Doyle, E, Frecknall-Hughes, J and Summers, B orcid.org/0000-0002-9294-0088 (2022) Ethical Reasoning in Tax Practice: Law or is There More? Journal of International Accounting, Auditing and Taxation, 48. 100483. ISSN 1061-9518
Abstract
Private sector tax practitioners are often accused of unethical behavior in developing contrived tax avoidance arrangements. Such arrangements usually comply with the letter of the law but contravene its underlying (often unstated) ‘spirit’. Prior research comparing the ethical reasoning of private sector tax practitioners, government revenue tax practitioners and a non-tax (control) group in both social and tax contexts found no significant differences between them in a social context. However, where tax dilemmas were concerned, private sector tax practitioners demonstrated lower levels of ethical reasoning. We seek here to examine whether this difference results from the regard private sector tax practitioners have for the law – in other words, whether they have a law and order orientation when facing ethical issues or whether the professional context offers other motives. Using the Defining Issues Test (DIT) and a tax-specific context version of the DIT, we test whether there is a law and order dominance in the ethical reasoning of private sector tax practitioners in both tax and social contexts, in comparison with government revenue tax practitioners and a non-tax control group.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © 2022 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Inc. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/). |
Keywords: | Defining Issues Test (DIT); Ethical reasoning; Private sector tax practitioners; Government revenue tax practitioners; Law and order orientation; Personal interest reasoning |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Leeds |
Academic Units: | The University of Leeds > Faculty of Business (Leeds) > Management Division (LUBS) (Leeds) > Management Division Decision Research (LUBS) |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Publications |
Date Deposited: | 11 Oct 2021 10:09 |
Last Modified: | 25 Jun 2023 22:47 |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | Elsevier |
Identification Number: | 10.1016/j.intaccaudtax.2022.100483 |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:179017 |