As a student of accounting and finance, with the ambition of becoming a chartered accountant in the future, I feel it is appropriate for me to analyze ethical issues facing the accounting profession. . The accounting profession has been the subject of much attention in recent years, with the emergence of scandals such as those at Enron and Anglo. A series of unethical decisions led to the closure of one of the "big five" accounting firms when the Enron scandal broke. In Ireland, Ernst and Young are due to appear in court today over their involvement as auditors of Anglo Irish Bank. Needless to say, they also made some unethical decisions while working with the bank. In this literature review, I endeavor to evaluate the code of ethics for accountants and provide examples of cases where accountants have not adhered to this code of ethics. The International Federation of Accountants (IFAC) is a global body that sets professional standards for the accounting profession. . The IFAC has an ethics committee which published a new code of ethics, which came into force in June 2006 (George, 2005), and updated this code, in force from January 2011. There has five fundamental principles in this code of ethics, objectivity, integrity, professional competence. as well as due diligence, confidentiality and professional behavior. Objectivity implies that an accountant must not allow bias, conflicts of interest or undue influence of others to override his or her professional or business judgments (George, 2005). Accountants must be honest, forthright and act with integrity in all business dealings. The principle of professional competence and diligence requires accountants to act diligently and in accordance with applicable technical, professional and legislative requirements...... middle of document ...... has been revised. This standard allocates a sufficient number of partners and personnel with appropriate time and skills regardless of the audit fees to be charged, prohibits contingency fees, limits the total fees to be received for audit services and non-auditing of listed and unlisted companies and finally, it prohibits all persons involved in an audit from accepting gifts from clients unless they are of insignificant value (The Auditing Practices Board, 2010) . Finally, ES5, which was updated in 2011, relates to non-audit services provided to audited entities and requires the audit firm to establish policies and procedures that require other persons within the firm, when they consider whether or not to accept a proposed engagement to provide a non-audit service to an audited entity or one of its affiliates, communicate the details of the proposed engagement to the engagement partner auditing (The Auditing Practices Board, 2011).