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This research provides accounting-ethics authors and administrators with a benchmark for accounting-ethics research. While Bernardi and Bean (2010) considered publications in business-ethics and accounting’s top-40 journals this study considers research in eight accounting-ethics and public-interest journals, as well as, 34 business-ethics journals. We analyzed the contents of our 42 journals for the 25-year period between 1991 through 2015. This research documents the continued growth (Bernardi & Bean, 2007) of accounting-ethics research in both accounting-ethics and business-ethics journals. We provide data on the top-10 ethics authors in each doctoral year group, the top-50 ethics authors over the most recent 10, 20, and 25 years, and a distribution among ethics scholars for these periods. For the 25-year timeframe, our data indicate that only 665 (274) of the 5,125 accounting PhDs/DBAs (13.0% and 5.4% respectively) in Canada and the United States had authored or co-authored one (more than one) ethics article.

This chapter presents a review of the recent sales and use tax (SUT) literature for accountants, focusing on articles published between 2000 and 2011 in traditional accounting outlets. State and local taxes are an important component of accounting research, but the SUT element of state and location taxation has not been reviewed from an accounting perspective. This review indicates that most recent SUT research has focused on evaluating current or proposed SUT structures, or on empirically studying the antecedents and consequences of SUT policy. Behavioral researchers have substantial opportunities to contribute to the SUT field in future studies by conducting surveys, behavioral experiments, and qualitative case studies to further expand the field's understanding of SUT's antecedents and consequences. Overall, this chapter provides a comprehensive overview of recent SUT research that can help to foster interest of SUT within behavioral accounting research and beyond.

This research note investigates the relationship between the constructs of professional skepticism and client advocacy as they relate to accountants’ roles as auditors and tax professionals. Although Pinsker, Pennington, and Schafer (2009) implicitly treat advocacy and professional skepticism as opposing constructs, the purpose of this research note is to explicitly examine whether an accounting professional can be both a professional skeptic and a client advocate. Two hundred and six experienced accounting professionals with a mixture of accounting and tax backgrounds responded to a client advocacy scale (Pinsker et al., 2009) and a professional skepticism scale (Hurtt, 2010). Results indicate that while tax professionals have higher levels of client advocacy than auditors, both groups have similar levels of professional skepticism. Moreover, no correlation emerges between participants’ responses to the advocacy and the full professional skepticism scale or five of its six sub-scales. These results provide evidence that client advocacy is a separate and distinct construct from professional skepticism. These findings have implications for behavioral accounting researchers by demonstrating that these two constructs are not related; thus, it is important to separately measure client advocacy and professional skepticism when they are relevant to a research question.

This paper uses two studies to examine taxpayers' knowledge of tax incentives for charitable giving and also explores the consequences of this knowledge on charitable giving decisions. The first study surveys 600 US taxpayers to establish a baseline understanding of how making a charitable contribution affects taxpayers. In the second study, we conduct an experiment with 201 US taxpayers in which we manipulate the knowledge of taxpayers by providing an educational intervention; we also measure, if, how much is donated in a hypothetical scenario under various tax deductibility conditions. The first study indicates fewer than half of participants understand the basic principles of how charitable donations affect tax liability. Our second study reveals that a short educational video is extremely effective at improving taxpayers' understanding and helping them accurately estimate the tax benefit associated with charitable giving. However, through moderated mediation analysis, we also show that participants who received this educational intervention and accurately estimated the tax benefits in turn decreased their charitable giving. We conclude that the majority of US taxpayers do not understand whether they benefit from certain deductions and may be overestimating the benefit they receive from charitable giving, resulting in giving more than they intend.

Tax professionals in public accounting firms must meet professional standards in working with their clients, but may also face pressure from both their clients and firms when making ethical decisions. The purpose of this study is to examine the influence of client factors on tax professionals’ ethical decision-making. Furthermore, we also investigate how client service climate and different ethical climate types affect these ethical decisions. Based on an experimental design with 149 practicing tax professionals, results indicate that tax professionals are not swayed by client importance or social interaction with the client when making ethical decisions. However, tax professionals are more likely to engage in ethical behavior when their own accounting firm monitors and tracks the quality of client service, whereas unethical behavior is more common when public accounting firms emphasize using personal ethical beliefs in decision-making. The results of the study suggest the importance of strong policies and procedures to promote ethical decision-making in firms.

Companies frequently use Internet Financial Reporting (IFR) to distribute financial and nonfinancial information to stakeholders. Research suggests that companies often distribute information via the web for impression management purposes in order to diffuse potential negative reactions and/or to promote positive reactions to corporate policies and actions. The purpose of this study is to investigate whether web disclosure of environmental information and the presentation format influences the outcomes of litigation awards. Results indicate that even a partial web disclosure of pending environmental sanctions on a company’s financial statement reduces the compensatory and punitive damages that jurors award when shareholders suffer losses as a result of environmental sanctions. The results also indicate that firms using enhanced presentation formats when disclosing environmental information further reduce the amount of damages awarded against them. These results have implications for users and preparers of IFR, and for policy makers weighing mandates for disclosure of nonfinancial information in annual reports.

In this study, we develop reliable scales for measuring taxpayers' social norms toward tax compliance and explore the effect of social desirability bias and several methodological issues that may affect behavioral tax and accounting studies. This study provides theoretical specificity to a potentially “decisive” (Alm & McKee, 1998) influence on tax compliance by drawing on Cialdini and Trost's (1998) taxonomy of social norms in developing our scale items. We describe in detail the methods that we used to develop these scales. On the basis of the responses of 218 experienced taxpayers, our results identify four separate social norm dimensions that correspond with the four social norm constructs identified by Cialdini and Trost. We also consider the effect of social desirability bias and find that these effects are mild for experienced taxpayers and are not directly related to compliance intentions. Finally, we also manipulate both the order of the items presented in the experiment and the form (online or paper-based) of the experimental instrument. While order and form effects do not interfere with the interpretation of the influence of social norms on tax compliance, we do find a significant presentation order effect driven by the paper condition, which suggests that online data collection may be preferable to uncontrolled paper and pencil administration.

Given the conflicting attitudes that people have toward those who report wrongdoing and a lack of empirical research specifically examining subsequent hiring, it is an open question as to whether accounting professionals would want to work with former whistleblowers. The authors examine this question using an experimental design, in which participants evaluate an employment candidate before and after the person discloses having been a whistleblower. Four manipulations of whistleblowing are used in both a within-subjects and a between-subjects manipulation. The authors’ results demonstrate that accounting professionals’ intentions to recommend a candidate for hire decrease after they are informed that a strong candidate has a whistleblowing past. A candidate is viewed most negatively, however, when discovering malfeasance and electing not to blow the whistle internally. Moreover, when the whistle is blown internally and the superior takes no action, the candidate who remained silent and chose not to continue to push the issue is viewed more negatively than the candidate who proceeded to blow the whistle externally. Although a candidate having a whistleblowing past appears to pose a cautionary signal in the interview process, participants reacted more harshly when the candidate failed to act or lacked the durable moral courage to see the matter through to completion.