Determinants of academic cheating behavior: The future for accountancy in Ireland

•The potential for restoring the reputation of the Irish accountancy profession is explored.•Attitudes to academic cheating predict future unethical workplace practices.•The impact of gender, idealism and relativism on intolerance of academic cheating is considered.•Gender and idealism are positively associated with intolerance of academic cheating.•The findings bode well for restoring integrity to the Irish accountancy profession.

This paper considers the potential for improving the reputation of the Irish accountancy profession by exploring undergraduate accounting students’ intolerance of academic cheating as a predictor of future attitudes to unethical workplace practices. The study reports that females are significantly more intolerant of cheating than males. Further, with regard to ethical ideology, idealism was found to have a significant positive association with intolerance of cheating while relativism reported no association. It is anticipated that the growing admission of women to professional accountancy membership together with educational intervention to increase idealism may improve ethical attitudes and help restore the profession's reputation.