Potential Adverse Effects of Specialization Within Accounting Firms.

SYNOPSIS: Our research focuses on the relative ability of 116 audit "specialists" and 35 "generalists" to identity 24 potential tax issues and 14 audit issues embedded in a set of auditing working papers. The specialists were drawn from many offices of a firm with separate audit and tax departments, while the generalists worked for firms without such separate departments. Discriminant analysis was used to distinguish between the two groups, as well as to identify which variables are important. As expected, generalists identified significantly more tax issues than did the audit specialists. Surprisingly, however, the generalists also performed significantly better on audit issues. This finding suggests that specialist firms may not be receiving the maximum benefit from the specialist organizational structure. Experience, as measured by years spent in public accounting, was not a significant variable in the discriminant analysis. Suggestions and explanations are provided for mitigating the adverse effects of specialization within specialized firms.