“Uncomfortable territory”: personal and organisational values in the tax profession

ABSTRACT

As professionals, accountants hold a public interest mandate based in part on ethical claims. However, individual professionals, particularly in tax, commonly see their work as more technical than relating to the common good. Rising public concern about tax avoidance focuses attention on how ethical values are brought to bear on tax work. In these contexts, the tension between personal and organisational values merits attention. This study draws on a large international survey and a set of 68 semi-structured interviews to explore the balance between the personal ethical or spiritual values that individuals bring to their tax work and the ethical framing of their organisations. This direct approach captures self-reported moral awareness experienced at the level of the individual tax professional, framed by the concept of ethical awareness as a base level of ethical action (Rest, J., Moral development: Advances in research and theory. Praeger, 1986). We find, inter alia, that spiritual values are understood as personal and are most influential in smaller, more domestic firms and among those still undertaking professional exams, while ethical awareness is lowest among early career professionals in large international firms. The study highlights a disconnect between ethical learning acquired during professional training and its application at the early career stage. Socialisation within the firm adds to the potential for the early-career stage to set the tone for career-long ethical framing. This heightens the responsibility of firms as well as professional bodies to valorise moral judgement.

KEYWORDS:

• Ethics
• values
• professionals
• tax
• spirituality
• accounting

ACCEPTED BY:

• Sumit Lodhia

1. Introduction

Accounting and tax professionals hold a mandate to act in the public interest, and their professional privilege is built on an assumption of ethical training, formation and decision-making. Claims based on deference to “the public interest” are commonly summoned by the accounting profession as a defence against societal revulsion (Muzio et al., 2013). Such ethics-based claims are fundamental to the social contract that exists between the state, professions and society at large, and have been the basis of a considerable amount of research within the accounting field (Addison & Mueller, 2015; Dedoulis, 2006; Gendron et al., 2006; Neu et al., 2003). However, relatively little work addresses how individual professionals are influenced in their daily work by their own personal ethical or spiritual values, or how they reconcile these to organisational values. This paper aims to address that lacuna by directly exploring ethical awareness amongst tax professionals at different career stages and in varying organisational contexts. Using a mixed-methods field study, we highlight tensions between personal and organisational understandings of ethics, allowing us to interrogate professional socialisation and ethical formation in tax.

The context for this study is a professional tax world besieged by rising public concern about the deleterious impact of tax practice on equality between and within nations (Sikka, 2017). What was seen as a technical service provided to high net worth individuals or corporates is now typically framed as a societally damaging action by an elite group. This accelerates a metamorphosis in the “moral meaning” of tax work, reminiscent of Hitlin and Vaisey (2013, p. 58), and increases the relevance of a study of how tax professionals understand the applicability of ethics to their work, and how they balance the tension between their own personal values and those of their employer.

Until recently, relatively little attention has been paid to the underlying ethical contexts within which such professional decision-making is conducted (Carter & Spence, 2014). Indeed, separate from the question of the many possible ethical framings of an issue such as taxation, it is not clear from current research to what extent tax professionals are actually aware of an ethical dimension mattering in their daily work (Dowling, 2014). Prior work suggests a capacity on the part of tax experts to dissociate professional decision-making from more essential considerations of personal ethics, spiritual values, socialisation and professional context (Carter et al., 2015). Furthermore, since the typical workplace is a commercial environment, tax work is routinely informed by an emphasis on the profitability of the firm, leading to choices made by individual tax experts that may lean towards tax avoidance or other harmful tax practices. This creates a set of competing logics between the societal consequences of tax work, “changing moral boundaries in society”, and evolving institutional logics (Alm & Torgler, 2006; Radcliffe et al., 2018; Suddaby, 2013). Because tax practitioners can now be seen as “morally significant actors” (Suddaby, 2013, p. 381), there are calls for “more empirical work looking at the experience of tax professionals” with the explicit goal of better understanding how the “introduction of a new moral ‘logic’ into the tax field potentially conflicts with a well-established commercial ‘logic’ of tax minimisation” (Radcliffe et al., 2018, p. 47). This study seeks to address this call.

Despite some homogeneity in ethics training across the various professional bodies concerned with taxation, the morality of professionals cannot be assumed to be either uniform or linear. Lakoff (1996), for example, sketches out a range of potentially defensible moral positions on taxation, while Lamont (1992) describes a variety of bases for professional self-worth, based on money, manners or morals. In addition to the competing professional and commercial logics described in Radcliffe et al. (2018), there are also the competing personal and institutional logics of the common good, justice or altruism, as described in Lamont (2012, p. 212), and “alternative definitions of worth, such as those grounded in group identity, morality [or] religion” (Lamont, 2012, p. 214). Further, the dynamic between personal values and workplace or professional ethos and the place of spiritual values in tax work has not been widely studied (McGhee & Grant, 2017). However, for many people “[t]axation is not merely a moral issue; the very basis of morality is at stake!” (Lakoff, 1996, p. 192 italics in original). We are interested, therefore, in exploring the heterogeneity of personal ethical and spiritual values as influences on experts working in this ethically contested field, and how those influences relate to wider institutional factors such as the organisational context, age and career stage. In this, we are responding to Hitlin and Vaisey (2013) with an analysis that “looks for variations in moral meanings, connects the development of meanings to social processes, and recognizes the potential for moral meanings to influence action over time” (p. 64).

Our primary data derives from two sources: a large global survey of tax professionals complemented and extended by a substantial set of semi-structured interviews. We focus on the level of daily awareness expressed by these tax professionals (Rest, 1986). This is captured by the influence of personal ethical and spiritual values on their daily work; the degree to which they value being ethical; and the extent to which they would characterise their organisation as ethical. We examine how these factors vary over age and career stage, in large or small firms, and in those with a domestic or transnational presence. This allows us to explore the interaction of organisational factors with the personal beliefs of individuals (Longenecker et al., 2004; Weaver & Agle, 2002). The self-reporting format of a field survey combines well with the lived experience articulated in the interviews. In aggregate, the data allow us to explore the field, highlighting frictions between the personal and the professional framing of ethics.

We find a noticeably different ethical culture at work in large multinational firms, with a significantly different level of personal moral awareness evident in respondents from this sector, particularly at the early career stage. This may reflect a willingness on the part of employees in such firms to subordinate personal values to corporate culture (Rees et al., 2019). In contrast, we find a significantly higher level of moral awareness in tax practitioners in very small firms. We find differences in relation to career stage are driven by the often-competing considerations of ethical behaviour and ambition, as well as the lack of agency experienced by junior workers in large firms. Spiritual values play a role, albeit at a low level, amongst those undertaking their professional examinations, perhaps reflecting a capacity to reconcile the competing logics of organisational imperatives and personal values, making “living out of a moral identity … second nature” (Barnard, 2016, p. 1031). The study’s core practice contribution is to highlight a period of ethical risk following professional qualification, and the need to better bridge the gap between ethical formation deriving from professional training and organisational experience. Our work also lays the foundation for further empirical work on the impact of organisational context on ethical socialisation.

The rest of the paper is structured as follows: Section Two positions our work in the context of prior literature on the profession and tax experts and outlines the ethical framing we are drawing on in our work. Section Three describes our method and data. Section Four outlines our analysis. Section Five discusses the implications of the work and concludes.

2. Ethical and spiritual values and the profession

There is a significant societal motivation for examining the ethical and spiritual values of tax experts, articulated, for example, in Radcliffe et al. (2018). Increased attention has been paid to the impact of taxation on inequality, for instance, not only at a national level – given its power to redistribute and concentrate wealth – but also internationally as multinational firms engage in either tax arbitrage or aggressive tax practices that shift taxable income from one country to another. This strengthens or depletes the ability of governments to provide basic services for their citizens. We explore the salience of ethical and spiritual values to those engaged in such tax-related initiatives, looking in particular at the balance between personal and organisational imperatives. In addressing the issue of ethics within the field of tax in this manner we are responding to the insight in Prasad and Mills (2010, p. 232) that “actions in privileged spaces (i.e. boardrooms, executive suites, etc.), ultimately contribute to the further disenfranchisement of individuals situated at the bottom of the socio-economic ladder”.

The examination of the ethics of tax professionals links to a wider body of work in accounting inspired partly by the ethics-based claims of professionals to act in the public interest (Addison & Mueller, 2015; Gendron et al., 2006). Professional ethics are drawn on by accountants to provide a sense of credibility and independence (Dedoulis, 2006) and, as noted by Ferry and Lehman (2018), accounting students are expected to develop an appreciation of the ethical dimensions of their work, a process continued by professional firms in the socialisation process of most trainees (Carter & Spence, 2014).

For tax practitioners, such claims to ethical sensitivity and public interest mandates underpin their access to a world in which decisions of profound socio-economic consequence are formulated. This has prompted an emerging thread of more recent work on tax professionals (Boden et al., 2010; Radcliffe et al., 2018). The technical nature of tax may also provide a degree of cover for the public interest (O’Regan & Killian, 2014) despite the societal significance of tax work. We contribute to this field by exploring how ethics is understood by tax professionals in the context of the contending personal and institutional logics.

Much of the work on tax ethics is experimental in nature, using scenarios to elicit responses from respondents. Our approach is closer to fieldwork, aiming “to study how morality motivates conduct in natural settings and how moral meanings infuse situations and choices occurring outside of an experimental laboratory” (Hitlin & Vaisey, 2013, p. 60). While work using scenarios and experiments is useful in fitting into what Bykov (2019) terms the cognitive sociology of morality, there are dangers in an exclusive reliance on such an approach:

concentrating on measuring single judgements of “rightness” and “wrongness” leads to a considerable fragmentation of the very idea of morality, which now looks like just little more than a capacity to evaluate hypothetical scenarios. (Bykov, 2019, p. 203)

There is, in fact, a wide range of ways in which the morality and ethics of taxation can be conceptualised and internalised (Forsyth, 1980; Lakoff, 1996, pp. 189–192; Morales, 1998; McGee, 2006), with a corresponding diversity of views on the ethics of aggressive tax planning. This makes the inference of ethical judgement from the choices made by experimental subjects using a scenario methodology somewhat challenging – it is not always clear how a higher level of ethical or spiritual awareness would track to a particular outcome.

Research on how ethical values are formed as part of the professional identity of accountants tends to look at a relatively homogenous range of respondents, such as senior staff in large firms (Carter et al., 2015; Spence & Carter, 2014). The context of the small firm, as noted by Spence and Lozano (2000), remains less well researched. Nevertheless, a great deal of work in both the critical accounting literature (Gendron et al., 2006; Muzio et al., 2013; Spence & Carter, 2014; Addison & Mueller, 2015; Carter et al., 2015) and in business ethics (O’Fallon & Butterfield, 2005; Kish-Gephart et al., 2010; Craft, 2013; Lehnert et al., 2015; Rees et al., 2019) has addressed the issue of ethics in the workplace and the factors that predispose to ethical decision-making. However, much remains to be done to explore and capture the underlying ethical and spiritual dispositions of tax professionals in a manner that both identifies and reflects the factors informing their hugely consequential decision-making (Prasad & Mills, 2010; Radcliffe et al., 2018).

2.1. Ethical awareness

In approaching the question of ethics in the workplace, the field of descriptive (empirical) ethics, which examines the actual thought-processes and behaviour of actors in organisations, has become an increasingly significant locus of attention (see Craft, 2013; Kish-Gephart et al., 2010; Lehnert et al., 2015; O’Fallon & Butterfield, 2005; Rees et al., 2019; Rodgers & Fayi, 2018; Tenbrunsel et al., 2003; Tenbrunsel & Smith-Crowe, 2008; Trevino et al., 2006). In terms of conceptualisation, the work of Rest (1986) “has guided the majority of research and narrative reviews of research findings within behavioral ethics” (Kish-Gephart et al., 2010, p. 1). We draw on Rest’s (1986) model, which is seminal in the workplace ethics literature, by focusing on awareness as a necessary, albeit insufficient, criterion for ethical action. We use Rest’s ideas, not in terms of defining issues, but rather in highlighting the essential importance of ethical awareness at a basic level, i.e. the recognition by tax experts of ethical dimensions in their work.

Rest’s model sees ethical decision-making as a process involving four key stages – “identifying the moral nature of an issue, making a moral judgement, establishing moral intent, and engaging in moral action” (O’Fallon & Butterfield, 2005, p. 375). These may be loosely paraphrased as ethical awareness, judgement, intent and behaviour. In the Rest model, each step is distinct and constitutes a necessary but insufficient condition for making an ethical decision. For instance, an individual’s possession of strong ethical judgement ability will not trigger an ethical choice in the absence of moral awareness or failure to recognise a moral issue (Lincoln & Holmes, 2011).

Awareness, then, is fundamental, although difficult to observe. Rest (1986, p. 3) points up potential challenges in researching the “awareness” factor, noting that it involves the “interpretation of the particular situation in terms of what actions are possible, who (including oneself) would be affected by each course of action, and how the interested parties would regard such effects on their welfare”. Despite these difficulties, in a review of the literature on business ethics, Lehnert et al. (2015, p. 198) observe increased research attention to the first stage of this construct, “moral awareness”, and to relatively unexplored aspects of the decision-making process such as religiosity and personal spirituality. In tax work, this foundational issue of awareness may be more nuanced than in other professional contexts. In a review of the area, Trevino et al. (2006, p. 952) define behavioural ethics as “individual behaviour that is subject to or judged according to generally accepted moral norms of behaviour”. The degree to which aggressive tax positions, particularly those taken on behalf of clients, are considered to breach accepted norms in a tax context is unclear, and exploration of this question lends itself to a mixed methods approach.

Attention to issues of ethical awareness amongst accountants and practitioners has become more pointed in the wake of recent scandals (Low et al., 2008; Uyar et al., 2015). These studies have concentrated on work experience or career stage (Eweje & Brunton, 2010) as well as factors relating to gender, age, religiosity and personal values (Enderle, 2003; Uyar et al., 2015). The inclusion of spiritual values in this context is relatively novel, and the link between issues of ethical behaviour, common good and morality remains one of the more interesting, if under-researched, aspects of the spirituality in the workplace literature (McGhee & Grant, 2017). A strand of research does address issues of spirituality and ethics in the workplace (Ashmos & Duchon, 2000; Case & Gosling, 2010; Tackney et al., 2017). However, this work has not directly linked to ethics in other literatures (Everett & Tremblay, 2014; Lehman, 2014), and analysis has not been disaggregated into personal or organisational levels. This may derive, in part, from the comparative novelty of this association (Gibbons, 2000), or the methodological challenges inherent in investigating aspects of personal and professional ethics or motivation that do not easily lend themselves to observation. As McGhee and Grant (2017, p. 162) note “[m]uch of what exists is quantitative in nature” and “such studies are limited in their capacity to understand an agent’s motivation for acting”. We address this by triangulating our survey data with qualitative material from interviews.

Prior work on ethical behaviour breaks down the factors that might trigger ethical or unethical decisions into a number of categories: those relating to the individual; the organisational context; or the nature of the ethical issue itself (O’Fallon & Butterfield, 2005). Complementing scenario-based experimental work, our field work centres on the first two of these levels, referred to by Kish-Gephart et al. (2010, p. 2) as “bad apples and bad barrels”, as expressed in terms of organisational differences, and the personal values, demographics and views of our respondents. We explore in some depth the extent to which personal and organisational factors impinge upon the ethical awareness of tax practitioners in their everyday work. Our findings also highlight how ethical influences are variously perceived in different organisational contexts. This allows us to examine more closely the interlinking nature of the ethical and related dynamics pressing upon tax practitioners in contexts where multiple logics converge.

2.2. Personal and organisational values

While previous work has investigated the degree to which tax professionals face competing logics in terms of the public interest and the need to generate profit (Carter & Spence, 2014), this study explores a different set of tensions, that of personal and organisational ethical framings. Individual tax experts may find that their personal ethical or spiritual values are not congruent with their organisational context. Indeed, “[i]ndividuals and organisations are likely to operate within more than one moral community and will therefore need to reconcile or at least manage the tensions that arise because of this” (Shadnam & Lawrence, 2011, p. 379). Subject to competing commercial and personal logics, they may experience the disruptive impact of multiple calls upon their ethical and spiritual bases. This may be even more pronounced in circumstances in which tax professionals not only function in an advisor-client capacity, but also find themselves mediating the additional pressures induced by national taxation authorities. This motivates research on the ethical frames used by practitioners to navigate the commercial, organisational and regulatory pressures.

Barnard (2016, p. 1018) explores how individuals operating in circumstances that make living up to their personal values – in this case, “freeganism” in an urban environment – can maintain their individual moral identity in a way that is “habitual [and] relatively unproblematic”. We also explore the circumstances in which individuals working in a tax field feel the daily influence of personal values, and how they marshal these as they navigate the often fraught and contrary logics that their unique mediating role induces. This is important because,

morality in organizations is embedded in nested systems of individuals, organizations and moral communities in which ideology and regulation flow “down” from moral communities through organizations to individuals, and moral ideas and influence flow “upward” from individuals through organizations to moral communities. (Shadnam & Lawrence, 2011, p. 379)

With the “moral meaning” of tax avoidance and other legal, but extreme, tax positions coming under increasing public scrutiny, insight into how and where this habitual influence prevails should complement the work of Barnard (2016) and inform regulators and professional bodies interested in the ethical and moral orientation of professionals. Since tax decisions are made by individuals who often work in highly structured professional environments, the equilibrium between their personal ethics and values and the ethics of the firm become relevant. In practice, the work of tax experts takes place in a range of settings, and an employing firm will include tax experts who are themselves diverse in terms of age and experience. We examine, therefore, the salience of personal values over age, career stage and organisational context, directly interrogating various dimensions of moral awareness in the field, with implications for practice and theory.

3. Method and data

Much of the work on ethics and tax has been experimental in design. However, the subjects of the experiments are often not engaged in the kind of work that is being examined in the scenarios or vignettes with which they are presented, which is a limitation. It is also arguable that “the widespread use of vignettes and scenarios (Weber, 1992; Weber & Gillespie, 1998), although useful, may in some cases inadvertently prompt deliberation that takes participants out of the realm of more impulsive types of unethical decisions” (Kish-Gephart et al., 2010, p. 22). While experimental methods are useful in the area of decision-making, they are less suitable for our research objective, which is to address the salience of ethical dimensions of tax work in practice. As noted by Tenbrunsel and Messick (2004, p. 233), “the less salient the ethical dimensions, the less likely it is that an ethical decision frame will be adopted and hence the more likely it is that individuals will behave unethically”. We track awareness and influence of ethical and spiritual values using both a survey and interview data. This allows us to explore how personal ethical and spiritual values interact with ethical codes of organisations, and the impact of this on individuals’ ethical awareness at work. In this, we respond to the call in Abend (2010, p. 581) for research into the natural setting of professionals, thus complementing experimental work using a mixed method approach. We aim for “a systematic integration of quantitative and qualitative methods in a single study for purposes of obtaining a fuller picture and deeper understanding of a phenomenon” (Johnson et al., 2007, p. 119). Our initial set of data is quantitative, and we aim in our qualitative data to expand on emergent findings from the survey, and deepen our understanding. Accordingly, while we present the methods separately here, the two sources are best viewed as complementary, and as addressing the same questions.

3.1. Survey method and data

Initially, we designed an online survey instrument for tax professionals to measure how influential various ethical and spiritual values are in the daily work of tax experts; how much they value ethical as a personal trait in their daily work; and to what degree they would characterise their firm ethos as ethical.¹ This captured various dimensions of ethical awareness and of the salience of ethics to professional work on five-point Likert scales. Conscious of order effect and pattern answering issues, we designed the survey with “disagree” to the left side rather than the right, and included attention validation questions. These helped to validate the survey results. Having piloted the survey, we rolled it out internationally. Initially, we drew on the professional network of the authors, some of whom had previously worked in tax. We extended the reach through professional conferences, and direct approaches to a range of firms and individuals. We also rolled the survey out through a number of professional institutes worldwide.

We reviewed the complete sample of surveys, and removed those that failed an attention check² (10 responses), those that were too incomplete to use, having no demographic or Likert data (138 responses), and those that were completed in an unrealistically short time (129 responses), indicating random answering on the part of the respondent. Our final sample, after this data-cleaning process, comprised 1061 responses from 59 countries. The sample was well-balanced by personal and organisational variables, as shown in Table 1 below.

Table 1. Sample balance on individual and organisational variables.

Age band	20s	30s	40s	50+
% of sample	17%	36%	23%	24%
Stage	Studying	Early	Established
% of sample	16%	25%	59%
Firm size	Micro	Small	Medium	Large
% of sample	14%	18%	9%	59%
Focus	Domestic	Multinational
% of sample	44%	56%

We test for differences in ethical awareness across four age categories: twenties, thirties, forties, and fifty-plus. Eweje and Brunton (2010) found mixed results on differences by age, cementing their observation that research on how ethical awareness varies by age or by work experience has produced inconsistent results. To address this, we separately test for differences across three career stage categories: those respondents who were studying for professional exams (“studying”), those who had obtained a professional qualification in the last five years (“early career”); and those who were qualified for more than five years (“established”). It is important to understand in this context that “studying” does not refer to fulltime students, but rather to individuals working fulltime in tax, while undertaking a professional qualification. This is akin to an apprenticeship and implies some formative development of ethics in an organisational as well as a classroom context.

We are interested in this firm-level socialisation, and the influence of the firm’s “ethical infrastructure” (Tenbrunsel et al., 2003). We, therefore, explore differences across firm size categorised by the number of employees as micro (fewer than 10); small (11–50); medium (51–100); and large (more than 100). Conscious of the impact of the Big 4 accounting firms on practice in the field, we categorised firms and tested for differences based on whether they were established in only one country (“domestic”) or many (“multinational”). Table 2 below shows a cross tabulation of employing firm size and internationalisation among survey respondents. Understandably, most micro firms are located within only one country, but there is a reasonable balance in the other categories.

Table 2. Size and internationalisation data for employers of survey respondents.

Employees	Firm size	One-country	Multinational	Total
10 or fewer	Micro	135	7	142
11–50	Small	129	62	191
51–100	Medium	45	48	93
More than 100	large	145	470	615
Missing values	–	–	–	20
Total		454	587	1061

For independent variables with more than two categories (age group, career stage and firm size) a one-way between-groups analysis of variance was initially conducted to explore their impact on core ethical variables. Where statistically significant differences were found, these were further explored with post-hoc comparisons and bilateral t-tests.

3.2. Interview method and data

Following the survey, we undertook a set of 68 semi-structured interviews with tax professionals from eleven countries. Recruitment of respondents followed a similar pattern to that of survey participants. Interviews took place between May and November 2018. 58 interviews were face-to-face, with 9 by phone and one using Skype. Average interview time was 57 min, with the shortest interview being 31 min long. Again, this group was well-balanced by gender, age and career stage. Just over half of respondents were female. While most interviewees were at the established stage of their careers, slightly less than half were at partner level, with others ranging from trainee level to management. Three interviewees came from professional bodies.

Almost 64 h of interview data were transcribed, coded and sub-coded using nVivo. The purpose of the interview data is to complement and inform the survey data, providing cues for interpretation of the findings on age, stage and firm characteristics, as well as the tension between the personal and the organisational understanding of ethics, together with rationales around ethical awareness in various contexts. Accordingly, our initial analysis involved coding the data for themes relating to ethics, ethical formation and spiritual values, and then sub-coding for elements relating to age, career stage, organisational context. This process was initially deductive, based on survey findings, followed by a more inductive and exploratory process of coding which led to the emergence of a theme centred on the experience of tensions between personal and organisational understandings of ethical values.

4. Findings

Quantitative and qualitative methods are analysed together here to explore personal and organisational ethical dynamics across the field. Our approach differs from that of, for example, Jick (1979) where quantitative results are used largely to supplement the qualitative data (p. 606). In our case, the survey preceded and informed the interviews, and so we give early prominence below to the presentation of quantitative findings, using our interview data to deepen, expand on and clarify issues emerging. Where quotes are presented, the size of the firm in which the respondent works is indicated.

Following Kish-Gephart et al. (2010), we explore the link between the perceived significance of personal and organisational ethics in different organisational contexts, allowing us to interrogate the degree to which ethical formation may have its root in professional training or the professional firm. Our initial attention is at the level of the individual. We examine how dimensions of ethical awareness vary by age and career stage among tax experts (see Appendix 1). In the second section, we drill deeper into organisational contexts, examining these issues in firms of different sizes with different levels of internationalisation (Kish-Gephart et al., 2010). In all cases, we initially present tests based on the survey data, and interpret these in the light of our interview data. In aggregate, our data are self-perceptions on the part of respondents, and so function at the base “awareness” level of Rest’s (1986) model.

4.1. Age and stage

Initially, a one-way between-groups analysis of variance was conducted to establish the significance of differences across the five age categories. This was followed by t-tests between age categories where significant differences are indicated. Table 3 shows the mean scores of key values-related variables across the four age categories, and the results of t-tests for the difference between respondents in their twenties and those in their fifties and older.

Table 3. Mean scores in age bands, and t-tests for difference between 20s and 50+

	20s (n = 170)	30s (n = 370)	40s (n = 240)	50+ (n = 241)	Sig (2-tailed)
Awareness: personal ethical values	4.05***	4.30	4.40	4.61***	0.000
Awareness: spiritual or religious values	2.24	2.18	2.41	2.37	0.382
Firm ethos is ethical	4.20***	4.31	4.44	4.53***	0.000
Valued trait: ethical	4.38***	4.55	4.64	4.68***	0.001

***Significantly different at 1% level.

**Significantly different at 5% level.

In general, ethical awareness rises with age, with several significant differences between the youngest and oldest cohorts. Respondents in their twenties report a lower influence of personal ethical values on their daily work, place a lower value on the personal attribute “ethical” and are less inclined to characterise their firm ethos as ethical. This is echoed in interview responses in two ways. In general, some younger respondents expect that ethics will become more important to them in later life: “maybe [laughter] as I age, I might become more ethical” (Int28, Big4). Older respondents however respond to questions on ethics in a way that indicates they see more of an ethical dimension in tax as they get older: “[Tax] is not objective at all. It’s incredibly subjective. And I think as I have got older, well I used to think the world was terribly black and white and now I will see it grey everywhere” (Int65, Small).

For some interviewees, spirituality is firmly associated with religion or personal faith: “I was brought up as a Methodist” (Int39, Micro); or “It’s also part of my Christian outlook on things, so if they were hiding or wanting to avoid tax I would not continue with them as a client” (Int63, Micro). A roughly equal cohort takes a different view, drawing on more humanist values: “As a human you have your values, it doesn’t have to be a religion” (Int57, professional body); “I think you can be ethical without following a formal religious code. I think that you can be ethical by reference to concepts that would be personal to each individual: concepts of justice and equity and compassion” (Int38, Large). A common thread across all interviewees was that when discussing spiritual awareness, interviewees defaulted to the personal. This internal moral compass was emphasised by many both in general – “I also think instinctively, as humans, we know right from wrong” (Int66, Micro) – and in relation to questionable tax practices “I’ve not got a good feeling from an ethical point of view” (Int12, Large). A recurring sentiment in relation to unethical tax practice was acting in a way at work that allowed the individual to “sleep at night” (Int19, Micro; Int23, Int27 & Int28, Big4) indicating that for those with a sense of spiritual values, unethical practice played at a level deeper than professional risk or reputation.

The salience of spiritual values, then, appears to track an ability to bring personal morality to bear on tax decisions, regardless of religious affiliation. This awareness of spiritual values follows a different pattern to that of personal ethical values. Besides having a very much lower score overall, there is a drop in the level of influence among respondents in their thirties. This may in part relate to early-career pressures, and/or a greater congruence of organisational and personal values at a senior level. Both of these issues are discussed below.

To explore the extent to which age differences derive from the kind of ethical socialisation that is considered to be a hallmark of professionalism (Dedoulis, 2006), the tests conducted across age bands were replicated by career stage. Three categories were defined: those respondents who were currently studying for a professional qualification (“studying”), those within five years of qualification (“early career”), and those who had qualified more than five years ago (“established”). As before, a one-way between-groups analysis of variance was first conducted to establish the significance of differences across the three groups, followed by t-tests as appropriate. Table 4 shows the mean scores of key values-related variables across the three career stage categories, and the results of t-tests for difference between respondents at the early career stage and both trainees and those whose careers are established.

Table 4. Mean scores in career stage groups, and t-tests for difference between early career and other categories.

Variable	Studying (n = 159)	Early career (n = 244)	Established (n = 578)	Early career vs. studying Sig (2-tailed)	Early career vs. established Sig (2-tailed)
Awareness: personal ethical values	4.23	4.20***	4.45***	.728	.000
Awareness: spiritual or religious values	2.58***	2.20***	2.27	.009	.508
Firm ethos is ethical	4.29	4.28**	4.44**	.927	.013
Valued trait: ethical	4.58	4.49**	4.61**	.238	.047

***Significantly different at 1% level.

**Significantly different at 5% level.

These results diverge in an interesting way from those based on age. Rather than showing a steady rise in ethical awareness, there is a dip in all awareness measures in the period immediately after qualification. The change in the level of awareness of spiritual and religious values at this point is significant. All other measures of ethical awareness then rise significantly between early career and the established stage.

As noted earlier, spiritual values are generally seen as more personal by interviewees, deriving from faith or humanist convictions, and guided by a personal moral compass. The data show that once tax professionals qualify, the salience of these values – personal rather than institutional – in their daily work drops significantly. There are two possible reasons for this – the effect of being a student, or the effect of having completed studies and beginning a post-qualification career.

Evidence from interview data leans towards the latter explanation. The experience of ethical formation during professional training is mixed, despite an overt emphasis on ethics in the syllabus: “When you take the professional qualifications you read ethics. You have exams on ethics. You learn what’s right from wrong; it’s part of the training” (Int52, Micro). This is commonly understood as constituting a growing element of current professional training: “There wasn’t a huge amount of ethics when I was doing exams and I’ve been qualified since 2002 so it’s probably more heavily involved in the syllabus now” (Int26, Big4). However, many characterised the kinds of ethical training they received in the process of obtaining a professional qualification as irrelevant to the kinds of work they were expected to do post-qualification: “Some of those like case studies you do for ethics, they’re just off the wall anyway so they’re never going to happen in real life” (Int21, Big4). Others downplayed the impact of professional training on ethical formation: “It comes from me, it does not come from my training and I know that’s how I am, that we should all pay our fair share” (Int42, Small). During the training period, while respondents are working in tax firms, the range of decisions to which they are exposed is more limited. This is partially borne out by interview responses from relatively junior staff which echo a kind of ethical blindness at this stage: “I’m only in the door … [but] … I have never been in the situation where I was like, we could be in a bit of an ethical dilemma here” (Int32, Big4). This quote is interesting, coming from a respondent currently taking the professional exams, who has not encountered any recognisable ethical issues at work despite the increased emphasis on ethics and values in professional training.

A far more significant and consistent finding emerging from the interviews is that the period immediately post-qualification is a very challenging period for tax workers in an ethical sense, a time when they lack the seniority to make decisions without consulting their managers or partners. This may explain why most measures of ethical awareness are significantly lower at this time, compared to later, at the established career stage. Many early-career tax professionals appear to lack the confidence to follow their personal values. This exemplary quote is from an interviewee at an early career stage who earlier noted that she is not particularly conscious of personal values from day-to-day: “You know, I’m not going to say to my manager ‘no I’m not filing this return’ because I think we shouldn’t avail of that loophole” (Int28, Big4). The individual has subordinated her personal values to the values of the firm, or more specifically those of her immediate superior. For some, this links to career ambition: “you can’t exactly just walk into a partner and be like, ‘Oh by the way someone’s doing XYZ and I don’t agree with that’, because that doesn’t look great from anyone’s perspective” (Int21, Big4). More senior respondents recall this phenomenon from early in their career: “In the first company I worked for, I noticed things right out of the gate that I wasn’t comfortable with, and it was challenging to bring those to management’s attention” (Int66, Micro).

Some senior respondents observe that as well as a lack of agency, more junior staff may not recognise ethical issues as they arise: “I would say it’s hard for them to speak up against anything in general, but they are not necessarily sure would they know what was ethical or unethical either” (Int36, Large). Both of these tensions – a difficulty in speaking out, and a lack of recognition of ethical issues – are intertwined. It is not that the individuals are choosing to act unethically, but rather they “do not see the situation as one with ethical implications, and as a result their values and principles are not relevant to the decision process even though they would be if the ethical aspects of the situation were recognized” (Rees et al., 2019, p. 28). Regardless of the reason for this phenomenon, the tendency of junior staff to not challenge on ethical concerns is a potential problem. As noted by Kadous et al. (2019, p. 2114) in an audit context such “upward communication is particularly critical to audit quality” because of the involvement of more junior staff in gathering all of the material on which decisions will ultimately be made.

For a small number, the lack of agency experienced by junior staff is seen as positive, a way of obtaining guidance from more experienced colleagues: “If I have a question posed to me and I don’t personally feel comfortable with that, I would always go to the partner that I work for and I would ask him” (Int7, Small). For most, however, it is a period during which they do not feel that they should take responsibility for the ethical implications of their work, even where these are recognised: “if it’s that big an issue, it’s going to be escalated. So like you’d kind of hope somewhere up the chain that someone would pick up on it” (Int21, Big4). This supports the suggestion in Weeks et al. (1999) that this is a competitive career stage in which ethical compromise may be more prevalent. A key risk is that this lack of agency could lead to morality being seen as completely distinct from work, as shown in this quote from another interviewee at a junior level: “I think I’m a good person, in that I try. I don’t break the rules often. Like, I wouldn’t go drink and drive. That’s wrong. But in work, you just kind of do what you’re told really” (Int28, Big4). Such dissociation was expressed in slightly more extreme terms by some more senior respondents: “morality is nothing, absolutely nothing, to do with tax law” (Int13, Large). This indicates that for some, diminished ethical awareness may not be a temporary phenomenon driven by career pressure, but a socialised and enduring component of professional identity.

Tax professionals at later career stages are more aware of personal ethical values, and perhaps more free to exercise personal judgment They are also more likely to see their own firm ethos as ethical and to place a higher value on “ethical” as a valued personal trait in the context of their daily tax work. The significance of the more personal spiritual values diminishes post-qualification, indicating that some organisational norming may be in progress in terms of an understanding of professional ethics. This is discussed further below, under the heading of organisational context.

4.2. Organisational context

The data above suggest that the balance between personal and organisational values varies by age and career stage, and raise the idea of some ethical norming or induction at the organisational level. The interaction between personal values and those of an employing organisation can, however, be “a complex process involving a range of commitments and contextual factors that influence the salience of one or another element of a person’s identity” (Weaver & Agle, 2002, p. 86). This section presents analysis at the organisational level. In a tax context, the “Big 4” firms – both large and international – are seen to dominate the landscape. To deconstruct this effect, tests are conducted separately across differences in organisational size and internationalisation, and interview data is used to shed light on these findings.

Table 5 below shows the results of t-tests with the sample partitioned between those firms located in only one country, and those with an international presence.

Table 5. Mean scores and t tests for significant differences over firm internationalisation.

Variable	Domestic (n = 446)	Multinational (n = 579)	Sig (2-tailed)
Awareness: personal ethical values	4.36	4.36	.990
Awareness: spiritual or religious values	2.52***	2.12***	.000
Firm ethos is ethical	4.39	4.36	.657
Valued trait: ethical	4.60	4.55	.340

***Significantly different at 1% level.

**Significantly different at 5% level.

The only significant difference emerging based on internationalisation alone is the salience of spiritual or religious values, which is higher among respondents in firms based in a single country, than in multinational firms. This may link to a conflation of religion and culture, and a more widely-shared interpretation of spiritual values in a single country.

Four size categories are used, based on the number of employees, as previously described: micro (fewer than 10); small (11–50); medium (51–100); and large (more than 100). Tables 6 and 7 show the mean scores in each category, and the results of t-tests for difference between micro and large firms and other categories. Note that no significant differences emerged between the scores of respondents in small or medium firms.

Table 6. Mean scores and t-tests for difference between micro firms and other size categories.

Variable	Micro (n = 140)	Small (n = 186)	Medium (n = 90)	Large (n = 609)	Micro vs. small Sig (2-tailed)	Micro vs. medium Sig (2-tailed)	Micro vs. large Sig (2-tailed)
Awareness: personal ethical values	4.49*^/**	4.32*	4.19**	4.36	.093	.015	.133
Awareness: spiritual or religious values	2.71***	2.57	2.59	2.08***	.417	.588	.000
Firm ethos is ethical	4.52***^/*	4.24***	4.30*	4.40*	.003	.066	.088
Valued trait: ethical	4.66*^/**	4.49*	4.35**	4.61	.060	.017	.520

***Significantly different at 1% level.

**Significantly different at 5% level.

*Significantly different at 10% level.

Table 7. Mean scores and t-tests for difference between large firms and other size categories.

Variable	Micro (n = 140)	Small (n = 186)	Medium (n = 90)	Large (n = 609)	Large vs. micro Sig (2-tailed)	Large vs. small Sig (2-tailed)	Large vs. medium Sig (2-tailed)
Awareness: personal ethical values	4.49	4.32	4.19	4.36	.133	.611	.113
Awareness: spiritual or religious values	2.71***	2.57***	2.59***	2.08***	.000	.000	.001
Firm ethos is ethical	4.52*	4.24**	4.30	4.40*^/**	.088	.026	.363
Valued trait: ethical	4.66	4.49*	4.35**	4.61*^/**	.520	.078	.025

***Significantly different at 1% level.

**Significantly different at 5% level.

*Significantly different at 10% level.

Micro firms are significantly different to small and medium firms, displaying higher levels of ethical awareness on most measures. Micro and large firms, however, report no significant differences in terms of the salience of personal ethical values, or the degree to which the quality ethical is valued. Micro firms show significantly higher salience of spiritual or religious values than those in large firms, with no significant difference emerging on this dimension between respondents in micro, small or medium-sized firms.

Responses from large firms show significant differences to those from all categories of smaller firms along all dimensions except awareness of personal ethical values. The direction of these differences is different for spiritual value measures than for ethical value measures. Respondents in large firms have a significantly lower salience of spiritual values than those in smaller firms. However, the degree to which “ethical” is valued as a personal trait, and to which the firm ethos is characterised as ethical is higher in large firms than in those in the intermediate categories (although not as high as within micro firms). This may point to a different understanding of ethics in large firms, and this point is explored below using interview data.

The ethical culture of the “Big 4” accounting firms (which are both large and multinational) emerges as very distinct and dominant in interviews. There is a reliance within these firms on codes of ethics rather than individual judgement, with considerably more processes in place to ensure consistency of decision-making: “Especially in the Big 4, I suppose it is very red tape and very regulated. You know, they are very risk-averse and … [tax advice] has to go through so many levels of sign-off’s before it gets out the door” (Int40, Small). Some report frustration with these processes in large firms: “I think when you work for a bigger firm you are so risk averse you literally can’t do without signing for a million bits of data and it’s so tedious” (Int61, Big4). The international nature of the client base in Big 4 and other international firms may in part account for this high level of control. Many respondents noted that the cultures of their home countries have a distinct ethical approach to taxation: “In Italy, we have a problem about the ethical aspect of taxation” (Int48, Micro); “and we know what is the approach the Finnish tax authority and the Finnish public will take on what is their view on certain types of transactions” (Int10, Large); “It is simply not in the Danish culture to go so far” (Int1, Big4). Smaller, more domestic firms do not need to deal with such cultural variation, and as a result may be better placed to have a less coded form of ethics in their organisations, and a higher level of latitude to rely on personal rather than organisational values. This may account for the higher influence of spiritual values in micro firms since spiritual values, as previously noted, are seen as more innate and pervasive than ethical values: “I would call myself a Christian, so I would say that has some influence … it’s difficult to know where … I think it’s more sort of baked in, you know” (Int65, Small).

The firm is seen as a key site of ethical formation, and in general more significant in that role than the syllabi of professional training. The early career period is highlighted as particularly influential:

If you get into the right company or organisation you are always trained in a specific way, whereas if you are an engineer, which my brother is, you can get into a company where your ethical values are not so strong in relation to it. (Int46, Small)

One impact of this is that the influence of senior management in the early employing years may linger as an internalised workplace norm: “If you end up with an ethical or underhanded partner that’s going to affect your own ethics. It wouldn’t be the be-all and end-all but it would have an impact … I think that’s the way you are inducted” (Int33, Big4). This almost directly echoes the “induction mechanism” highlighted by Tenbrunsel and Messick (2004, p. 228) whereby the ethics of a situation are understood in a way that is benchmarked from the way in which an organisation has dealt with such issues in the past. This then is particularly relevant in light of the finding that the early career period is one in which salience appears low. This has the potential to be particularly problematic in an area such as taxation, where the ethical implications are not always made explicitly visible within the firm.

This issue of values-norming and ethical norming within organisations emerged as a very distinct theme in the interviews, particularly in situations in which firm values, or firm controls are seen to supplant individuals’ ethical judgement. Again, this is most prevalent in Big 4 firms: “We do have [Big 4 firm name] values and ethical rules and we must follow those” (Int9, Big4); “I suppose as a firm, [Big 4 firm name] would have a very strong ethics policy and a requirement to adhere to the policy and then one’s own personal morals” (Int27, Big4). The phenomenon of norming is by no means exclusive to large international firms, but size does seem to play an important role:

When the organisation is big enough, the brand becomes the culture and the company tells you: ‘this is our set of values and ethics and I don’t care where you come from, I don’t care who you are, from the moment you are an employee of this company you must ensure that you have fully integrated this set of values and ethics in your own personal set of values and ethics. (Int59, Large)

For many respondents, subsuming personal values to the organisational ethos is seen as a positive. More senior respondents see it as a form of risk management for the firm:

There wouldn’t be any room here for people who are not prepared to do things the right way … That’s very much you know, part of our culture that we don’t take risks like that so I’ve deliberately separated ethics and personal values because personal values obviously can change from person to person, there can be cultural implications, your background and so on, … That’s why I was reluctant to kind of say, how do people’s personal values align with what we do as a business where it’s much easier for me to answer that in the context of ethics. (Int30, Big4)

This quote from a senior tax partner reflects the use of firm-level ethics as a control mechanism, and a discomfort with personal values, whether ethical or spiritual, in the workplace. This is a recurring theme, exemplified by the description of personal values as “uncomfortable territory” by another respondent. It appears to derive from a concern that there may be a greater disparity of outcomes when individual judgement is relied on, rather than deontological codes, as noted by Rodgers and Fayi (2018).

Early-career interviewees are keenly aware of this form of norming: “It is kind of hammered home in here” (Int32, Big4). For many, this is seen as a positive: “The culture that you operate in is important because culture to a large extent gives us our sense of ethics” (Int44, Small). This reflects a perspective from a senior partner who relies on culture to norm moral values within the firm. It is also echoed by respondents who are happy to separate personal from organisational ethics: “I’m able to compartmentalise very easily” (Int68, Small). A related form of norming comes from peers as well as more senior staff. “I had a discussion with two colleagues about having your house painted by someone who’s not sending a bill, whether that is possible or not. We are tax advisors. We feel we cannot do that” (Int53, Big4). This discussion with colleagues of a personal ethical matter – the painting of the interviewee’s private home – in the light of her professional standing is an example of the informal systems and organisational climate that are a key element of the ethical infrastructure of the firm, “the “real” talk that occurs between peers and co-workers” (Tenbrunsel et al., 2003, p. 304). This is difficult to achieve, but indicates a high level of ethical alignment among peers in the organisation, and the use of peers as ethical soundboards. Such an alignment of personal and firm-level values was broadly considered preferable at an individual level by interview respondents: “to work here as a tax advisor, you have to agree on the values of the company. Otherwise, you would probably get stressed and confused” (Int4, Large).

The risk associated with surrendering personal ethical judgement to that of the firm is vividly illustrated in the following quote:

I don’t know if you’re familiar with the phrase, “the banality of evil?” Right so you’re in a spot where you’re working with several others who are all acting a certain way or going in a certain direction and to go against the grain is very challenging. (Int66, Micro)

This powerfully illustrates the impact of a dominant corporate culture when it comes to ethics and values.

As an alternative to challenging the ethical culture of their employers, many interviewees reported choosing their employer based on congruence with their own ethical frames: “I, especially when I was done my training contract … [told myself] … that kind of a firm was not what I wanted. I was very careful what my next move was, to make sure that I was going to be happy in my next job” (Int37, Large). Such values-led career choices may account for the higher salience of personal values among those who are more established in their careers. In a typical quote, a more senior individual reports being more at ease with his own firm’s ethics: “We have very strong firm values and ethics which again, personally for me, fit my own very well. So they are, like, identical, so I don’t experience [conflict] with my firm cap on which is not in accordance with my personal values” (Int2, Big4). This may also account for the finding reported above, where those at a more established stage of their career are more likely to report the ethos of their firm as ethical.

5. Discussion and conclusion

In this paper, we have used a mixed-methods field study approach to explore the salience of ethics and values in tax work (Rest, 1986). In doing so, we uncover tensions between personal and organisational ethics, particularly amongst early career stage practitioners in large international firms. Given the range of tax attitudes that can be construed as ethical (Lakoff, 1996), these findings both complement work that uses an experimental approach and highlight areas to further explore using that methodology, particularly at the intersection of career stage and firm characteristics. Our findings are consistent with recent work on the competing commercial logics within professional service firms, and extend that body of work by addressing the sometimes competing roles of personal and organisational values (Carter et al., 2015; Carter & Spence, 2014).

Spiritual values are strongest in those working in very small firms, where the question of personal judgement is less overtly coded, and amongst those who are still undertaking professional exams. This seems to be an easier stage at which to reconcile the tensions between organisational imperatives and personal values (Barnard, 2016, p. 1031). We find that spiritual values score more highly within domestic compared to international firms. Interview data suggest that the impact of spiritual values is less transactional than ethical values, more “baked in”. The finding that spiritual values are more pervasive in domestic firms may also indicate something about either the higher level of corporate control in international firms, a clearer understanding of public interest as aligning with a national interest, or a homogeneity of values in domestic organisations. However, the strength of the size effect we uncover suggests that the Spence and Carter (2014) observations on the competing commercial logics of Big 4 firms may be driven in large part by their size rather than their international nature per se.

Salience of spiritual and religious values is lowest in large international firms. Interview data suggests that these organisations are the most likely to overtly sideline personal values, replacing them with deontological codes of ethics and a reliance on internal controls. Large international firms appear to encourage the prioritisation of corporate over personal values, in part as a way of achieving consistency of response across diverse cultures. The use by large firms of ethical framing as a form of managerial control encourages early-career workers to deactivate their personal moral judgement at work, confident in the values and internal control mechanisms of the firm. As individuals, they do not see the relevance of personal values to their work lives. This impacts most at an early-career stage, where practitioners broadly report a lower awareness of personal ethical and spiritual values, as well as a lack of agency in reaching decisions.

This surrender of personal values to the corporate culture is not without risk (Kadous et al., 2019), given the societal relevance of tax decisions, and is of particular concern in view of the dominance in tax practice of the “Big 4” accounting firms. It is especially hazardous since ethical formation is reported as relating to the firm rather than to professional ethics training, with the implication that early-career experience can have a lasting impact on how ethical practice in taxation is both understood and mediated. The formative impact of these early years adds gravity to the finding that this is the period in which ethical awareness is low. This is potentially a weak point in the “ethical infrastructure” (Tenbrunsel et al., 2003), not only of the firm, but the profession as a whole. Such bounded ethicality is even more concerning if it sets the tone for an entire career. It also constitutes a form of ethical loss to both the profession and the firm since those at early career stage are emerging fresh from a training programme in which ethics have featured prominently, but in which the value of this training may be negated as it is overwhelmed by corporate culture or career pressures.

Rees et al. (2019) note that unethical behaviour can occur, even unintentionally, with low levels of ethical awareness (Rest, 1986). This implies that focus needs to move beyond deliberate ill intent on behalf of individuals, to address the issue of reduced ethical awareness at the early career stage and in large international firms, as highlighted in our findings. Future work exploring which elements of organisational culture contribute to an overriding of personal values would be particularly welcome. The public interest mandate of the tax profession and the clear impact of tax decisions on inequality place a responsibility on both firms and professional bodies to ensure that moral awareness is brought to bear on tax work. Our findings indicate that an emphasis on ethics during professional training is insufficient, and that early socialisation within firms is particularly significant. This places greater responsibility on the firm to acknowledge the role of the individual’s moral compass at work while also upholding the values of the firm. Given the primacy of ethical claims in the profession, more attention should be paid to rebalancing the salience of personal and organisational values, particularly at early-career stage.

Acknowledgement

The authors acknowledge the support of H2020 funding, and the valuable feedback received on earlier versions of this paper at EAA, IAFA and CSEAR Ireland conferences, as well as the useful comments of anonymous referees.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Horizon 2020 Framework Programme [grant number: H2020-SC6-REV-INEQUAL-2016].

Notes

1 Relevant extracts of the survey are included in Appendix 1 to this paper.

2 The attention check was of the “instructed response” type (Kam & Chan, 2018). This meant that included within a bank of Likert-scale questions was one instructing the respondents to respond with “n/a” rather than a numerical score. This identified some respondents who had not read the question before answering, and so, those whose responses were not reliable. The attention check removed fewer than 1% of the originally-collected responses.

Appendix 1.

Survey questions.

The survey that forms the basis of quantitative elements of this study is described in Section 3 of the paper. Apart from demographics, the questions used in analysis asked respondents to indicate dimensions of ethical awareness on a five-point Likert scale, as follows:

1. In your day-to-day tax work, how influential are the following factors?

   (1 is very low influence; 5 is very high)

   • Factors including “Personal ethical values” and “Personal spiritual or religious values”

2. To what extent do the following descriptions apply to the leadership/ethos of your organisation?

   (1 is not at all; 5 is a great deal)

   • Descriptions including “Ethical”

3. In relation to the personal qualities that you bring to your tax work, how important is it for you to be:

   (1 is not very important; 5 is very important)

   • Qualities including “Ethical”