Impact of Tax Law Complexity on Professionals.
通过实验室实验，研究了税法复杂性（阅读复杂性和内容复杂性）对专业会计师任务绩效的影响，发现呈现方式加剧了税法概念的难度，并测试了新的可读性指数。
Abstract This study examined the impact of income tax law complexity-reading complexity and content complexity-on the task performance of professional accountants. The research results have implications for the appropriate presentation style of the tax law as well as the applicability of standard readability tests to professional readers. In a laboratory experiment 98 tax arid accounting professionals were randomly assigned to one of four experimental conditions. The experiment tested the subjects' ability to understand and correctly answer client questions involving practical situations. The impact of reading complexity on overall understanding, holding underlying content complexity constant, also was tested. Results indicate that presentation style exacerbated the effect of an already difficult tax law concept. Also, for adult subjects, a newly developed readability index was superior to standard readability tests currently used by federal and state government agencies.