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This study examines the employability skills of accountants cited in job advertisements in Australia and New Zealand, as they indicate the skills that are most valued by employers. The results indicate interpersonal and personal are the most frequently requested skills. Of the 31 identified skills, the most sought-after skills included the ability to collaborate with colleagues, present, discuss and defend views, and having a positive attitude. Overall, a team player with a positive attitude and good communication skills appeared to be the most valued behavioural skill as perceived by employers. This reflects the changing work of accountants, from being 'backroom number crunchers' to engaged business professionals. Although the results indicate some differences in skills requested across the five accounting occupational subgroups, interpersonal and personal skills again stood out as the most frequently cited skills. The results indicate the importance of incorporating such skills development in the accounting curriculum.

This study examines the impact of learning styles on academic performance using major assessment methods (examinations and assignments including multiple-choice and constructed response questions (CRQs)) in an introductory accounting course. Students' learning styles were assessed using Kolb's Learning Style Inventory Version 3.1. The results indicate that students' learning styles, after controlling for other variables, are associated with academic performance, particularly, in the final examination including both formats, multiple-choice questions and CRQs. Students who exhibit the "assimilating" learning style appear to perform better in some of the assessments than students with "diverging" or "accommodating" learning styles. The findings have implications for designing assessments to ensure that they are not biased towards particular learning styles which would improve their validity and fairness.

Over the past three decades, numerous studies have addressed the importance of generic skills and have focused on the broad category of employability skills for accountants, without differentiating between the various types of occupations within the accounting profession. As an extension and contribution to this literature, this study examines the key employability competencies or skills required by employers of tax accountants. We conducted a content analysis of skills specified in job advertisements over a 12-month period in Australia and New Zealand. The results show that personal and interpersonal skills were the most frequently mentioned in advertisements for tax accountants. These findings are generally consistent with prior studies, and tax educators should continuously consider ways to help graduates develop these skills. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigates small business taxpayers' psychological and social disposition towards taxation based on the motivational postures framework. Our findings show that small business taxpayers can adopt more than one posture towards taxpaying. Sometimes they cooperate and sometimes they defy, depending on the circumstances. In general, the perception of an authority's trustworthiness and fairness helps to close the perceived social distance between taxpayers and the authority. Resistant defiance is about grievance over the way an authority carries out its duties and could be reduced by treating people fairly, fostering trust and improving tax knowledge. Game playing and disengagement postures indicate that people are questioning why an authority exists. This deeper form of defiance is not easily managed. The results support the call for authorities to deal with taxpayers in a fair, respectful and trustworthy manner before deep defiance sets in. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A significant body of research both internationally and in New Zealand has been devoted to understanding the factors that influence compliance with tax law. Early studies on compliance were primarily focused on individuals and income tax. Recent comprehensive reviews of the literature indicate that groups of taxpayers, such as small businesses, and compliance with other tax types, such as consumption taxes, remain under-explored. To contribute to the extant literature, this preliminary study extends prior work on the compliance attitudes or behaviour of small business owners (SBOs) by focusing on their tax attitudes toward New Zealand's goods and services tax (GST) system. In particular, their perceptions of deterrence (eg chance of being audited or penalised), tax morale, social norms (eg other business taxpayer's compliance attitudes), perception of the tax system (eg fairness, complexity, tax burden), and tax administration (eg trust in authority) are examined. The results show some evidence of "mental accounting" which is in line with Adams and Webley's study. Not all SBOs perceived the GST system as being reasonably simple or easy to understand. Many owners also indicated that they relied on accounting software packages for recording their GST transactions and they appeared to assume their tax practitioners would pick up any errors they make. The results further indicate that tax penalty and tax audit are salient in the minds of SBOs. The majority of SBOs always tried to file a correct and timely tax return in view of the potential cost of incurring penalties for not doing so. Although the tax system was perceived as being reasonably simple, issues relating to internet transactions and GST on imports, and the burden of compliance cost of GST were particularly frustrating to SBOs. They also had different personal experiences in their dealings with Inland Revenue and different perceptions of Inland Revenue's fairness. The SBOs' GST morale with regards to proper invoicing and classification of goods and services was found to be positive. The majority would not feel good in falsifying invoices or misclassifying goods or services, although some suspected others did engage in such activities. Many are also aware of customers' preference to pay cash to business owners to avoid GST and one-third of the sampled owners even admitted doing so themselves. These insights have several implications for tax authorities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses various articles in the issue which include review of the book "Sham Transactions," limiting deductions of penalties from the payment due to breach of law, and compliance with tax obligation in New Zealand.

The article discusses the plan of using taxation to regulate the consumption of soft drinks in New Zealand. Topics discussed include the long-term health consequences impact of obesity on society through increased health care costs and losses in productivity, soft drink as the leading single contributor to obesity, and statistics that show the correlation between increased consumption of soft drinks and obesity.

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses various articles within the issue on topics including the impact of excise tax on unhealthy food on its consumption, inclusion of capital gains in a comprehensive income tax base in New Zealand and the goods and services tax (GST).

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses various reports within the issue on topics including taxation of food and alcohol, tax avoidance and tax on obesity in New Zealand.

The article focuses on the risk attitudes of small business owners in New Zealand when filing taxes with the aid of a tax practitioner. Information is provided on the results of a survey that examined business owners' willingness to exploit tax loopholes, individual risk propensity, and audit previous experience.

The findings of various studies regarding the association between students' learning style and academic performance are inconclusive. This study examines the association between learning style preferences and performance of students in an undergraduate taxation course at a large New Zealand university. An instrument based on Kolb's Learning Style Inventory was used to profile the learning styles of students as one of four learning groups: Converging, Diverging, Assimilating or Accommodating, The results indicated that the majority of the students were either Convergers or Assimilators and there were no significant differences in performance between the two learning style groups. These results suggest that as more and more educators adopt various approaches in teaching and engaging students in learning, certainly students have the ability to adapt to different learning styles. Educators can certainly help students to learn by exposing them to varied learning styles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses various reports within the issue on topics including the incidence of income tax on individuals from 1985 to 201, tax fairness, and social security in New Zealand.

Purpose - The purpose of this study is to examine the impact of five factors, reflecting students' diversity in prior content and metacognitive knowledge, on students' academic performance in the introductory accounting course. Design/methodology/approach - Based on a conceptual framework of prior knowledge, five factors are hypothesised to have an impact on students' performance. They are: prior accounting knowledge, age, gender, intended academic major, and first language. A self-administered questionnaire is completed by students enrolled in the compulsory introductory accounting course at a large multi-campus NZ university. Multivariate analysis is carried out to test the research hypotheses and the predictive ability of the five independent variables on students' performance. Findings - Consistent with the educational psychology literature, prior content knowledge has a significant impact. Students' metacognitive knowledge, which differs according to their language and gender, also has a significant effect on students' performance. Research limitations/implications - The low R[sub2] in the regression model suggests that, although some of the study variables are significant, a high proportion of variation in academic performance remains unexplained by the model. The results may also not be representative of student population in general as information is elicited from students from one particular university. Future research could extend the sample to more than one tertiary institution and consider the effect of other potential variables such as students' intrinsic motivation and learning strategies. Originality/value - Unlike many prior studies which lacked a theoretical framework to support their research, this study proposes a conceptual framework drawn from the education psychology literature for examining students' performance in the introductory accounting course. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the call in recent years for a change in accounting education to redirect the focus from being too technically oriented to more conceptually oriented and more skills based, this study examined the content coverage of first tax courses in New Zealand. The survey results show that both educators and practitioners considered a higher level of conceptual understanding than technical proficiency is required in most taxation topics canvassed. A wide range of topics was covered but not to the extent that tax educators would like or the practitioners expected them to. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]