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The purpose of this paper is to examine three different responses to the Finnish 2005 tax reform that, among other things, reduced the corporate tax rate and hiked dividend taxation. Focus lies on the factors influencing the decision to change the fiscal year-end and whether earnings management is more prevalent when the decision is not taken.

This study uses the financial statement data of Finnish private firms and studies 350 fiscal year-end changing firms and 700 non-changing firms with logistic and linear regression analysis. Discretionary accruals are the proxy for earnings management.

The results suggest that firms seize the window of opportunity and extend fiscal years depending on the magnitude of the expected tax savings. Firms that do not change their fiscal year-end engage in more tax-induced earnings management. In terms of economic consequences, the earnings management approach is less economically significant.

This study only examines a limited number of firms that change their fiscal year-end, hence, care has been exercised in generalising the findings.

The findings may be considered when structuring future tax reforms, particularly when considering transition rules relating to changes in fiscal year-ends. The study may also have implications beyond tax reforms since the evidence of opportunistic changes in the fiscal year-end can be informative for tax authorities, independent auditors and creditors.

This study contributes to the relatively scarce literature on private firm responses to tax policy changes by analysing both upward and downward earnings management, as well as changes in the fiscal year-end. This is in contrast to previous research that mainly focusses on listed firms and absolute earnings management or earnings management in one direction.

This paper aims to investigate how transfer pricing (TP) and earnings management affect tax avoidance of firms in Ghana.

The authors use a panel data set from 2008 to 2015 to further shed light on transfer pricing-tax avoidance nexus by examining the complex interaction of three key variables: transfer pricing, earnings management and tax avoidance.

The results show that almost all the sample firms have engaged in some form of transfer pricing strategies and the manipulation of earnings to avoid tax during 2008-2015. There is evidence to suggest that non-financial multinational corporations manipulate more earnings than the financial firms while financial firms also use more TP than non-financial firms. The overall results suggest that the sensitivity of tax avoidance to transfer pricing decreases as firms increase their earnings management. By extension, these results have important policy implication for policymakers in assessing the effectiveness of tax laws relating to transfer pricing.

The authors investigate how transfer pricing and earnings management affect the avoidance of firms operating in Ghana.

This paper investigates whether board composition, a family chief executive officer (CEO) and the firm's managerial capabilities affect proactive tax management in family small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). The main statement is that the professionalisation of corporate government and management practices explains the difference in tax avoidance behaviour in closely held family SMEs.

Using the 2012 Spanish thin-capitalisation rule as a quasi-experiment, the authors estimate panel regressions with firm fixed effects and robust standard errors. This model represents a triple difference-in-differences combined with propensity score matching (PSM-DID).

Analysis shows that having a high proportion of non-family board members and a high endowment of managerial capabilities lead to tax liability optimisation in family SMEs. Conversely, familial boards and family SMEs with low managerial capabilities lack enough expertise to weigh the costs of tax avoidance over the benefits, resulting in a reluctance to engage in tax optimisation behaviours. Alike, results show no significant relation between CEO's family affiliation and tax management behaviour.

When implementing fiscal policies, the specific needs of family SMEs should be considered, and how these needs interact with corporate governance and managerial mechanisms. Moreover, policymakers need a deeper understanding of family SMEs in order to develop policies appropriate to their characteristics. A more comprehensive knowledge of how family firm heterogeneity affects corporate decisions, such as indebtedness and fiscal decisions, may improve public policies.

This study addresses the issue of tax behaviour in family SMEs in a particular event that implies a specific logic to weigh the pros and cons of each alternative: reducing debt or paying more taxes. This study’s conclusions are based on a model that deals with potential endogeneity problems, which avoids bias in the findings.

The purpose of this paper is to examine earnings management around tax rate reduction in the wake of the 2007 corporate tax reform in China.

This paper is an empirical work using a sample of listed Chinese real estate firms.

This study finds that firms managed earnings, including accrual-based earnings management and real earnings management, to decrease income in the fourth quarter of 2007, and to increase income in the first quarter of 2008. It suggests that the real estate firms were shifting income from the fourth quarter of 2007, when the statutory tax rate was 33 per cent, to the first quarter of 2008, when the statutory tax rate was 25 per cent, and therefore saved on tax payments. It also finds that corporate ownership structures, including ownership concentration and state ownership, affect earnings management. In the fourth quarter, state ownership is negatively associated with accrual-based earnings management, while ownership concentration is positively related to both accrual and real earnings management. In the first quarter, state ownership is negatively related to real earnings management.

Tax authority and policy makers might be interested in evidence on earnings management around tax rate reduction. Changes in tax rates increase the incentives to shift income, which may warrant a closer scrutiny by both outside auditors and tax auditors.

This paper is the first study that relates to both accrual-based earnings management and real earnings management to corporate tax rate changes by showing that firms manipulate income upward in the low-tax-rate periods and downward in the high-tax-rate periods.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the effect of financial factors on firms’ financial and tax reporting decisions. Firms often face the difficulties of accomplishing both financial and reporting goals. The extent to which reporting they put more value depends on the differential weighting of firms’ financial reporting and tax costs. The authors incorporate various financial factors as a source of cross-sectional differences in the weighing of both financial reporting and tax costs.

To examine firms’ decisions when fulfilling both the purposes of financial and tax reporting is difficult, the authors use a large set of firms in Korea, where book-tax conformity is high and aggressive tax shelters are restricted. The authors develop a new measure that can specify firms’ decision making between financial and tax reporting by considering both earnings management and tax avoidance.

The findings show that debt ratio affects firms’ financial and tax reporting decisions non-monotonically depending on the level of the debt ratio. The authors also find that firms with more long-term debt financing are more likely to be aggressive in financial reporting, while firms with higher financing deficit or better access to the capital market are more likely to be aggressive in tax reporting.

Thus, the findings provide more compelling evidence of firms’ decision making between two conflicting strategies, particularly when fulfilling both the purposes of financial and tax reporting is difficult. The authors expect that the results provide practical implications to standard setters, auditors and financial statement users who are interested in the ongoing debate over book-tax tradeoffs.

This paper fulfills an identified need to study how firms’ decision making between two conflicting reporting strategies are affected by the various financial factors, which are closely linked to a firm’s financial reporting and tax costs.

The purpose of this paper is to test the economic theory that product market competition should enhance firm performance in the US corporate tax management setting. It identifies one mechanism through which corporate management can improve firm performance. The paper also identifies business conditions that may facility or impede effective corporate tax management.

The paper tests the relationship between product market competition and corporate tax efficiency using large archival data. The primary data source is COMPUSTAT, which contains annual and quarterly accounting data for US public firms. Other data sources include accounting comparability data generously shared by Professor Vedi.

The paper finds that firms in competitive industries are more efficient in managing taxes. Specifically, the paper documents that firms in competitive industries exhibit lower effective tax rates than their non-competitive counterparts. Furthermore, the paper finds that the positive link between competition and the efficiency of tax management is much stronger for firms with lower cash flow volatility and for firms with fewer industry investment opportunities. The lack of financial statement comparability may weaken this link.

Tax laws vary greatly from country to country. Readers should interpret the results within the US tax environments.

Results in this paper have implications for multinational corporations that are interested in investing and doing business in the USA.

This paper sheds light on how competition influences firm performance through efficient tax management, a specific mechanism through which competition improves firm performance. To the best of the author’s knowledge, this study provides the first documentation of how product market competition affects tax planning for US publicly traded companies.

This paper aims to draw on Adler and Borys’ (1996) concept of an enabling use of bureaucracy to examine how the integration of a single-book tax-compliant transfer pricing system into the management control system is related to the perceived success of that transfer pricing system.

Based on survey data from Swiss multinational firms, the authors test a structural equation model. In addition, the authors conduct interviews with executives from three multinational enterprises.

The authors find that the integration of a tax-compliant transfer pricing system into the management control system may be perceived to be successful in achieving both tax compliance and internal (control) purposes. This is particularly true when the transfer pricing system is transparent and can be amended in the case of fundamental management control problems.

The typical shortcomings of a survey-based research apply to this study. Future research could build on this model and more closely investigate the relationship between transfer pricing system integration and an enabling use of the transfer pricing system.

Based on this study’s findings, the authors recommend that a strong integration of tax-compliant transfer prices into the management control system should be accompanied by internal transparency and the ability to repair the transfer pricing system.

Prior research on the integration between transfer pricing and management control systems has either been analytical or based on case studies. This cross-sectional analysis provides reliable insights into different levels of integration, use and the success of transfer pricing systems.

This paper aims to investigate the economic consequence of the tax reductive strategy on stock price. The authors’ theory, empirically reinforced, suggests managerial tax aggressiveness endangers the corporation through a heightened risk in stock price crashing. Information opacity worsens the situation by reinforcing the relationship. Policymakers should emphasize two aspects: market openness and tighter institutional monitoring. The evidence shown in this paper demonstrates that these two weaken the tax aggressiveness impact on risk of a crashing stock price.

The sample in this paper consists of 9,702 observations from listed firms from 2008 to 2013 in China. The tax rate is manually collected and all the other original data used in this study are sourced from Wind and China Capital Market and Accounting Research databases. Both logistic regression and ordinary least squares regression methods are used to test the hypothesis in this paper.

One key insight is in tax aggressiveness to be strongly correlated with a greater risk of future stock price crashing. The authors also found information opacity to exert a positive moderating effect. That is, the higher the information opacity, the stronger and more positive the correlation between tax aggression and stock price crash risk. However, the market process and an institutional investor have opposite, negative impacts. An open market environment reduces their correlativeness. Similarly, stronger institutional vigilance leads to an attenuation of such a co-relationship.

The findings of this paper have wide policy implications for management and control by authorities of listed corporations. Aggressiveness in management of corporate taxes accentuates the risks borne by stockholders. If so, internally within the corporation, such aggression shown by management, if not proscribed, could be subject to scrutiny, possibly by an independent committee. Externally, this may be countered by the authority in emphasizing three key factors: openness in information sharing, the market environment and tighter institutional monitoring.

This study provides a consequential theory of aggressive management of tax, rigorously analyzed and strongly, empirically supported. Overall, aggressiveness in tax management is related with assumption of higher risks in the crashing of stock price. The relationship is enhanced through information opacity, but reduced via market environment and institutional monitoring.

Measuring tax service quality is important as it may contribute to sustainable tax management. This study aims to develop and validate a scale that measures tax service quality for enterprises.

This study uses a mixed method consisting of three focus groups with 25 participants in charge of the management of tax service for item generation, a survey of 121 enterprises for scale purification and a survey of 362 enterprises in Vietnam for main study. The scale development is tested through three important steps including exploratory factor analysis (EFA), confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) and structural equation modeling (SEM).

The findings reveal that the scale of tax service quality for enterprises is represented by 13 items comprising two dimensions: responsiveness and professionalism.

This scale can be used by tax management authorities as a convenient tool to understand and measure tax service quality.

Empirical studies on the measurement of tax service quality are scarce. Most studies have focused on tax service quality for individual taxpayers. There is an absence of research on a process for the development and validation of a specific, orthodox scale of tax service quality for enterprises.

Tax risk-management (TRM) is relatively understudied in the area of corporate governance and integrated reporting. The purpose of this study is to identify whether South African organisations identify, rank and manage tax risks in terms of importance and relevance to their own corporation. The study also aims to identify the link, if any, between TRM practices being implemented and the discussion and disclosure of these practices in the integrated report.

Detailed interviews with some of South Africa’s leading tax and corporate governance experts are used to highlight the TRM practices currently in place, as well as the evolution of these practices. These interviews also identify the connection between the practices and the integrated reporting disclosures.

The experts interviewed have identified a sound understanding of TRM practices in place and certainly some evolution of these practices over the past five years. What has been identified though is the need for further enhancement and incorporation of TRM practices into the corporate governance control structures within organisations. Integrated reporting disclosure of TRM still appears to be an area where there is need for improvement, specifically a better understanding by companies of how to use their integrated reports as a strategic asset of the company as opposed to merely a compliance exercise.

The research relies on a relatively small sample of subject experts and does not provide a complete account of TRM developments.

The study adds value by contributing to research conducted on TRM. Although there has been research on ERM from a corporate governance perspective, few studies have examined this from a tax perspective, and there is virtually no formal academic research on the relationship between TRM and corporate governance from a South African perspective.