New honesty and ethics ratings place accountants near historic lows.
By CPA Trendlines
Accountants remain among the more trusted professions in American life — but barely, and increasingly precariously.
In Gallup’s newest Honesty and Ethics of Professions survey, only 35% of Americans rate accountants’ honesty and ethical standards as “very high” or “high.” That places the profession in the middle tier of public esteem and, according to Gallup, statistically close to its lowest point since the polling series began in 1976.
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The new poll comes with a broader warning label: Americans’ ethics ratings have fallen across many occupations, and the average across Gallup’s core set of professions has slid to a historic low. Accountants are not isolated — but they are exposed. Their work is built on trust, and their public standing appears to be eroding at the exact moment the profession is asking clients and regulators to accept more complex roles for CPAs, including AI-enabled advisory services, outsourced finance, and expanded assurance responsibilities.
Gallup’s annual ratings ask Americans to grade the honesty and ethical standards of people in different fields as “very high,” “high,” “average,” “low,” or “very low.” Gallup reports the combined “very high/high” share as the headline metric.
In the new poll, accountants’ 35% “very high/high” score is net-positive (more Americans rate accountants positively than negatively), but it is far from a majority endorsement. A majority, 54%, rates accountants as merely “average,” and 9% rate them “low” or “very low.”
Even among the better-rated occupations, Gallup shows a decline in trust since pandemic-era highs. For example, Gallup reports nurses at 75% — still first-place — but down from their pandemic peak, leaving many professions “at or near historic lows.”
Accountants’ trust is slipping — and Gallup says it is near a low
Gallup’s long trendline for accountants (1976–2025) shows a gradual erosion in the share of Americans who assign the profession “very high” or “high” ethics. The early years of the series placed accountants closer to the 40% range. Over time, that level has drifted downward, with the most visible reputational shock tied to the corporate scandals of the early 2000s, like WorldCom and Enron.
Gallup’s own write-up accompanying the newest data explicitly lists accountants among the professions that are “statistically close to their lowest points.” It signals that the latest 35% is not just a noisy one-year downtick; it is consistent with a longer, downward drift that has pushed accountants toward the lower half of their historical range.
The trust paradox: respected, but not understood
There is a long-running paradox in the reputation of accountants: the profession is generally seen as more ethical than many business occupations, yet the public often has only a hazy understanding of what auditors and CPAs actually do — and do not do.
That gap has consequences in a scandal. In the wake of Enron and WorldCom, former SEC Chairman Arthur Levitt Jr. warned that the accounting profession’s credibility can be unusually brittle when public understanding is thin. In his 2002 book, Take on the Street, Levitt argued that reputations rooted in public confidence can take years to build but can unravel quickly when a single crisis reshapes perceptions.
Levitt’s point was not academic. The collapse of Arthur Andersen demonstrated how quickly an entire brand — and public confidence in large-firm auditing — could disintegrate once doubt set in. When the public struggles to distinguish between corporate management misconduct and audit failure, it is easy for “accountants” to become the catchall culprit.
CPA Trendlines has repeatedly returned to this vulnerability, often using Gallup’s own polling as a yardstick. In a September 2025 Trendlines report on Gallup’s industry image data, Trendlines summed up the profession’s standing with a blunt subhead: “But only until the next scandal.” The piece noted that accounting ranked near the top of major U.S. industries for positive public views, while also emphasizing that the public “cares or knows little about the profession,” leaving it exposed when reputational shocks hit.
That theme goes back two decades in Trendlines’ archives. In a December 2005 report, Trendlines highlighted Gallup’s finding that accountants’ honesty-and-ethics ratings had “almost fully recovered” from the Enron-era hit — after falling sharply during the scandal period. A November 2008 Trendlines update likewise reported accountants as “top-rated” in Gallup’s ethics measures, and a February 2012 Trendlines report argued accountants’ reputations remained “unsullied” relative to other sectors after financial debacles.
The through-line across those years is that the profession’s reputation can be resilient in normal times, but it can also be rapidly stress-tested by events that dominate public attention. Gallup’s newest report suggests that, even without a single headline scandal tied to accountants in 2025, trust is still ebbing.
Not just accountants: America’s “ethics recession.”
Gallup’s newest findings frame the accounting numbers as part of a broader slump in perceived ethics. Gallup reports that the average positive rating across a core set of professions tracked annually since 1999 is now 29%, the lowest it has been historically. According to Gallup’s own description, the average was typically 40% or higher in the early 2000s, closer to 35% during most of the 2010s, and rose to 38% in 2020 before falling again.
That broad-based decline has two implications for firms. First, it suggests reputational repair is harder: accountants are trying to climb a ladder whose rungs are sliding downward. Second, it reduces the “distance” between accountants and lower-rated business roles — potentially increasing the likelihood that the public lumps professional services together when new controversies arise.
For CPA firms, the Gallup numbers are not merely a public relations curiosity. Ethics ratings serve as a proxy for willingness to trust, encompassing the acceptance of audit opinions, sharing sensitive financial information, relying on advice, and granting the profession deference in standard-setting and regulation.
Accountants still sit above bankers, lawyers, business executives, and stockbrokers in Gallup’s ethics table. However, the profession is no longer among the top. And Gallup’s characterization — “statistically close to their lowest points” — suggests a limited margin for error.
The profession’s challenge is not only to behave ethically, but to be understood well enough that ethical behavior is visible and credible to the public. In the post-Enron era, regulators warned that trust could be lost faster than it could be rebuilt. Gallup’s newest data suggest that, two decades later, the profession is still living inside that warning.