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AI in finance and accounting

IESBA Code R270.3 — Pressure to Breach the Fundamental Principles

R270.3 is two prohibitions, not one. An accountant shall not allow pressure from others to result in a breach of the fundamental principles, and shall not place pressure on others that they know, or have reason to believe, would cause those others to breach. The second limb is the one that reaches a manager telling a team to stop checking.

§ 1Who it binds

Both directions of the duty

Accountant in business

Any professional accountant in business, in both directions: as the person under pressure to accept, approve or pass on work they have not verified, and as the person applying that pressure to someone else. Pressure may be explicit or implicit, and may come from a colleague, a superior, an external party or a target. The Code takes effect through the IFAC member body that has adopted it.

§ 2In practice

The limb that points the other way

Section 270 is short and the mandatory provision at its centre is shorter. R270.3 prohibits the accountant from allowing pressure from others to result in a breach of the fundamental principles, and equally from placing pressure on others where they know or have reason to believe it would cause a breach. 270.3 A1 records that pressure may be explicit or implicit and may come from a colleague, a superior, an external party, or from internal or external targets and expectations. That last source is what matters for AI-assisted work, because most of the pressure in a close is structural rather than personal: a reporting timetable built on the assumption that a tool removes a day of checking is a target, and the paragraph names targets. The fundamental principle most exposed is objectivity, where the compromise is a judgement that was not the accountant’s own.

The application that makes this a page rather than a footnote is the second limb, because it points the other way from where people look. A controller who tells a team that the AI-generated variance analysis is good enough and to stop verifying it is the one applying the pressure, and the provision reaches them directly — not for producing a bad number, but for putting a subordinate in a position where following the instruction and complying with the fundamental principles are different things. It is a small and very common act, and it is why the provision belongs in a collection about using AI in finance work: the pressure to accept an output usually comes from the person who most wants the tool to have worked. Where the resulting information is misleading rather than merely unchecked, the escalation provisions take over, and the pressure itself becomes part of the facts to be recorded.

§ 3What a weak answer looks like

Pressure understood as somebody shouting

Pressure understood as somebody shouting. The function is confident nothing here applies, because no one has been told to falsify anything and relations in the team are good. The paragraph names implicit pressure and targets expressly, so a close timetable shortened on the strength of a tool, applied to a team nobody has told what may safely be skipped, is squarely inside it. The absence of a confrontation is not evidence that the provision is not engaged.

§ 4What discharges it

What shows the pressure was not applied

The artefacts an assessor asks to see, and what makes each one sufficient rather than merely present.

  1. 01

    The instruction as it was actually given, in writing

    What a team was told about how much verification an output needed, and by whom. Pressure that arrived as a verbal aside is the hardest kind to evidence and the easiest kind to apply.

  2. 02

    The timetable assumption behind an AI-shortened close

    Where a deadline was pulled in because a tool was adopted, the record of what checking was assumed to fall away and who agreed to it. A target is a named source of pressure in this paragraph.

  3. 03

    The route by which a subordinate can decline

    How someone junior refuses an instruction to accept output they have not checked, and whether anyone has ever used it. A route nobody has used says something about the culture rather than about its absence.

§ 5When it applies

Which edition carries this

  1. 29 August 2024

    Publication date of the 2024 edition of the IESBA Handbook, given as an edition marker. Section 270 does not appear in the Technology-related Revisions pronouncement’s contents and carries no separate verified effective date. Not a compliance deadline.

§ 6Where this is assessed

Where this is assessed

Examined in one credential, in the domains named on each card.

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§ 7provenance

The provision itself

This page sets out what the instrument requires and what discharges it. The official text is the authority — these go straight to it.

§ 8Also read

Also read

Certification

Examined on this standard of evidence

What this page sets out is examined, on work the candidate has not seen, in the credential beside it. Every paper is machine marked against its key and every result is reviewed and released by a named person, and every credential is on the public register.

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