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The purpose of this paper is to garner a deeper understanding of the site of influence of aspects of risk management for tax practitioners.

The research design is twofold. Phase one consisted of a wide-scale international survey with 1,061 tax experts across 59 jurisdictions. In phase two, the authors followed up with 68 semi-structured interviews with tax practitioners working in 11 different countries.

The findings recognise the importance of the firm as a significant “site of influence” for tax practitioners in shaping their risk appetite in their tax work. The firm eclipses other influences of risk such as professional body oversight, public interest and demographic markers such as gender and career stage. The authors show that firm is significant, irrespective of size of firm.

This work has practical implications as the findings highlight the importance of oversight of professional service firms by both the professional accountancy bodies and revenue authorities. The findings may have impact on the ethical training and guidance for trainee accountants in terms of an increased awareness on the employing firm as a site of influence for tax practitioners.

This research is important as it adds to the significant body of work on firm socialisation and highlights the important role that the firm holds in moderating (or exacerbating) the risk appetite of tax practitioners, which has significant implications in terms of pushing the boundaries of tax aggressive behaviours. The work aims to recognise the important role that tax practitioners can have in moderating aggressive tax practice, and, thus, reducing tax inequalities and shaping a better world of “Reduced Inequalities” (SDG10).

This study aims to examine the effect of audit client’s use of blockchain (BC) on auditing accounting estimates (AEs), especially the inherent risk (IR), control risk (CR) and collection of audit evidence.

The study used a questionnaire to collect data for a sample of 249 auditors. A partial least squares method is used to test the hypotheses.

The results showed positive relationship between audit client’s use of BC and both IR and CR when auditing AEs. The results also showed the BC improves the collection of sufficient and appropriate audit evidence when auditing AEs.

This study did not address all the risks associated with auditing AEs, including fraud, detection, sampling and nonsampling risks, and the procedures and tests for auditing AEs.

There are several implications of this research, including that it informs the revision of auditing standards and guidelines to correspond with successive technological changes, which subsequently clarify the roles and responsibilities of auditors, and the study findings will also cause changes to the design and form of audit procedures so as to obtain sufficient and appropriate audit evidence.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is considered the first of its kind that deals with the effects of audit client’s use of BC on audit AEs in the Middle East and North Africa region. This study also presented different sets of measures as proxies for measuring IR, CR and AE.