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Purpose -The purpose of this paper is to determine whether the presentation medium of corporate social and environmental web site disclosure has an impact on user trust in such disclosure, and to examine the effect of media richness on user perception about corporate social and environmental responsibility. Design/methodology/approach -The paper's methodology is a three-by-two between-subjects design experiment, manipulating presentation medium and industry type. Participants viewed social and environmental web site disclosures and completed and communicated their perceptions of trust and the experimental companies' corporate social responsibility. Findings -The presentation medium richness of social and environmental web site disclosures is positively associated with: trusting intentions, but not trusting beliefs, of web site users; and user perception of corporate social and environmental responsibility. Research limitations/implications -As with all controlled experiments, the research design focused on internal validity to maintain control over the task design, manipulation, and measurement of variables. While this required trade-offs with external validity, the task was designed based on real-world scenarios to maintain high levels of external validity within the experimental setting. Practical implications -The paper provides evidence that corporations could use enhanced web-based technology to potentially mislead users regarding their performance in the social domain. Originality/value -The paper extends the visual disclosure literature by examining the richness of the image/visual media, and investigates whether user perceptions are impacted by the variations in its richness.

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This study investigates the degree to which professional role (auditor or tax professional), decision context (an audit or tax environment), and gender influence the ethical decision making of public accounting professionals. The primary analysis, including all 134 accounting professionals who participated in our experiment, indicates that these participants are both less likely to indicate they would concede to a client in a contentious situation and less likely to recommend conceding when they are in an audit as opposed to tax context. Furthermore, work experience in auditing (as opposed to tax) is associated with a decreased likelihood of conceding to the client in both contexts. However, when data for males and females are analyzed separately, professional role, context, and moral intensity are significantly related to males' decision making, but are not significant with respect to females' decisions. This suggests that males and females may use different decision-making processes. Possible theoretical explanations for these findings are discussed.

A primary responsibility of tax professionals is to be an advocate for their clients (AICPA 2000). Prior studies have shown mixed results on how the advocate role influences tax professionals’ decision processes and outcomes (e.g., Cloyd and Spilker 1999; Davis and Mason 2003; Barrick et al. 2004; Kahle and White 2004). In this study, we consider how advocacy may be at least partially context-specific, introduce the construct of client-specific advocacy, and thoroughly examine the influence of advocacy attitudes on a number of steps in the judgment and decision-making process. Consistent with attitude theory, we report experimental results that suggest client characteristics influence tax professionals’ advocacy attitudes. We also find that client-specific advocacy influences process variables such as the weighting of evidence and decision outcomes such as the recommendation of tax advice. The results of the study indicate that tax professionals may be unintentionally influenced by client attributes when making judgments and may have difficulty separating their advocacy and evidence evaluation roles.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate certified public accountants' (CPAs) perceptions of their ethical environments. More specifically, we compare the perceptions of CPAs in (1) public accounting firms to those in industry, and (2) perceptions of CPAs at Big 4 public accounting firms to those at non-Big 4 firms. The ethical environment is one component of overall organizational culture and is important for encouraging ethical decision making. Based on responses from 904 CPAs, we find CPAs working at public accounting firms perceive their ethical environments as significantly stronger than CPAs in industry (and other nonpublic accounting work settings). Additionally, within public accounting, CPAs at Big 4 firms perceive their ethical environments as significantly stronger than those working at non-Big 4 accounting firms. Implications for research and practice are discussed. Data Availability: Please contact the authors.

Manuscript Type: EmpiricalResearch Question/Issue: Companies operating in transition economies encounter a broad range of potential challenges. In the area of tax, firms make direct tax payments but may also encounter unofficial tax costs in the form of bribery or extortion. We focus on institutional determinants, including formal rules, informal rules, and enforcement, to examine conditions under which firms are more likely to encounter these transactions. We operationalize formal rules as rule-based trust and informal rules as dispositional trust.