An Analysis of Auditing and Accounting Professionalss Work-Life Balance in the Post-Sarbanes-Oxley Era

Abstract

The Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) of 2002 fundamentally changed the accounting profession and dramatically increased the workload of accounting professionals, resulting in lower work-life balance for a large segment of the accounting profession (Gullapalli 2005). At the same time, work-life balance has surpassed compensation and benefits as the most important factor in employee job satisfaction for accounting professionals (AICPA 2004). Yet, despite the importance of work-life balance issues in the accounting profession (AICPA 2011), prior research has not examined work-life balance perceptions across different segments of the accounting profession. In this study, we survey 1,063 accounting professionals from a wide range of organizational contexts to (1) empirically compare accounting professionals’ perceptions of work-life balance issues (i.e., work-family conflict, burnout, and AWAs) across large and small public accounting firms; (2) to compare audit professionals’ perceptions of work-life balance issues to the perceptions of tax professionals; and (3) to compare public accounting professionals’ perceptions of work-life balance issues to private accounting professionals’ perceptions. We find that accounting professionals at larger firms perceive higher levels of work-family conflict and job burnout compared to accounting professionals at smaller firms. Furthermore, although accounting professionals across all firm types (i.e., Big 4, mid-sized, and local firms) generally perceive similar levels of organizational support for AWAs, Big 4 accounting professionals perceive significantly lower levels of viability regarding the use of AWAs (i.e., Big 4 accounting professionals are less likely to believe that they could remain effective employees while using AWAs). We also find some evidence of within-firm workload stability given that we observe no significant differences between the perceptions of audit and tax professionals across our work-life balance measures. Finally, using open-ended participant responses, we offer several recommendations for firms to improve their work-life balance efforts.