Individual Ethics Mini-Case

“Popejoy & Lee LLC, Revisited” Fast forward eight years from the events of Mini-Case 1. Popejoy & Lee LLC is still based in Hillsborough, NC, offering essentially the same lines of service – tax, audit and assurance, financial planning, and advisory services. The firm has experienced robust growth over the intervening years and is still managed in a highly collaborative, very cohesive manner by Juanita Lee, who heads up the tax practice, Earl Lee, who heads up auditing and assurance, and Tawrence Popejoy, who heads up financial planning and advisory services. You have been an audit partner for about a year, and you remain the firm’s in-house expert on matters of ethics and professional responsibilities. Wingo Corporation has now been an assurance client of Popejoy & Lee LLC for seven years and remains the firm’s largest client. Tom Wingo and Susan Lowenstein continue to serve as CEO and EVP-CFO, respectively, of Wingo Corporation. The company remains privately held by the Wingo siblings. However, the owners have begun to explore the possibility of taking Wingo Corporation public, possibly within a five-year timeframe. In light of the interest the Wingo siblings have expressed in beginning the exploration of an initial public offering, the Popejoy & Lee leadership team have begun their own internal due diligence around the firm’s level of preparedness to serve publicly owned clients. (Wingo Corporation would be Popejoy & Lee’s first publicly held audit client.) In the context of this Popejoy & Lee internal due diligence initiative, the firm leaders have just tasked you with developing a series of brief presentations, targeted at the firm’s entire professional staff. They have asked you to brief the firm’s professional staff on the obligations and responsibilities the firm, its partners, and its professional staff, take on as members of the accounting profession, especially in light of the possibility of serving a publicly owned assurance client. Upon reflection, you have decided to frame these presentations around the six Principles of Professional Conduct contained in the AICPA Code of Professional Conduct, with your first presentation to be focused on Responsibilities and The Public Interest. For this first presentation on the Responsibilities and The Public Interest principles, you envision a slide deck consisting of approximately seven slides, with a single slide devoted to each of the two statements in the Responsibilities section of the Code and to each of the five statements in The Public Interest section of the Code. You would like to communicate the essence of each of each of these statements in your own words and in a way that will personally resonate with all members of the Popejoy & Lee professional staff, across the firm’s lines of business, and from the newest associate to the most senior partner. In preparing for this presentation and in preparing this slide deck, you have decided that you will rely primarily on your personal reflections on these Principles and descriptive statements, on what they mean to you personally in your work as a member of the accounting profession and as a member of the professional staff of Popejoy & Lee LLC. • Please use bullet points to show the content of seven slides. • Please use your own words to explain the seven AICPA Code • Each code should be in one bullet point, there should be in total seven bullet points