TY - JOUR
T1 - Ethics in tax practice
T2 - A study of the effect of practitioner firm size
AU - Doyle, Elaine
AU - Frecknall-Hughes, Jane
AU - Summers, Barbara
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2013, Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht.
PY - 2014/7/1
Y1 - 2014/7/1
N2 - While much of the empirical accounting literature suggests that, if differences do exist, Big Four employees are more ethical than non-Big Four employees, this trend has not been evident in the recent media coverage of Big Four tax practitioners acting for multinationals accused of aggressive tax avoidance behaviour. However, there has been little exploration in the literature to date specifically of the relationship between firm size and ethics in tax practice. We aim here to address this gap, initially exploring tax practitioners’ perceptions of the impact of firm size on ethics in tax practice using interview data in order to identify the salient issues involved. We then proceed to assess quantitatively whether employer firm size has an impact on the ethical reasoning of tax practitioners, using a tax context-specific adaptation of a well-known and validated psychometric instrument, the Defining Issues Test.
AB - While much of the empirical accounting literature suggests that, if differences do exist, Big Four employees are more ethical than non-Big Four employees, this trend has not been evident in the recent media coverage of Big Four tax practitioners acting for multinationals accused of aggressive tax avoidance behaviour. However, there has been little exploration in the literature to date specifically of the relationship between firm size and ethics in tax practice. We aim here to address this gap, initially exploring tax practitioners’ perceptions of the impact of firm size on ethics in tax practice using interview data in order to identify the salient issues involved. We then proceed to assess quantitatively whether employer firm size has an impact on the ethical reasoning of tax practitioners, using a tax context-specific adaptation of a well-known and validated psychometric instrument, the Defining Issues Test.
KW - Ethics
KW - Firm size
KW - Moral reasoning
KW - Tax practice
KW - Tax practitioners
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=84879064833&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1007/s10551-013-1780-5
DO - 10.1007/s10551-013-1780-5
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:84879064833
SN - 0167-4544
VL - 122
SP - 623
EP - 641
JO - Journal of Business Ethics
JF - Journal of Business Ethics
IS - 4
ER -