Everyone enjoys those David and Goliath-type films, like The Insider, Erin Brockovitch or Serpico, where one brave soul risks all to expose corruption. But in reality, making a "public interest disclosure", or "whistleblowing", has none of the glamour of the silver screen and all of the risk.
Accountancy body Cima (the Chartered Institute of Management Accountants) recognised this and has decided to make the lonely path of a whistleblower that little bit easier - for its members at least.
It now offers a whistleblowing hotline and has signed up a firm of lawyers specialising in public interest disclosures to provide expert advice to its members.
John Coghlan, worldwide Cima president and former chief executive of Smurfit UK, explained that it is extremely important for people in a whistleblowing situation to protect themselves and their jobs by taking the appropriate steps. "If somebody sees something wrong, they can't just say, 'I'll blow the whistle'. They must go through the proper procedures to protect themselves," he said. "Our members get the best advice possible."
Cima also provides an ethics helpline for members or students who find themselves with an ethical dilemma. It receives several calls a week from around the globe. The organisation also began running an ethics roadshow earlier this year, in Ireland and internationally.
"Ethics is of key interest to us," Mr Coghlan said. "We're trying to help out members and students in a practical way."
"Ethics" has been a buzzword among the accounting fraternity since the Enron/Worldcom scandals that rocked the financial world at the start of the century.
"With these public interest cases, the likes of Enron and WorldCom, the big ones, there's a failure of the audit but there's also a failure of internal management and internal controls. The auditors didn't institute that financial scandal. It came from within the company. It is accountants . . . that are working within the business and if they are straight, you don't have to worry about the auditors.
"So the behaviour of public accountants in business - their proper behaviour in business - is of key interest to us," Mr Coughlan said.
The Cima accountancy qualification differs from others, such as ACA or ACCA, in that much less emphasis is placed on areas such as auditing and tax. Instead the focus is very much on business strategy, financial management and risk analysis.
"Lots of employers see our syllabus as the most relevant to business," Mr Coghlan said.
"Our qualification tends to be focused on - what are the business drivers, what information do you need to make the business successful. So management accounting is value-creation accounting.
"It's not just the acquisition of knowledge - it's the practical application of the knowledge in a business sense," he added.
Management accountants are particularly in demand in the financial sector. In the UK it is the most sought-after accountancy qualification.
Goldman Sachs in London, for example, hires educational providers to run Cima courses in-house, and flies in employees from Ireland and continental Europe to attend these courses.
Over the last five years, Cima has been the fastest-growing chartered institute in the Republic and the UK in terms of members.
