Ethics in Taxation. Accounting, Finance, SPSS Essay

Running head: ETHICS IN TAXATION1
Ethics in Taxation
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Ethics in Taxation
The accounting practice and service has grown over years making frequent circulars and updates necessary. The exponential growth of enterprise across borders and into new activity areas has, moreover, expanded mandates and raised bars accounting practitioners are expected to comply by and meet. Indeed, of many professions, accounting is more prone to legal and ethical reviews and examination. Unsurprisingly, professional conduct, legally abiding and ethically compliant, and ethics are front and center of accounting practice and service. The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) issues periodic circulars in order to ensure practitioners, on review and client sides, are up to date and well informed of best practices. The significance of such circulars cannot be overemphasized. If anything, maintaining a sense of practice and service excellence is apt not only to make integral and internalized optimum standards in routine practices but, perhaps more importantly, emphasize ethics as equally significant, if not sometimes more so (as shown in a discussion on connections between taxation and Christian worldview), to optimum professional standards. Two issues mentioned in Circular No. 230 (Treasury Department, 2014) are, for current purposes, of primary interest: (1) knowledge of client’s omission and (2) solicitation. This paper aims, accordingly, to discuss “knowledge of client’s omission” and “solicitation,” included in Treasury Department's Circular No. 230, in order show legal and ethical consequences of failure to comply by practitioners, offer some practical examples, compare “tax avoidance” and “tax evasion,” and finally, explore connections between taxation and Christian worldview from a Biblical perspective.
In Circular No. 230, practitioners are explicitly urged to promptly advise clients on any identified instances of error or omission “from any return, document, affidavit, or other paper
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which the client submitted or executed under the revenue laws of the United States” (Treasury Department, 2014, p. 19). Failing to do so might subject a practitioner to legal liability on grounds of willful, reckless or gross incompetence. Ethically, a practitioner doing so is questionable on grounds of professional integrity and fairness. In practice, a practitioner may, for example, choose, willfully, to make a tax report submitted by a taxpayer appear complete in return for any material or in kind gains.
For solicitation, practitioners are similarly prohibited from soliciting uninvited services: A practitioner may not, with respect to any Internal Revenue Service matter, in any way use or participate in the use of any form of public communication or private solicitation containing a false, fraudulent, or coercive statement or claim; or a misleading or deceptive stateme...