... subjectivity pay transparency professional judgment client pressure law firm compensation The ability of professionals to abide by professional and ethical standards and exercise independence in the face of economic pressure is an important issue facing the legal and accounting professions...

...William F. Messier, Jr.; Martin Schmidt ABSTRACT This paper reports on the first experimental study to examine how materiality and client pressure affect auditors' judgments of two detected misstatements that have offsetting effects on the client's income. One hundred forty-three...

... is employed to analyze the effects of these two factors that should lead individual auditors to adopt as a directional goal the acceptance of client management's aggressive accounting. Accordingly, we predict and find that auditors experiencing greater client affinity and facing explicit client pressure...