I don't have experience with audit busy season, only tax busy season.
My experience with the CPA exams wasn't that they were super stressful, just time-consuming.
So, with that preface, to me busy season was “worse”, because you didn't get to pick your schedule, and there was a lot more riding on it then a couple hundred dollars spent re-taking an exam. “Failing” during tax busy season meant making someone out of compliance on their taxes, not re-taking an exam 3 months later. And…as deadlines approached, hours extended; missing a deadline didn't mean having to pay a $35 reschedule fee or waiting till the next window to test or, worst-case, losing credit and re-taking a section; it meant, again, someone's in trouble with the IRS. Having other people's financial well-being in my hands and my hours dictated by keeping them out of trouble – regardless of how terribly they give me their records – was much more stressful to me than taking exams.
But…the exams, to me, weren't particularly more stressful than college, so I may have had a unique experience stress-wise with the exams (and took them while working, but had also taken college courses while working, and to me both experiences were similar). Also, I may have taken too personally the responsibility of handling my client's taxes, and that might be part of why I bowed out of taxes after a year and went elsewhere. Now I'm in private, so basically I have one “client”, and have some responsibility for all the employees thereof, but it's a stress that I feel like I have more control over the outcome so can manage better. In taxes, I felt like I had responsibility with no control – someone can bring me a bag of receipts on Oct 14th at 5pm, and if I don't get the return completed by Oct 15th the taxpayer's in trouble, even though I had no control over getting the information sooner. In private, I might have more immediate connection to the one client and its “dependent employees”, but I also have more immediate control over getting what's needed to perform my job properly.
So…to me, in a different part of public, it was more stressful than the exams. But, I may have taken public too personally, and I definitely took the exams less personally than most.
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