Jon D. Perkins
Florida State University
Abstract: Accountants rely on informal consultation to manage accountability and justification requirements. This process is an influential, yet not well understood, property of accountants judgment and decision-making processes. I present a model of accountants informal consultation and experimentally investigate the joint impact of accountability type and knowledge of justifiee preferences on accountants informal consultation and information documentation behaviors. The experimental results suggest that accountants engage in informal consultation for purposes other than to improve the normative accuracy of their judgments and decisions. Specifically, I find that accountants engage in strategic informal consultation and stylize their information documentation in response to accountability and justification concerns. Strategic use of informal consultation can have adverse effects on accountants efficiency and effectiveness, particularly when its use results in contrived consensus, leading to overconfidence on the part of accountants and people who rely on accountants judgment and decisions. This overconfidence can have adverse consequences for accountants and/or their firms.
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