Abstract This paper reviews the extant research literature on tax accountants' judgment/decision making (JDM) and suggests directions for future research. An economic psychology-processing model links five categories of factors that affect tax accountants' JDM: individual cognitive and affective psychological factors, economic risks and rewards in the external environment, task inputs, cognitive processing, and task outputs. Empirical findings are related to the model and contradictory results attributable to subject, task or design are reconciled. Empirical findings indicate important factors In tax accountants' JDM Include individual psychological factors such as tax accountants' knowledge, experience and advocacy attitudes, and economic environmental factors such as the amount of tax savings at stake, risks of audit and penalties, client risk preference, and maintaining client relations. Promising future research directions include linking knowledge more directly to performance and explicating the formative stages of JDM: problem recognition and representation, internal and external information search, and analysis and application of tax authorities.
Michael L. Roberts (Sun,) studied this question.