Audit and tax professionals tend to make judgments consistent with their client's preference, even when that preference is aggressive. Client preference affects judgments directly and indirectly, via information search. In particular, professionals focus their search on information that supports...

Tax professionals are responsible for objectively evaluating tax authorities and evidence relevant to their application and for serving as client advocates. We predict that practice risk, i.e., exposure to monetary and nonmonetary costs of making inappropriate recommendations, will affect tax...

In the current environment of increasing exposure to liability in tax practice, it is particularly important to understand the judgment and decision processes of tax practitioners and the relation of those processes to features of the tax setting. One way that tax practitioners reduce their...

SEC Staff Accounting Bulletin No. 74 (SAB 74, U.S. SEC 1987) requires registrants to provide information about the predicted financial statement effect of an enacted but not yet adopted accounting standard. The objectives of SAB 74 disclosures are to inform users the registrant will be required...

We examine a new government-sponsored investment vehicle available only to individual investors, 529 college savings plans, to analyze consumers' investment behavior after a significant change in disclosures of historical investment returns and tax benefits. We find evidence that disclosures...

Taxpayers have invested over $45 billion in state-sponsored 529 college savings plans. Created by federal legislation in 1996 and enhanced by a 2001 tax law change, all 50 states and the District of Columbia now offer a 529 plan. States provide tax deductions and/or exemptions to taxpayers...

Taxpayers have invested over $45 billion in state-sponsored 529 college savings plans. Created by federal legislation in 1996 and enhanced by a 2001 tax law change, all 50 states and the District of Columbia now offer a 529 plan. States provide tax deductions and/or exemptions to taxpayers...

Corporate lobbying is an important and growing component of firms' corporate political activity. According to recent reports, 2,220 organizations spent $773 million on 6,500 tax lobbyists in the 2011-2012 Congress with the number of tax lobbyists predicted to grow 30 percent by 2014 (Byrnes...

In this paper we use audited corporate tax disclosures relating to a tax holiday on repatriated earnings created by the American Jobs Creation Act of 2004 to examine the return on lobbying. We find firms lobbying for this provision have a return in excess of $220 for every $1 spent on lobbying,...

Is the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) bad for business? Did the countries' most prominent companies game the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) disclosure process to make negative political statements about ObamaCare? Immediately following the ACA's enactment on March 23,...