6. The Impact of Covid-19 on the Sustainability of the Accounting Profession: Turkey Case

Nowadays, where the relations between business and society change under the influence of various factors, society expects businesses to create social and environmental values ​​as well as economic value. From this point of view, sustainable business success; in addition to following economic policies aimed at increasing shareholder profits in enterprises, it requires the monitoring and measurement of the effects of business activities on the environment and society, and the use of tools and methods to fulfill these transactions. At this point, the duty of accounting is to provide information about economic activities as well as to provide information to its stakeholders about the social and environmental performance of the enterprise. As of 2019, it is important to reconsider the issue of accounting profession and sustainability in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic affecting the world and the changes experienced and to address the responsibilities of the accounting profession in this process. In this period, which is called the epidemic period caused by COVID-19 and affected all countries of the world, social and economic orders, companies and professions faced many positive and negative effects. This period accelerated the digital transformation, brought services to the agenda, and many professions had to adapt to this digital transformation. There are also professional accountants among these professions. Moreover, accounting professionals are the most important stakeholders and indispensable actors of companies, which are the smallest dynamos of economies. In this context, it is aimed to reveal the relationship between sustainability, the role of accounting and the COVID-19 outbreak in this study. In this study, regarding the professional accountants who assume such a big task in social and economic terms; COVID-19—to determine how the professional accountants are affected positively and negatively during the pandemic period. It is aimed to identify how these effects change business lives and office environments, and in this context, to present a roadmap for the future sustainability of the accounting profession. The study consists of three parts; In the first part, literature research, in the second part, the need for the profession, and in the third part, a survey study was conducted for accounting professionals across Turkey, and the positive and negative situations they experienced during the COVID-19 period and the ways they adapted to these situations were investigated. As a result, when such epidemic periods are encountered again, solutions have been suggested for what kind of a road map to follow in terms of the sustainability of the profession.