THE PROBLEM OF TEACHING AND LEARNING ACCOUNTING IN NIGERIA UNIVERSITIES

CHAPTER ONE

INTRODUCTION

1.1 OVERVIEW OF THE STUDY

Accounting as one of the subjects in business education, has functions of developing in individuals, skills, knowledge, attitudes and values towards solving problems and towards satisfaction of real needs in life. Accounting is a very important branch of business education in which much of our daily life is governed and attached, by the results and application of business.

The National Council of Education (NCE) in 2007 gave the approval to the Nigerian Educational Research and Development Council (NERDC), the government agency saddled with the responsibility of developing curriculum for schools in Nigeria to review the existing senior secondary school education (SSE) curriculum (Ahmed-Rufai, 2010). The author further affirmed that the new curriculum was set to meet up with both national and global challenges and issues.
Bakare (2007) reported that investors in Nigeria have lost several billions of dollars through the collusion of accountants and external auditors with companies’ management and directors to falsify and deliberately overstate companies’ accounts.

These collapses or systemic failures, as the broad range of financial scandals exposed in the early years of the 21st century have brought into sharp focus and over a more concentrated timescale, issues of long-standing debate (Brown, 2005) including: audit and accounting regulation; auditor independence; earnings management; and audit and audit firm quality controls.

One of the difficulties of evaluating the veracity of these claims, and the validity of the counter claims, is that moral scheme and codes of ethics have undergone changes over time. Prior research on ethics and the profession of accountancy has come from a wide range of disciplines and has focused on a broad range of issues.

It is widely acknowledged that the accounting profession is an important facet of our society (Wyatt, 2004).Accounting emerged from the society; Hines (1988) stated that accounting is socially constructed and socially constructing. This implies that accounting influences society and accounting is influenced by society. In the last decade, studies have shown that the accounting profession has had to deal with a lot of challenges than it has done in its lengthy history which spans over one Hundred years (Mactosh et al., 2010). This period has been characterized by series of business failures, ethical negligence and accounting scandals both in developed economies and developing economies. Publicized cases of the recent past, such as Satyam, Enron, WorldCom, Global Crossing, Adelphia Communications, HIH, Tyco, and Vivendi, Royal hold and HealthSouth together with a host of companies from Nigeria (such as, Cadbury and NAMPAK), have drawn increasing attention to the accounting profession. This has had a negative and cumulative impact on the way informed opinions view the accounting profession. There has been great apprehension regarding the fairness of the operation of a market system where shareholders, employees in general and pensioners have lost large sums, while those running companies, are seen as responsible for those losses, have enriched themselves as the businesses collapsed. In doubt if Nigerian related research efforts are adequate to fully address the challenges of enforcing ethical guidelines in financial reporting and auditing.

1.2 STATEMENT OF THE PROBLEM

Brown (2005) posited that various business failures have led to increased scrutiny of deficiencies in the financial reporting process and corporate disclosure requirements of corporate organizations. This has had a negative and cumulative impact on the perceived credibility of financial reporting.

This concern is now at the forefront of public debate about the accounting profession and its effectiveness (IFAC, 2003). There has been a decline in reporting credibility across capital markets worldwide, with the attempts by professional accounting bodies and professional accounting firms to change these widely held perceptions of accounting and accountants have met with limited success (Warren & Parker, 2009). In Nigeria public perception about accounting and accountant decline.

The researcher wishes to find solution to the following problem:

Whether students’ seriousness affect teaching and learning of accounting in Nigerian universities.

Whether the nature of lecture time-table affect the teaching and learning of accounting.
Whether the environment affect the teaching and learning of accounting.
Is accounting profession important in Nigeria’s development.
Whether the problem of teaching and learning of accounting can be corrected.

1.3 OBJECTIVES OF THE STUDY

One of the aims of this study is to investigate the perception of the public attitudes towards the accounting profession in societal development.
The specific objective is to:

(i) To determine to what extent Student seriousness affect teaching and learning accounting in delta state university Asaba campus.
(ii) To determine whether the nature of lecture time table affect the teaching and learning accounting in delta state university Asaba campus
(iii) To determine whether the environment of learning affect the teaching and learning of accounting in Nigeria universities

1.4 RESEARCH QUESTIONS

John (2010) posited that the research question is a methodological point of departure of scholarly research in both the natural and social sciences. It’s an important step to providing sound conceptual foundation for one’s research, in that, it stream lines the whole work into a set of questions:

(i) Does student seriousness affect teaching and learning accounting in delta state university Asaba campus?
(ii) How does the nature of lecture time table affect the teaching and learning accounting in delta state university Asaba campus?
(iii) How does the environment of learning, affect the teaching and learning of accounting in Nigeria universities?