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For four years, Valerie Thorpe was Director of Accounting for Taurus Construction. She was fired by the company's owner, Vic Bullard, when she refused to falsify accounting entries. Bullard's directive would have lowered profits, thereby deceiving his business partner and committing tax evasion. Until her firing late in the spring of 2011, Valerie had a few concerns about Bullard's lack of ethics in his business dealings. However, she has not questioned him previously because of her own emotional condition after the unexpected death of her husband. During the spring 2011 semester in graduate school, Valerie was inspired when her classmates recounted their own experiences of resigning from jobs because of unethical managers and owners. Valerie had thought of resigning from Taurus; but, Bullard fired her first. Six months after her firing, Valerie is seriously contemplating whether she should report Bullard's tax evasion to the Internal Revenue Service.

Field Based Research. Interviews with the case protagonist.

The case is suitable for graduate and undergraduate courses in business ethics, accounting ethics, entrepreneurship, income tax accounting and an undergraduate auditing class.

This is a real-life case applying ethical frameworks coverage of which can be challenging as students perceive those theories and frameworks as “dry.”

Currently, there is no formal recommended structure, particularly regarding the client’s ethics, for determining whether an external auditor should continue the business relationship with an audit client. This statement is not meant as a criticism, but rather as the backdrop for proposing that (1) a structure is needed that will assist auditors in evaluating client ethics and (2) such a structure should be institutionalized as an integral part of the continuance decision. Auditors will never be able to guarantee that a client is ethical – even those clients with detailed codes of ethics – but auditors could benefit from a more comprehensive and established process to assess a client’s commitment to ethical behavior. This paper begins by discussing some of the psychological aspects of the audit client continuance decision. Then, reviews existing, professional guidance related to evaluating client ethics. This is followed by the authors’ baseline model and client ethics evaluation checklist designed to assist external auditors in institutionalizing the evaluation of client ethics as part of the continuance decision.

Classifying workers as either employees or independent contractors has significant financial consequences for the payer (usually a business) and the worker. The payer may be motivated more by the desire to avoid paying for employee benefits and employer payroll taxes than by doing the right thing and correctly classifying and paying the worker as an employee. Estimates are that the cost of such benefits and taxes may equal 20–30% of gross pay. When governmental regulations are unclear or enforcement is lax, many stakeholders suffer. This includes the workers, their families, their co-workers, and law-abiding employers as well as citizens (taxpayers) who must pay more than their fair share to provide adequate funding for related government programs and benefits. This is a global issue as evidenced by widely publicized lawsuits in many countries involving prominent defendants such as Microsoft, Uber, and Lyft. Software platforms used to distribute small jobs to temporary and part-time workers have resulted in the exponential growth of the gig economy. Such technology has also further enabled the misclassification of workers beyond what has occurred in years past. An ethical analysis to identify the many stakeholders and the impact of worker misclassification should be conducted to guide governments in developing and enhancing regulations for the pervasive issue of worker classification and to protect the rights of their workers and taxpayers.

Communications regarding this column should be addressed to Mrs. Cheney, Peabody Library School, Nashville, Tenn. 37203. Mrs. Cheney does not sell the books listed here. They are available through normal trade sources. Mrs. Cheney, being a member of the editorial board of Pierian Press, will not review Pierian Press reference books in this column. Descriptions of Pierian Press reference books will be included elsewhere in this publication.

Academic librarians are being bombarded with an accelerating stream of news: new services, new public relations, new information formats, new technologies and new catalogs have been introduced during the past 10 to 15 years. Innovations are not always successfully assimilated by large academic libraries and dislocations associated with change in one department often affect the entire library. Coping strategies have been envisioned and even implemented, but usually are grafted onto existing, traditional organizational structures. Therefore, collection development and management in academic libraries is most sensibly addressed in terms of the larger library organization.

Shadowing markets is a new technique used in competitive intelligence that owes its name to the British political concept of the “shadow cabinet,” which is formed by the party out of power in Parliament. Each member of the shadow cabinet is assigned a British government department to follow. It becomes that politician's responsibility to:

The institution of an annual series devoted to current and ongoing research in economics and business should be considered one of the notable developments during the period under review. Long standing need for such a reference not withstanding, there has been until this year no systematic attempt to organize a continuing series which concentrated on selected areas of ongoing research, especially adapted to the Jahrbucher format. By facilitating the publication of research papers which are longer than the conventional journal‐length article yet shorter than a monograph, publishing outlets available to scholars in the field have been infinitely expanded. Two years ago, the Royal Economic Society and the Social Science Research Council of Great Britain, developed an experimental series, published by Macmillan, entitled Surveys of Applied Economics. The JAI Press, Greenwich, Conn., has now come out with an annual series, which is expected to fill the gaps in at least seventeen areas of economic theory and business. These are briefly listed below, with pertinent bibliographical citations: Research in Economic Anthropology: An Annual Compilation of Research. Series editor, George Dalton. vol. 1. Sept. 1977‐ $22.00 ISBN 0‐89232‐040‐9; Research in Economic History: An Annual Compilation of Research. Series editor, Paul Uselding. vol. 1. Sept. 1976‐ $22.50 ISBN 0‐89232‐001‐X; Research in Health Economics: An Annual Compilation of Research. Series editor, Richard M. Scheffler. vol. 1. Sept. 1977‐ $22.50 ISBN 0‐89232‐042‐7; Research in Human Capital and Development: An Annual Compilation of Research. Series editor, Ismail Sirageldin. vol. 1. June/July 1977‐ $22.50 ISBN 0‐89232‐019‐2; Research in International Business and Finance: An Annual Compilation of Research. Series editor, Robert G. Hawkins. vol. 1. May/June 1977‐ $23.50 ISBN 0‐89232‐031‐1; Research in Labor Economics: An Annual Compilation of Research. Series editor, Ronald G. Ehrenberg. vol. 1. March 1977‐ $22.50 ISBN 0‐89232‐017‐6; Research in Law and Economics: An Annual Compilation of Research. Series editor, Richard O. Zerbe. vol. 1. Sept. 1977‐ $22.50 ISBN 0‐89232‐028‐1; Research in Marketing: An Annual Compilation in Research. Series editor, Jagdish N. Sheth. vol. 1. June 1977‐ $22.50 ISBN 0‐89232‐041‐9; Research in Philosophy and Technology: An Annual Compilation of Research. Series editor, Paul T. Durbin. vol. 1. March 1977‐ $22.50 ISBN 0‐89232‐022‐2; Research in Political Economy: An Annual Compilation of Research. Series editor, Paul Zarembka. vol. 1. Sept. 1977‐ $22.50 ISBN 0‐89232‐020‐6; Research in Population Economics: An Annual Compilation of Research. Series editor, Julian L. Simon. vol. 1. April 1977‐ $22.50 ISBN 0‐89232‐018‐4; Applications of Management Science. Series editor, Matthew J. Sobel. vol. 1. 1977‐ $22.50. ISBN 0‐89232‐023‐0; Research in Econometrics. Series editor, Dennis J. Aigner. vol. 1. 1977‐ $22.50 ISBN 0‐89232‐039‐7; Research in Experimental Economics. Series editor, Vernon L. Smith. vol. 1. 1977‐ $22.50 ISBN 0‐89232‐030‐3; Research in Finance. Series editor, Haim Levy. vol. 1. 1977‐ $22.50 ISBN 0‐89232‐043‐5; Research in Organizational Behavior. Series editor, Barry Staw. vol. 1. 1977‐ $22.50 ISBN 0‐89232‐045‐1; Research in Public Policy and Management. Series editor, Colin Blaydon. vol. 1. 1977‐ $22.50 ISBN 0‐89232‐044‐3.