| In recent years the accounting profession has undergone a number of changes, including the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, which have created a need for more auditors at the same time as the number of accounting students was declining. During the late 1990s the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA) undertook a project (The Vision Project) to identify what accountants were doing. They identified several new practice areas beyond the traditional practice areas of tax, audit, and accounting. Some members of the profession took exception to this. They maintained that these new practice areas were not truly accounting activities. This disagreement within the profession led to the question: What were accountants happy doing? Therefore, this study was undertaken to determine if Certified Public Accountants in public practice in the traditional practice areas were more satisfied with their jobs than those practicing in the non-traditional practice areas.; In order to add robustness to the study, locus of control, a psychological theory within the area of social learning theory, was also examined. Locus of control is often studied as a variable related to job satisfaction. Age, gender, and earnings were also considered in this research as they are frequently examined with job satisfaction and locus of control. Level of education was added as a variable as this relates to another recent change in the accounting profession. In the last several years most states have changed the education requirement for CPA candidates from a bachelor's degree (with 120--128 credits) to a requirement of a bachelor's degree and 150 credits.; Survey research design was used in this study. A questionnaire was designed and sent to 400 CPAs across the country from a list supplied by the AICPA. Job satisfaction was measured using the Abridged Job Descriptive Index and the Jobs-in-General Index (Balzer et al., 1997). Locus of control was measured using the Rotter I-E scale (Rotter, 1966). Ten hypotheses were generated from the literature review and tested.; Results indicated that in general CPAs in public practice were satisfied with their jobs and there did not appear to be significant differences on the level of job satisfaction of CPAs in traditional and non-traditional areas. Gender, earnings, and internal locus of control, however, were also found to be related to job satisfaction.; The findings were discussed and recommendations for future research were made. |
