Business Ethics, Leadership, and Sustainability in Light of Auditing: The Mediating Impact of Cloud-Based Managerial Accounting Practices Toward Audit Quality

Sustainability and ethics have been considered recently as building blocks, from the perspective of managerial accounting, that influence managerial accountability and auditing. Prior works have shown that leadership behavior and ethical auditing sustainability principles and the functions of internal audit have a notable impact on the transparency of the practices in the audit area. However, with the new contemporary trends and the processes of digital transformation, the dire needs appear to understand how ethics and sustainability interact with the processes of digital transformation via indicating to Claude managerial accounting systems to promote the quality of audit in the developing countries eventually. The aim of the current study is to explore ethical auditing, internal audit leadership, and audit sustainability control influence audit quality, while investigating cloud-based management accounting practices as a mediator variable. Analyzing data collected from 147 chartered accountants and analyzed using partial least squares structural equation modeling, the current study offers new findings on the impact of hierarchic of contemporary audit determinants in developing countries. The findings show that IAL has a clear impact as could be considered as driver of audit quality, both directly and indirectly through cloud-based management accounting practices, showing that effective audit leaders behave as strategic agents that align ethical commitment, digital adoption, and professional responsibility. On the other hand, ethical auditing and audit sustainability control did not mediating effects on audit quality, suggesting that ethical and sustainability frameworks, while conceptually central, remain underdeveloped and insufficiently institutionalized in the Iraqi audit context. The mediation analysis verifies that the cloud-based management accounting practices model acts as a technological link between top management abilities and enhanced audit performance, via introducing immediate access to data, continuous controlling and transparency in reporting. The current study has theoretical participation in connecting studies on ethics, executives, digital transformation, and sustainability via providing an integrated model for technology-enabled audit excellence. The practical of the current work focuses on audit firms' need to invest in developing managers of the firms and digital infrastructure to ensure that ethical standards and sustainability objectives translate into physical developments in audit quality. In general, the results categorize leadership and innovation in cloud computing to be considered as a core of accountability, credibility, and confirming sustainability in advanced auditing.