Implicit Attitudes and U.S. Tax Professionals’ Reliance on Offshore Tax Professionals’ Recommendations

Abstract

Large accounting firms offshore a significant amount of tax work to professionals in India. Prior research suggests that individuals can have negative implicit attitudes toward people from different nationalities and that such attitudes can have undesired consequences. In this study, we measure a sample of U.S. tax professionals' implicit attitudes toward Indian persons using an Implicit Association Test (IAT) and find that participants have strong negative implicit attitudes toward Indian persons relative to U.S. persons. Nevertheless, participants do not evaluate the work of U.S. tax professionals any differently than the (identical) work of Indian tax professionals. Participants appear able to rise above their negative implicit attitudes and perform their tax work without bias in our experiment. However, it is important to acknowledge that negative implicit attitudes may result in biased behavior in contexts outside of our experiment. Data Availability: Please contact the authors.