Environmental Awareness and The Role of Public Accounting Professional Bodies in Indonesia: A Brief Reflection

Abstract

This study aims to give an insight about environmental awareness from public accountant and 
the role of Indonesian accounting professional bodies in ensuring professional sustainability. A 
naturalistic method was applied to get deep understanding about the perspectives of the boards 
of professional bodies as a representation from the condition of public accountants in general. 
Data collection methods used in this study were interviews and focus group discussion. The 
findings highlight a variety of perspectives on knowledge of environment, interest in environ
mental accounting and moral responsibility on environmental damage. This variation shows 
different levels of awareness and it is mainly caused by the lack of law enforcement and no 
mandatory standards on environmental issues. This condition will threat legitimacy of account
ing profession and finally, be able to endangered professional accounting sustainability. Limi
tations are about the scope and sample,which provide insights of the boards of public account
ant professional bodies on environmental accounting issues. Future studies should be done on 
other accounting fields such as environmental audit, environmental accounting and reporting 
and environmental costing