1. Place yourself in Hamilton Wong’s position. Would you report all of your time worked on the Wille & Lomax audit? Why or why not? Do you believe that Lauren Hutchinson behaved unethically by underreporting the time she worked on that engagement? Defend your answer.

If I was in Hamilton Wong’s position, I think I would report all of the time I spent working on the Wille & Lomas audit, even if it exceeded the budget. As an accountant, my ethical responsibility is to be honest and have integrity and by not reporting the actual amount of time I worked on the audit, I would be lying. I will be losing my honesty and integrity if I was not to report the actual amount of worked I did. I would first have to evaluate why it is that I am …show more content…

This could be beneficial for mangers when they need to assess the staff auditors and help them during promotions.
However, this could be a problem as we saw in the case with Lauren. This leads me to one of the implications of underreporting time. Colleagues can be affected because a person who underreports time, like Lauren, could possibly get an unfair promotion. Managers will evaluate how an individual performs based on the budgets, thus a person who underreports time spend working on an engagement will seem more efficient than other employees. In the case of Hamilton, if he reports all of his hours and Lauren does not, it will seem as if she was more efficient than him and is more likely to get the promotion. If Lauren can underreport her hours and get away with it, even benefiting by getting the promotion, her colleagues and other auditors will think it is acceptable to underreport their hours. This will result in even more unethical behavior by their colleagues and other individual auditors. Hamilton, for example, will feel that he could possibly get away with underreporting his hours since he is the timekeeper and someone else is doing it. Hamilton will not see his behavior as unethical but rather as an opportunity to level the playing field with Lauren in competing for the promotion. Therefore, if the unethical act of underreporting time continues without the individual been reprimanded, more auditors will be likely to follow