Ethical Dilemma: Client to Preparer Confidentiality

Ethical Dilemma: Client to Preparer confidentiality

Before transferring out to Las Vegas, I originally lived in Palm Springs, California. During my time living in Palm Springs I was a student at College of the Desert. At the same time I also held two part time Jobs, which one was with a Tax and audit, accounting firm. My position at this firm was book keeper, and reconciliations. In addition to that, I also worked on special projects that the firm gave me from time to time. On one of m special projects I took on what I felt to be an ethical dilemma.

During my time at this small tax and audit accounting firm, I was selected to help with fixing up and improving the firms mailer system. The idea was that as a firm we felt that our customer to service relationship was not up to par during that time and we wanted to improve on that by showing our clients how we appreciate them for selecting us to do their taxes and other ordeals. One way we wanted to show our appreciation for them was to do birthday mailers, saying happy birthday and thank you for choosing us as their tax firm. I was given the honorary opportunity work on this project and I am glad that I was because, in the end result my being on this project saved the firms reputation and well being between their service to customer relationship.

What happened, was that during my time working on the project I noticed that one of the accounts that I had been working on with the mailers, the client's date of birth was not in-sync with what it should have been, which created a large problem. However this was not just one client this was with multiple clients. I told my manager and he said to just call up the clients and say that we are up dating our software and we need to just do some check to make sure everything is ok on what we have about them. Well this is where the ethical dilemma started.

The dilemma was that ethically I felt that this was not my job and I did not have the right or really none of us except for the one accountant had the right to call up and ask these clients about their current up to date status. This was due to the fact that these were not our clients, these people were the clients of the one accountant. Why I believe this is due in large part that we as other accountants should not be seeing other accountants client data unless the client stipulates that we have the right to. This in general all deals client and service provider confidentiality.

In essence, lets just say if I did do this task of calling up the clients and asking them for an update what would happen? Well the consequential stand point would be that we would face a decline in clients most likely. If we say what their birthday is and its wrong then they will want a full explanation