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were mailed to WPs throughout Germany randomly drawn from the WP Directory published by the Institut der Wirtschaftsprüfer. In addition, to examine whether differences exist between different nationalities that speak the same language, questionnaire G was also sent to a sample of WPs in Austria and Switzerland.

Sample sizes, response rates, and respondent demographics are reported in Table 2. For subsequent analysis, respondents with internally inconsistent responses were removed from the data set. Inconsistent responses were identified by comparing responses to those uncertainty expressions that are direct opposites of each other, such as,“likely/unlikely” and “wahrscheinlich/nicht wahrscheinlich.” Those respondents assigning a probability to the second expression in the pair greater than the probability assigned to the first expression were removed from the data set. These respondents apparently did not correctly understand the task.

[Insert Table 2 here]

The German WPSs’ response rates to questionnaires GE1 and to Part 2 of GE2 were well below the German WPSs’ response rates for questionnaire G, probably because German speakers were being asked to respond to uncertainty expressions ın English.

The most interesting result from the demographic questions is the extent to which the different groups are familiar with and refer to IAS in their work. The majority of U.S. CPAs indicated that they are not familiar and that they never refer to IAS, whereas only relatively small percentages of the various German-speaking WP groups indicated the same. Although this difference has no direct bearing on the current research, it is somewhat surprising to discover that

U.S. CPAs have so little contact with IAS.

Research Design