internal control mechanism. Australia serves as a proxy for the Anglo-American cluster of countries comprising the U.S., U.K., and Canada, while India and Malaysia represent the Asian-Indian and Chinese clusters, respectively. I draw on cultural characteristics and differences among these societies to formulate hypotheses that Australian professional accountants are both more likely and more accepting of engaging in whistle-blowing as an internal control mechanism than Chinese-Malaysian and Indian professional accountants. Data were gathered through a survey questionnaire administered to samples of senior professional accountants from Big 6 (at the time of data collection) firms in Australia, India, and Malaysia. The questionnaire comprised two whistle-blowing scenarios, and used both single-attribute and multidimensional attribute measures of professional judgment. The results support my hypotheses about differences in Australian compared to Indian and Chinese-Malaysian professional judgments. Additionally, the results support my expectation that multidimensional attribute measures would have greater explanatory power than single-attribute measures, and would provide insight into complex elements involved in ethical and professional judgments in cross-cultural settings. My findings from this study have implications for the management of local and multinational enterprises. Enterprises that aim to improve effectiveness in their control systems or achieve similar levels of reliability across divisions in various countries need to implement control systems that are compatible with cultural values. Specifically, the results suggest that compared to Indian and Chinese cultures, whistle-blowing as an internal control mechanism is likely to be more effective in Australian culture.

Traditionally, mainstream cross‐cultural accounting research has applied a societal norms and values measure to the examination of differences in culture. This approach is limited, however, because it effectively disfranchises the culture of minority groups such as indigenous peoples within nations. Our paper provides evidence of cultural differences between indigenous Australian values and the Western capitalist values implicit in the language of accounting and accountability. Utilising an alternative yin/yang framework developed for accounting by Hines, we argue that the core indigenous yin values of sharing, relatedness and kinship obligations inherent in indigenous conceptions of work and land, are incompatible with the yang values of quantification, objectivity, efficiency, productivity, reason and logic imposed by accounting and accountability systems. This conflict of values then brings into question the impact of accounting and accountability systems on the indigenous peoples of Australia whose beliefs, norms and values are organised differently. The need to address such a conflict is critical for all of the world’s indigenous peoples. Perhaps even more so for the Australian indigenous peoples because of the insistence by governments, at both the state and federal levels, that the extreme social and economic disadvantages experienced by the Australian indigenous peoples can be dissipated by the imposition of strict financial accountability measures for all indigenous organisations and representative bodies. We argue that the demonstrated conflict of values is a significant reason for the inability of accounting and accountability systems to deliver such social and economic outcomes. The research findings of non‐indigenous researchers are largely drawn on in this paper. The two authors of this paper are not indigenous people and therefore we are speaking “of” indigenous culture and not “speaking for” them.

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This study examines cultural influences on professional judgments of Australian, Indian and Chinese Malaysian accountants in relation to auditor-client conflict resolution. The study draws on cultural characteristics of, and differences among, these societies to formulate hypotheses that Australian accountants are less likely to resolve audit conflicts by acceding to clients than Indian and Chinese Malaysian accountants, and are also less accepting of resolving audit conflicts in this way. Data are gathered through a survey questionnaire administered to samples of senior accountants from "big-six" (at the time of data collection) firms in Australia, India and Malaysia. The questionnaire comprised an auditor-client conflict scenario, and used both single-item and multidimensional [specifically, the Multidimensional Ethics Measure of Robin (1988, 1990)] measures of professional judgment. The results support the hypotheses about differences in Australian compared to Indian and Chinese Malaysian professional judgments. Additionally, the results support the Multidimensional Ethics Measure as having greater explanatory power than a single-item measure. The results have implications for the international harmonisation of accounting and auditing standards, and for audit procedures and codes of conduct in international accounting firms.

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