Ethics and Auditing : An International Perspective

The reasons for examining the state of a company's ethics are many and various. They include external societal pressures, risk management, stakeholder obligations, and identifying a baseline to measure future improvements. In some cases, companies are driven to it by a gross failure in ethics, which may have resulted in costly legal action or stricter government regulation. More often, however, companies choose to do it simply because it is right, it is important, and because it is likely to bring business benefits.