Note.

This text is the condensed and revised version of a reflection that has matured over many years of teaching, professional practice and dialogue with new forms of knowledge.

It was born out of a conviction: at a time when technology automates decisions and shifts responsibilities, accountants continue to be the witnesses of economic reality, the guardians of the truth on which public trust rests.

Knowledge, when joined to consciousness, does not replace man: it magnifies him.

 Introduction

This reflection was born from a teaching experience aimed at accounting professionals, conceived not only as a technical space, but as an exercise in public awareness.  The purpose was to offer a broad vision of the tax administration as an instrument of balance between the State and society, exploring the fiscal pact as a moral foundation of the tax duty.

Taxation cannot be understood only as a collection mechanism, but as a link between the citizen and the common good.

Tax coercion or coercion are not simple administrative instruments, but symptoms of a social imbalance: when justice and public services fail, compliance becomes taxation and the pact is eroded.

My experience during the course revealed a tension characteristic of the accounting profession: many attendees expected operational solutions and found in it an ethical proposal.

The course, by proposing a look at the tax duty from its ethical and social root, generated bewilderment or frustration in some of them. This reaction was not a didactic obstacle, but a cultural symptom: the reflection of a professional education that has reduced public accounting to service techniques, removing it from its moral function as a guarantor of public faith.

Over the years, this teaching experience allowed me to confirm an essential idea: the accounting function cannot be disassociated from the moral structure of the State understood as the set of public values that support social trust, justice and the legitimacy of institutions, nor from the conditions of transparency and justice that make coexistence possible.

From this framework, the following chapters systematize the fundamental ideas that emerged from that experience: the diagnosis of the ethical problem of the profession, the role of the State in the allocation of public faith, the responsibilities of universities, the implications of non-compliance, the technological breakthrough and the proposal of a new pedagogy of balance.

Diagnosis: the ethical and civic deficit in accounting training

Accounting education has been colonized by the logic of the market.  The accountant is formed to serve the taxpayer as a client, not the company as a depositary of public trust.  Technique is privileged over awareness and efficiency over equity.

The result is a professional who is competent in the instrumental, but weak in the moral and civic.

Training accountants implies rescuing the ethical dimension of knowledge, so that they understand that each accounting record is a statement of truth and an act of trust.

The duty of the State: to assign the public faith and ensure its integrity

The State delegates the public faith to certain professions, including accounting, not as a privilege, but as a mandate of trust.

Whoever receives it assumes a legal and moral duty: to act in accordance with the general interest and to guarantee the veracity of economic information.

Public faith is mandatory: it compromises the professional’s conduct before the law and before society.

University prevention and formative responsibility

Universities must prepare the future accountant not only in technical, but also in legal, ethical and civic awareness.

Before the State delegates the public faith, the university must form a moral judgment capable of sustaining it.

Accounting education requires incorporating public ethics, philosophy of duty and comparative tax administration, evaluating the ethical maturity of graduates.

Implications of non-compliance and its penalties

When the accountant manipulates information or facilitates evasion, he violates the legal order and social trust.

Sanctions should not be limited to administrative or criminal matters: they should also be moral and institutional, exercised by universities and professional associations to preserve the dignity of the profession.

Educational transformation: from technicality to public awareness

The educational reform must reintegrate the public sense of accounting knowledge.

Taxation should be taught as an expression of coexistence, and fiscal legitimacy as the result of trust rather than coercion.

Every accounting record is a moral affirmation about the economic truth and an act of public faith that sustains the collective order.

Automation and the ethical fate of the profession

Technology has profoundly transformed accounting practice: automated systems no longer only record, analyze and audit with greater precision and speed than human, but also incorporate complex financial evaluation, projection and prediction algorithms capable of anticipating scenarios, identifying risks and formulating recommendations that were previously the result of professional reasoning.  

This revolution does not eliminate the function of the counter: it raises it.

The professional of the future will not be the one who masters the technique, the machine will do it better, but the one who understands the ethical and social meaning of the data.  The accountant thus becomes the guarantor of the meaning and the public purpose of the information.

Automation frees the profession from mechanical tasks and places it in the field of moral responsibility, where public faith cannot be replaced by algorithms.

Education must train professionals capable of preserving the humanity of the accounting act, its truth and its link with the social pact.

Professional complicity and the limits of public faith

The demand for accounting services often places the professional before moral dilemmas.   In environments where ethics is subordinated to interest, it can become a technical accomplice of illegality.

Broad rules, designed to protect professional autonomy, sometimes become a refuge for irresponsibility.   Neither personal decency nor codes of ethics are enough without an awareness of duty.

The accountant should not be conceived as a service provider, but as a custodian of the economic truth and the legal order of the State.  Education must reinforce that identity, remembering that the public faith is not for sale: it is honored.

The sense of professional duty in the articles of incorporation

Public faith is not a technical attribute, but a delegated social responsibility.   Professional ethics is not measured by the ability to reduce taxes, but by the ability to serve the common good.

The accountant is an agent of social balance, guarantor of trust and transparency.

Proposal: A pedagogy of balance

Accounting training should move from a technical and procedural approach to an ethical, institutional and reflective one.   It must prioritize commitment to society, the interpretation of economic reality and the understanding of public faith as a moral duty and state mandate.

This pedagogy of balance restores humanity to the technique and places the professional at the center of the fiscal pact.    At a time when automation replaces tasks, the true value of the accountant will be his awareness of public duty and his contribution to the moral reconstruction of the economic order.

Epilogue: the moral legacy of the profession

Seventy years of experience taught me that behind every number there is a human story, behind every record, a promise, and behind every balance sheet, a judgment about coexistence.

The meaning of our task lies not in the speed of calculation, but in fidelity to the truth.   The accountant is not a scribe of figures, but a witness of balance: the one who remembers that justice is also measured in clear accounts.

Faster and more automated times will come, but as long as there is a human being capable of asking if what he does is fair, accounting will remain a form of hope.

Nothing of who we are remains if it is not founded on truth and respect.

The techniques change; what does not change is the duty to live together.

Accounting, like life, seeks balance, and that balance, more than an exact sum, is a form of dignity.

If this job helps a new accountant understand that his firm represents everyone’s trust, he will have fulfilled his purpose.  Because the future does not belong to technology, but to consciousness.

And as long as there is awareness, humanity will continue to have a balance in favor.

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