As a result of these influences, the individual public accountant may come to see the profession’s independence standards as an obstacle to the generation of new business. This does not imply, however, that the independence commitment of all public accountants will have universally decreased; what matters to our argument is that changes in the nature of work in the public accounting domain are likely to have affected the independence commitment of a fair number of public accountants – especially in large accounting firms. In the light of all this, we state the following hypotheses: