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Tax education, a subset of accounting education formed in the early 1900s, was largely ignored as a discipline until the 1970s. Over time, tax became a more prevalent part of accounting practice and the CPA examination. In 1996, the AICPA developed the Model Tax Curriculum (MTC) to give a practitioner’s perspective on how taxation should be taught in higher education. This chapter provides a history of tax education and the responses of tax educators to the MTC Task Force’s recommendations in 1996 and the revisions in 2007 and 2014. The authors surveyed tax educators five times over 23 years to get a sense of the MTC’s adoption, both in the past and future terms. The authors found that tax educators largely ignored the MTC Task Force’s recommendations. This chapter discusses reasons given by respondents for not following the MTC and offers various strategies the MTC Task Force and others might consider when recommending future tax education reforms.

At a small liberal arts university in Western New York, a second-year accounting professor and a fully tenured education professor worked together to develop a model of sustained mentoring across an entire semester with the goal of helping the accounting professor improve his teaching. The model was put to practice in a freshmen managerial accounting class during the spring 2011 semester. It involved frequent observations (roughly one-third of the classes) and immediate follow-up communications. Control over all decisions remained with the accounting professor at all times. The results were positive and substantial for all parties. The students reported better learning during in-class time. The accounting professor added to his “tool belt” and gained greater confidence in his teaching ability while the education professor reenergized his career by extending the body of his life’s work to include higher education.

This study investigates the determinants of students’ intention to major in accounting (IMA) in pre-recessionary, recessionary, and post-recessionary time periods. By examining four factors (perceived professional ethics (PE), job market consideration (JMC), social influence (SI), and self-efficacy (SE)) in accordance with the theory of planned behavior (TPB), we address two primary research questions. The first question concerns whether the four factors are related to students’ IMA before, during, and after the recession. The second deals with whether there is a shift in the relative importance of the factors between the pre-recessionary, recessionary, and post-recessionary periods. We use structural equation modeling and multigroup analysis of structural invariance to analyze these issues. The results show that all four factors have significant structural weights in each period, with the exception of perceived PE in the pre-recessionary period. In terms of students’ IMA over the three periods, perceived PE, JMC, and SI become factors of greater importance during the recessionary and post-recessionary periods, while SE decreases in relative importance.

This paper seeks to establish the influence of several types of factors on the use of accounting information in the public sector within a developing country context. Institutional theory with its branches NIS and OIE underlies the theoretical framework for explaining the factors influencing the use of accounting information. The analysis was based on structural equation modelling to test nine hypotheses. The data were collected by administering 208 questionnaires to the Tanzanian Local Government Authorities’ political and administrative actors.

At large, the findings of this study comprehend the role of institutionalised social and legal rule with professionalism in shaping actors to use accounting information instrumentally and symbolically in budget decision-making processes. Furthermore, the findings establish the importance of education and experiences on accounting and financial aspects of the actors who are involved in the public sector budget decision-making process. The findings also provide an understanding of the differences between political actors and administrative actors in terms of the factors influencing the symbolic use of accounting information in LGA’s decision-making processes.

Our findings challenge development partners (i.e. donors), reformers such as Central Government and National Accounting professional board such NBAA in Tanzania to coerce pressure by adoption of implementation of NPM techniques, which can lead to positive change in LGAs to influence instrumental rather than symbolic use of accounting information in the budgetary decision-making processes. For example, adoption of accrual basis accounting should also concur with the improvement of accounting information systems, legal and regulatory frameworks together with creation of trainings that increase skill and knowledge of using accounting information by the actors. This might ensure financial sustainability to LGAs that can increase provision of service with relevant quality to citizens. Moreover, the findings need the political parties to take responsibility of building capacity of their candidates. It might ensure that their representatives in the council are capable of making appropriate use of the accounting information at their disposal to improve the quality of budget decision making and their representation of the population for the benefit of their organisation and eventually of their political parties. The citizens are needed to be sources of professional behaviours to both councillors and administrators by making closer follow up and demands of quality services from their LGAs through budgeting processes.

The generalisation of this study’s findings can be limited because they were obtained only from LGAs operating in Tanzania

This is the first paper that establishes the factors influencing the instrumental–conceptual use and the symbolic use of accounting information in LGAs’ budgetary decision-making processes in developing country context, in particular, in Tanzania.

This chapter proposes that tax education, proxied by Master of Science in Taxation (MST) degree, has substantial influence on chief financial officers’ (CFOs) knowledge, skill sets, values, and cognitive preferences and further influences their decisions in tax reporting. By empirically examining the relation between CFOs with MST degree and their companies' tax compliance based on US data between 2004 and 2016, we find that CFOs with MST degree are associated with improved tax compliance, suggesting that US MST education, beyond general accounting education, cultivates graduates with higher levels of professionalism and ethics in the field of taxation. Moreover, we find that CFOs' tenure, age, and compensation influence the relation between tax education and tax compliance, suggesting company's compensation and employee policies influence executives' tax decisions. Finally, we find that pressures from financial reporting and CEOs with accounting educational background could alleviate the role of CFOs with accounting educational background in tax reporting, while institutional owners could strengthen the role of CFOs. This chapter provides evidence regarding the social implication of MST program and has important managerial implication to tax compliance, executive recruitment, and corporate governance.