“…This significant result on the effect of problem severity of the accounting task on the extent of aggressive reporting behaviour of accountants is in line with results reported in previous studies which demonstrate that accountants' decision-making behaviour in a situation involving ethical issues is strongly determined by the severity of the moral problems that present in that parti cular situation (Arel et al, 2012;Cieslewicz, 2014;Musbah et al, 2016;Oboh, 2019). This finding is also similar to the outcomes of prior research examining ethical decisions in various contexts such as operations ma nagement (Valentine & Hollingworth, 2012), sales activities (Rokhmania, 2013;Valentine & Bateman, 2011;Yang et al, 2017) and purchasing decisions (Husser et al, 2019). More impor-tantly, the finding on the effect of problem severity on aggressive reporting behaviour lends support to the long-standing concept of moral intensity proposed by Jones (1991) in the ethics literature, which posits that the situational factors, i.e., the intensity of moral issues, must be taken into consi deration when evaluating the decision-making behaviour of individuals in conditions where moral dilemmas are present.…”