Effects of Advice on Effectiveness and Efficiency of Tax Planning Tasks

Supervisory advice is generally given to tax professionals in public accounting firms before they commence tax planning tasks. The objectives of giving advice are to achieve effectiveness and efficiency in tax planning, as well as for training tax professionals. An experiment with 54 tax professionals, from accounting firms across Canada, was conducted to determine the effects of supervisory advice on effectiveness and efficiency in performing tax planning tasks of different complexity. Advice results in lower effectiveness in lower‐complexity tasks, as evidenced by more technically inadequate tax plans, signs of confusion and overdetermined solutions (i.e., unnecessary information in the tax plans). In higher‐complexity cases, the results suggest a limited improvement in effectiveness, as evidenced by more technically adequate plans, but at a cost of limiting insightful judgment. On the other hand, advice results in limited gains in efficiency for both the lower and higher‐complexity tasks. This study extends the advice and tax literatures by investigating the role of advice in the performance of tax planning tasks of different complexity, which has not been examined in other research. This study also contributes to tax practice, as public accounting firms should consider the limited gains in efficiency with the decrease in effectiveness for lower‐complexity tasks and the potential to limit insightful judgment for higher complexity tasks. The results of this study suggest that firms face trade‐offs in achieving efficiency, effectiveness and the training objective.     

Book Reviews

This article will investigate why German business leaders during the 1950s resisted the American lead for advanced management training but instead developed theirvery own model, the Baden-Badener Unternehmergespräche (BBUG). The article explains the origins, set-up and methods of the BBUG; it also analyses the background of the talks' participants during its first decade of existence. In so doing, it provides another viewpoint to the debate on the ‘Americanisation’ of German management in the post-war years.     

Judgment and Decision‐Making Research in Auditing and Accounting: Future Research Implications of Person,Task, and Environment Perspective

The discipline of accounting and auditing has increasingly recognized judgment and decision making (JDM) as highly important attributes in the profession because individuals such as managers, auditors, financial analysts, accountants, and standard setters make pivotal judgments and decisions. Many studies undertaken in this domain of research also substantiate the significance of JDM in accounting and auditing. This study evaluates all the papers published in 10 accounting journals among the leading ones from 1980 to 2010 that fall within the domain of JDM research. The categorization of the studies reviewed in this paper is based on Bonner's ( 1999 ) three major determinants of JDM: Person, Task, and Environment variables. The review highlights the progress in the literature over the past three decades and also identifies the methodological limitations of previous research. The identified limitations will be useful for improving the research method of future JDM studies in accounting and auditing. The review also draws inferences on how JDM research in auditing, which is well established, could usefully guide future JDM research in financial accounting.