Media representation of tax practices is important because of the impact of public opinion on tax policy. Traditionally viewed as a technical subject and the preserve of professionals, taxation has recently become the focus of widespread and more informed public attention, as a result of, inter alia, tax scandals and the financial crisis. These events, together with wider international tax reform initiatives, provide researchers with an opportunity to explore the impact of tax reform on discourse by the public, as well as by tax experts and professionals. To this end, we analyse the changing treatment of tax-related issues in the mainstream and professional media in Ireland and the United Kingdom (UK) in order to capture expert voices, as well as public discourse. We do so in the immediate and medium-term aftermath of the financial crisis. Our analysis of tax discourse in general, and of the public framing of the term "tax avoidance" in particular, in both Ireland and the UK, reveals that a marked change has occurred in the public discourse in Ireland, a country struggling in the aftermath of a severe financial crisis. In contrast, our research finds that there is greater consistency in the UK's mainstream and professional media. Our findings also indicate that expert voices may lag behind public opinion.

The Fundamental Review of the Trading Book (FRTB) is the promised overhaul of bankmarket risk regulation. FRTB retains the authorized use of proprietary risk models, however, it introduces two additional criteria: (i) P&L attribution (PLA) tests and (ii) desk-level backtests. We examine empirically whether these additional criteria influence risk management and portfolio management practice, specifically portfolio construction and choice of risk model. We find that the PLA tests demand significant alignment with risk factors, however, the backtests do not incentivize use of superior risk models. This has important implications for the efficacy of the capital-based regulatory system.

As professionals, tax experts hold a public interest mandate, although their understanding of how this plays out in their daily work is not always clear. Ethics are a core element of professionalisation, and yet tax work is often framed as a technical skill, rather than as a practice with societal impact that relates to the common good. With growing inequality, and an increased recognition of the role of taxation in mediating this, both the profession and the public are concerned with how tax professionals understand the ethical dimensions of their work. The way in which ethics are understood and applied in this technical context is societally relevant but under-explored in the field. This chapter is largely based on a global field study, developed as part of an international project exploring tax and inequality. We draw on a set of semi-structured interviews (n=68) across eleven countries to explore the salience and nature of ethics in the work of tax experts. Complementing experimental research in the area (Hageman & West, 2022), our interview approach is a direct one, aiming to capture the voice of tax professionals themselves. We uncover a perceived dichotomy between dispassionate professional judgement and personal ethics and a framing of tax as a game facilitating the compartmentalisation of ethics at work. This work contributes to our understanding of how ethics impacts practice in a highly technical field.It also raises questions about ethical formation in a professional context.

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 alio, 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.

This paper investigates the persistence of Value-at-Risk (VaR), the dominant market risk metric for banks at the time of the devastating social impact of the financial crisis, in which VaR was widely implicated. We examine VaR as a calculative practice that influences (and is influenced by) actor behaviour through the analysis of interviews with a range of relevant bank practitioners. VaR’s mediating role is key to its persistence, enabling it to dominate how portfolio risk is communicated and understood. This case demonstrates the need to critically examine the behavioural impact of calculative technology, particularly where it has been given a public interest role through regulation.

The central role of Value-at-Risk (VaR) within bank market risk regulation received significant criticism from financial media and government investigations into the events of the 2007–2009 financial crisis. Impending reform of bank market risk regulation under the Fundamental Review of the Trading Book (FRTB) demotes VaR, replacing it with a layered framework centred on expected shortfall (ES). However, many of these criticisms assume full integration of internal and regulatory market risk models and further, a linear relationship between risk models and regulatory capital. We examine bank practitioners’ perspectives and experienced realities to better understand the operational relationship between internal and regulatory market risk models, and between risk models and capital. This has important policy implications for the efficacy of the reforms to banking regulation, financial stability and navigating the dichotomy of private and public interests.

To commemorate 40 years since the founding of the Journal of Business Ethics, the editors in chief of the journal have invited the editors to provide commentaries on the future of business ethics. This essay comprises a selection of commentaries aimed at creating dialogue around the theme Business versus Ethics? (inspired by the title of the commentary by Jeffrey Harrison). The authors of these commentaries seek to transcend the age-old separation fallacy (Freeman in Bus Ethics Q 4(4):409–421, 1994) that juxtaposes business and ethics/society, posing a forced choice or trade off. Providing a contemporary take on the classical question “if it’s legal is it ethical?”, David Hess explores the role of the law in promoting or hindering stakeholder-oriented purpose and governance structure. Jeffrey Harrison encourages scholars to move beyond the presupposition that businesses are either strategic or ethical and explore important questions at the intersection of strategy and ethics. The proposition that business models might be inherently ethical or inherently unethical in their design is developed by Sheila Killian, who examines business systems, their morality, and who they serve. However, the conundrum that entrepreneurs are either lauded for their self-belief and risk-taking, or loathed for their self-belief and risk-taking, is discussed by M. Tina Dacin and Julia Roloff using the metaphor of taboos and totems. These commentaries seek to explore positions that advocate multiplicity and tensions in which business ethics is not either/or but both.

International tax governance is significant societally as it impacts both inequality and the capacity of governments to deliver on their social contracts. Tax experts forma key, under-researched, heterogeneous element of the tax ecosystem, subject to a range of hard and soft governance influences. While problematic tax regimes are appropriately identified by reference to lax regulation or financial opacity, few empirical studies explore how operating in these jurisdictions affects the governance of tax experts individually. Using international survey data, we find that the influence of soft governance on tax experts varies across conditions of secrecy or lax regulation. Soft governance, including that of the workplace and the profession, is most influential in challenging regimes. Beyond a tipping point of economic freedom, regulatory knowledge and the threat of sanction become less influential. Elements along the continuum between hard and soft governance interact in a non-homogenous way that indicates a role for professional bodies and firms in tax governance.

The received narrative about accounting organisation largely originates from within the walls of the profession, assuming closure, and is not sufficiently informed by an understanding of the actions, ex-periences and perspectives of those who did not engage in the professional project. Our data offer another perspective, that of the majority of accountants in the field, who prospered for a prolonged period without pursuing strategies of closure or seeking a corporate identity. With a Bourdieusian framing, we explore a rich dataset of almost 3000 individual records from the 1901 and 1911 Irish censuses, supplemented by professional records and trade directories, to examine the diversity of the accounting field in Dublin. Our exploration of this cohort, largely hidden from history, reveals a majority of accountants acting independently in the field, with no strategies to act in concert or to erect occupational barriers to entry. The small minority of accountants pursuing professionalisation came from a background that was already elite. However, in a late colonial context with a weakened state, this broader group of accoun-tants did not present as either excluded or subaltern. Instead, what emerges is evidence of a wider cadre of "Plain" accountants displaying a level of economic progress over a ten-year period that outstrips that of their professionalised peers. Conscious of the 'imprecision of hierarchies' in the field (Bourdieu 1988, p. 20), this allows us to consider the role of 'accountant' separate from the idea of professional accreditation and to question the seeming inevitability of their conflation. (c) 2021 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).

This book showcases a multidisciplinary set of work on the impact of regulatory innovation on the scale and nature of tax evasion, tax avoidance, and money laundering. We consider the international tax environment an ecosystem undergoing a period of rapid change as shocks such as the financial crisis, new business forms, scandals and novel regulatory instruments impact upon it. This ecosystem evolves as jurisdictions, taxpayers, and experts react. Our analysis focuses mainly on Europe and five new regulations: Automatic Exchange of Information, which requires that accounts held by foreigners are reported to authorities in the account holder’s country of residence; the OECD’s Base Erosion and Profit Shifting initiative and Country by Country Reporting, which attempt to reduce the opportunity spaces in which corporations can limit tax payments and utilize low or no tax jurisdictions; the Legal Entity Identifier which provides a 20-digit identification code for all individual, corporate or government entities conducting financial transactions; and the Fourth and Fifth Anti-Money Laundering Directives, that criminalize tax crimes and prescribe that the Ultimate Beneficial Owner of a company is registered. Working from accounting, economic, political science, and legal perspectives, the analysis in this book provides an assessment of the reforms and policy recommendations that will reinforce the international tax system. The collection also flags the dangers posed by emerging tax loopholes provided by new business models and in the form of freeports and golden passports. Our central message is that inequality can and has to be reduced substantially, and we can achieve this through an improved international tax system.

This chapter explores the situations in which tax experts are most likely to take an innovative or aggressive tax position, focusing on the self-perception of the experts themselves of the factors that may influence them in taking such a position. The results highlight the micro-influences on tax experts that may move them along the spectrum of tax avoidance, which has been acknowledged as posing a significant risk to public welfare, equality of opportunity, and the common good. The chapter presents findings from an international survey of tax professionals and experts and highlights some key risk factors. The factors that lead tax experts to take a position that pushes the envelope of regulation are explored in aggregate and compared across the jurisdictional boundary of high or low levels of financial secrecy. The findings have the potential to empower both regulators and professional bodies in addressing the problem of tax avoidance.

While electric vehicles bring numerous environmental benefits during their lifetime, they could be a burden for waste management at the end of life if not managed properly. A circular waste management system, alternatively, suggests exploring the appropriate actions and policies to create the right environment for second-use applications. Such regulatory measures primarily require a temporal estimation of the volume of the end-of-life electric vehicle batteries which helps to distinguish the suitable applications, time, and level of investment in the repurposing market. From an end-of-life flow perspective, the profile of the end-of-life battery stock follows the growth of the electric vehicle market over time and vehicles’ survival age. However, the level of uncertainties about the future trend of these vehicles and their efficiencies makes the end-of-life estimation highly challenging. This paper addresses these uncertainties in end-of-life battery stock estimation in Ireland by (i) modelling the electric vehicle market diffusion based on government policies and customers' preferences, and (ii) estimating electric vehicle lifetime based on a combination of current electric & conventional vehicles. Having the distribution of primary and end-of-life batteries over time, the impact of added value to electric vehicles due to the battery repurposing on their adoption in the first place is investigated. Results confirm the significant influence of government policies on the electric vehicle adoption profile. The temporal estimation of the reuse capacity of the end-of-life batteries indicates that how different levels of regulations and second-use support schemes end up to a different amount of reuse availability in end-of-life battery stock, ranging from several hundred to a few thousand megawatt-hours in 2050. Results also show that to what degree a potential second-use market for end-of-life electric vehicle batteries would increase the growth rate of electric vehicle uptake in Ireland.

The Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (PCAOB) was created in 2003 after Congress passed the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002. The mission of the Board is to serve the public interest through regulation of accounting firms who audit public companies. Regulatory agencies are susceptible to regulatory capture whereby the agency serves the interests of the regulated industry rather than the public interest. In 2017, the Securities Exchange Commission appointed five new members, including Chairman Duhnke, to the PCAOB. This paper applies Carpenter’s (2014b) model to evaluate whether the PCAOB was captured during the Duhnke chairmanship. The susceptibility of the PCAOB to regulatory capture is important because the effectiveness of the capital markets depends on trust in financial statement audits. The available evidence is consistent with a “weak” capture conclusion. During the Duhnke Board’s tenure, there was diminished activity in the areas of inspection, standard-setting, and enforcement.

This paper explores the situations in which tax experts are most likely to take an innovative or aggressive tax position, focusing on the self-perception of the experts themselves of the factors that may trigger such a tendency. The results are important because they highlight the micro-influences on tax experts which may move them along the spectrum of tax avoidance, which has been acknowledged as posing a significant risk to public welfare, equality of opportunity and the common good. The paper presents findings from an international survey of tax professionals and experts and highlights some key risk factors. This aims to empower both regulators and professional bodies concerned with the governance of tax experts in addressing the problem of tax avoidance.

This paper presents and reflects on the evolution of an innovative, interdisciplinary module which engages undergraduate students with a range of non-profit actors, working in teams with the aim of developing and deploying business skills for social good The module combines experiential learning with service learning, and has proven to have very positive outcomes for students, partner organisations and the Business School, University and teaching team. We describe the context in which the module was developed, how it evolved over time, and its impact both within and outside of the University. The module is contextualised by reference to the PRME Principles and the commitment of the Business School, a PRME Champion Institution, to the realisation of the SDGs. Data is drawn from pre- and post-delivery surveys over a three year period as well as the student voice in the form of reflective journals and end-of-semester submissions and feedback from partner organisations. The offering is described at a level of detail intended to enable other institutions to replicate or develop this model further.

When governments use tax policy to motivate activities of social value, incentives are commonly targeted at non-profits or charities. For-profit businesses meanwhile are primarily seen by policy-makers as generators of tax revenue. Social enterprise, characterized by innovation and hybridity, can combine for-profit and social impact aims in a single entity. A tax system that anticipates a binary world of charities and capitalism may be unable to accommodate this, and so may function as a constraint on the contribution of social enterprise to the common good. This article reviews tax policy and the experiences of social entrepreneurs to explore this issue.

This paper examines the field of Responsible Management Education (RME) in the context of Agenda 2030 and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), situating the United Nations Principles for Responsible Management Education (UN PRME) in relation to a range of associated initiatives and organisations using a light, Bourdieusian theoretical framing. The emergence of the SDGs as a frame or doxa for RME and the role of UN PRME as an agent in this field is explored in the context of the literature on how business schools have delivered on sustainability and responsibility imperatives. The field of RME is partially mapped, loosely categorising actors and initiatives as membership or affiliation networks, teaching and learning initiatives and student-centred or student-led groups. Their differing aspirations are discussed, and tentative conclusions are drawn on the extent to which the SDGs are acting as a unifying paradigm, and on the future roles that UN PRME may play in the field.