While much of the empirical
accounting literature suggests that, if differences do exist, Big Four
employees are more ethical than non-Big Four employees, this trend has not been
evident in the recent media coverage of Big Four tax practitioners acting for multinationals
accused of aggressive tax avoidance behaviour.
However, there has been little exploration in the literature to date specifically
of the relationship between firm size and ethics in tax practice. We aim here to address this gap, initially exploring
tax practitioners’ perceptions of the impact of firm size on ethics in tax
practice using interview data in order to identify the salient issues involved. We then proceed to assess quantitatively
whether employer firm size has an impact on the ethical reasoning of tax
practitioners, using a tax
context-specific adaptation of a well known and validated psychometric
instrument, the Defining Issues
Test.