The purpose of this paper is to investigate the relationship between political connections, audit committee expertise and audit fee. The study examines the association of audit committee experts with the influence of political connections and audit fees. Samples involved 2020 financial data of 186 firms that were ranked by highest market capitalizations in Malaysia’s setting. Regression analyses were used to test the hypotheses. The initial finding suggests that audit fees are positively and significantly related to political connections (PCON) with the conditional upon there is interaction among the PCON variables as its response differently to different features. For the financial expertise of the audit committee members is negatively related to audit fees only when expertise is defined as accounting financial expertise. The result shows an interesting finding as the study has adopted an individual difference based on the political connection as key governance stakeholders and the associated reputational risks to explain audit pricing. The implication particularly on the audit committee to improve the financial sophistication and furthermore, improving the accounting expertise for all board members is likely to contribute to better governance.

The rapid change of time and technology in the business world has now caused it to become increasingly complex. As a part of the business operation, accountants also play a vital role in managing the risks arising from the complexity. Hence, it is important for an accountant to maintain their credibility and always be transparent in handling their job duties. One of the keys is to have good ethics. This paper focuses on how to enhance ethical values among future accountants- the accounting students. Thus, the attention is more on ethics in accounting education. A conceptual framework had been developed to explain this. The aim of this paper is to present a conceptual framework for the relationship between the quality of ethics education in accounting in an effort to produce highly ethical future accountants. The quality of the ethics course will be assessed based on four points which consist of contents, teaching approaches, students’ background, and learning approaches. It is expected that this study can contribute to the body of knowledge and research on the development of ethics education in the accounting discipline.

This paper aims to review the literature that discussing on the teaching approaches used in teaching ethics courses, especially in the accounting field. This paper also highlights the challenges associated with the teaching approaches. Given the influence of ethics education on the ethical behavior of students, it is important to ensure the quality of ethics courses offered in the university. One of the criteria that determines quality is by looking at its pedagogy. It is vital to set the objectives of the course before determine the teaching approaches. The goal of the ethics course is to develop moral awareness and moral sensitivity for the students. Due to this, previous literature suggests accounting educators use active learning for teaching approaches in the ethics course. This includes case studies, guest speakers, and group discussions. Group discussions can be conducted using activities such as role-playing. However, there are challenges in using active learning in the pedagogy. The challenges are time limitation, students’ participation, and creating a safe learning environment. This paper can help accounting educators to get ideas on appropriate teaching approaches in an ethics course.