Role of Accountants in Achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGS): Do Accountants Really Matter for Sustainable Development Goals?

Abstract

Accountants are known to be present in every medium and large scale organizations globally and are found to occupy different positions in both private and public organizations like, Management Accountants, Chief Finance Controller, internal and External Auditors, Tax officer, Account Officer, Treasury controller, etc and so occupy a large space in organizational growth processes. As organizational efforts are geared towards sustainable development in the 21^st century, the roles of every organizational key player like the accountants also change in line to accommodate sustainability concerns. Consequent to this, our study evaluated the extent of roles Accountants play in ensuring sustainable management of water and sanitation (Goal 6), making cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, and sustainable (Goal 11), and, in ensuring sustainable consumption and production patterns (Goals 12), which this study perceives as the foundational goals to achieving most other SDGs. Hence, these three goals as perceived by the researchers form the core of the 17 goals agenda. The population of study was seven hundred and seventy-two professionally affiliated Accountants with Institute of Chartered Accountants of Nigeria (ICAN) and Association of National Accountants of Nigeria (ANAN) in Anambra state, Nigeria. The Mann-Whitney Test used in hypotheses testing revealed that accountants really matter for sustainable development goals since they significantly contribute towards ensuring sustainable management of water and sanitation. Furthermore, it was found that accountants have significant role to play towards ensuring sustainable consumption and production patterns and also in making human settlements and cities safe, inclusive and sustainable. The researchers recommends among others that International organizations like the United Nations and others at the forefront of promoting the SDG drives should recognize the roles of the accountants by sponsoring researches towards promoting accounting innovations; and seminars educating public sectors and businesses on the need to work with the accountants in their SDGs’ pursuits.

Keywords: sustainable development, sustainability, accountants, value creation and accounting innovation.

DOI: 10.7176/EJBM/15-2-02

Publication date: January 31^st 2023