An Examination of Ethical Influences on the Work of Tax Practitioners

As a contribution to the continuing debate about tax practitioner ethics, this paper explores the main streams of Western ethical thought that are relevant to tax practitioners’ work, most typically deontology and consequentialism (although virtue ethics and distributive justice are also considered). It then goes on to consider the impact of such ethical influences on the professional ethical codes of conduct that govern tax practitioners’ work (with specific reference to the UK and Ireland), and attempts to unravel the complex work and ethical environment of the practice of tax in terms of tax compliance and tax avoidance. The paper then examines the prior studies on tax practitioners and ethics and the type of dilemmas that practitioners face in the context of their work. The paper proceeds to examine empirically the extent to which tax practitioners take a consequentialist versus a deontological approach in their reasoning about moral dilemmas. This is carried out by an innovative use of the Defining Issues Test.     

Safety management is a virtue

It is undeniable that safe operation and process reliability are not only compatible but highly interrelated. Reliable production units rarely have safety incidents, whereas unreliable ones tend to repeatedly experience abnormal operation. To prevent incidents, personnel, procedures, and equipment must be aligned to facilitate rapid identification and response to failures of the control system and protective safeguards. Safe and reliable performance requires minimization of the root causes that lead to abnormal and emergency operation. The challenges to accomplishing this in a timely manner are considerable, but not insurmountable. This article discusses various challenges to sustaining safe operation of process equipment. Each challenge is introduced using a philosophical saying from a Chinese fortune cookie to remind the reader that the barriers against progress are not new but have existed from many years. In most cases, the solutions are also well known and generally require deployment of robust equipment, proven techniques, and competent resources. © 2009 American Institute of Chemical Engineers Process Saf Prog 2009     

Fear and Loathing (of others): Race,Class and Contestation of Space in Washington,DC

Our article explores the cultural politics of public space and the placemaking politics of urban redevelopment in the Atlas District of Washington, DC, a popular commercial district undergoing rapid gentrification. The major questions we address are, how do race and class impact the ways public space is controlled and/or managed in the context of rapid changes in the built, economic and social environments of the neighborhood? What role do those narratives play in justifying changes in and management of public space? We focus on uses of public space and describe how various forms of power are linked to the control of space in the context of gentrification. Our analysis focuses on designated public space in the Atlas District—the Starburst Plaza. By analyzing everyday practices around community control at the Starburst Plaza, this case study focuses on the discrete methods by which the symbolic and material inequities promulgated by the neoliberal state are reconfigured through struggles to define and manage contested public spaces.     

Predicting total health care costs of medicaid recipients: An artificial neural systems approach

Although medical treatment costs have escalated beyond the reach of many Americans, a thorough total cost model is essential before implementing cost containment strategies. This study offers a prediction model of the total treatment cost for a Mississippi Medicaid patient. Artificial neural systems (ANS) are proposed as a methodology for the prediction of health care costs of postmenopausal women who are Medicaid recipients. The results of the neural networks along with traditional regression analysis are presented. Artificial neural systems overcome many of the problems associated with the estimation of this model, such as the identification of the appropriate functional form and dealing with both qualitative and quantitative aspects of these large claims databases. Neural networks are shown to provide superior forecasts. In addition preliminary results for the presentation of significance tests of individual causal variables using neural networks is presented.     

Using Payment Behaviour Data for Credit Risk Modelling

In this paper we evaluate payment scores in two contexts; that of predicting future payment behaviour and that of corporate failure prediction. The assessment of the ability and willingness of a firm to pay its creditors, and the likely timeliness of payments, are a major focus of both credit risk analysis (from the trade credit perspective) and government policy, although the latter issues have not been much studied in the academic literature. While failure prediction models are traditionally used as indicators of payment behaviour in the UK, payment behaviour prediction models are estimated and made available in the USA by the leading credit reporting agencies and the predictive abilities of such scores in the UK context are, therefore, worthy of consideration.We also consider the contribution that payment behaviour scores can make to predicting corporate failure. An important question is whether the availability of payment behaviour scores increases the overall information content of the credit report or merely re-packages information represented elsewhere. We find that payment behaviour data can be used to predict successfully future payment behaviour in a trade credit context, and can add incrementally to the predictivity of corporate failure models.     

Investigating the use of design methods by capstone design students at Clemson University

The authors describe a preliminary study to understand the attitude of engineering students regarding the use of design methods in projects to identify the factors either affecting or influencing the use of these methods by novice engineers. A senior undergraduate capstone design course at Clemson University, consisting of approximately fifty students and nine graduate design coaches, was chosen as the unit of analysis. Results from a survey of the class suggest that, though these novice engineers were convinced that design methods they were eager to learn were of use in helping them make better products, they tended not to use them. The stated reasons for not using them were the effort required to implement the methods, to understand how and when to use the methods, and the pressure to deliver results in a short duration. Recommendations from this study can be useful in designing effective design education programs and to develop more designer-friendly design methods.