Confirmation Bias in Tax Information Search: A Comparison of Law Students and Accounting Students

Abstract

Tax professionals frequently perform research to evaluate the strength of client favorable tax positions. Prior research suggests that when performing research, tax professionals tend to focus their attention on precedents with conclusions consistent with their client's preferred outcome and attend less to precedents with conclusions inconsistent with this outcome. This confirmation bias causes professionals to be overly optimistic about the strength of the authoritative support for clientpreferred positions. Despite the potential problems that may arise with confirmation bias, research has yet to consider factors that may mitigate this behavior. Using an experiment that compares the information search behaviors of law students and accounting students, this study provides evidence that the nature of academic training influences the extent to which tax researchers are subject to confirmation bias. Specifically, we find that when conducting research to resolve an ambiguous tax issue, law students are less prone to the bias in certain situations than are Masters of Accounting students. The finding that training may mitigate confirmation bias in tax research has implications for tax professional education and tax practice.