Re-examining the Relation between Financial and Tax Reporting Aggressiveness

초록

This study contributes to the ongoing debate concerning whether firms that exhibit aggressive financial reporting are correspondingly more or less aggressive in tax reporting. Drawing upon the agency theory, it would be reasonable to anticipate that managers, in pursuit of private benefits, will seek to maximize reported earnings while simultaneously minimizing tax liabilities. However, given that tax regulatory agencies utilize financial information for monitoring purposes, the detection risk of tax reporting aggressiveness (TRA) and the associated penalties escalate with the degree of financial reporting aggressiveness (FRA), compelling firms to weigh the competing incentives of financial and tax reporting. Our empirical investigation reveals that while TRA increases with FRA at lower levels of FRA, this relation reverses at higher levels of FRA, resulting in an inverted U-shaped relation between FRA and TRA. We also find that the negative association between FRA and TRA observed at high levels of FRA is stronger during the periods when tax regulatory agencies rely more on financial reporting. These results indicate that both FRA and TRA are intricately determined through a manager’s cost-benefit analysis and thus necessitate consideration as a unified strategic approach. Additionally, our findings suggest that empirical models assuming a linear relationship may inadequately capture the joint determination of FRA and TRA.

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