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The purpose of this paper is to explore the emerging discourse on corporate taxation from a corporate social responsibility perspective to develop a consensual definition of corporate tax responsibility (CTR) and to identify a set of indicators that firms should publicly communicate to their stakeholders as an accountability mechanism.

Data were obtained from semi-structured interviews with representatives of stakeholders closely related to taxation: tax authorities, companies, NGOs, tax advisors and academics. Based on a discourse analysis approach, data were coded and analyzed using computer-assisted qualitative data analysis software.

CTR is defined as the set of tax-related practices and policies that allow companies to pay a fair share of taxes as a function of the generated value in each jurisdiction in which they operate and to then publicly disclose them. Disclosure should cover disaggregated quantitative data and information on practices and policies.

Despite the wealth of research on sustainability reporting and increasing public awareness of tax aggressiveness and disclosure, academic research has not explored tax-responsible reporting. Moreover, no consensual definition of CTR has been formulated, and no indicators to properly account for responsible taxation have been identified. This paper contributes to filling these gaps by providing rich interview evidence regarding the nature of the emerging discourse on CTR reporting and a set of material indicators for CTR disclosure. This paper encourages researchers to foster the development of social accountability by engaging in future empirical studies of CTR.

This study examines the moderating effect of XBRL mandatory adoption on the association between managerial ability and corporate tax outcomes.

This study used a quantitative method with panel data regression models using a sample of listed firms on the Indonesia Stock Exchange from 2010 to 2019.

The regression results indicate that XBRL adoption moderates the relationship between managerial ability on tax avoidance and tax risk. Firms with higher managerial ability have relatively greater tax avoidance practices and lower tax risk following XBRL adoption. In this study, the authors document unfavorable and unexpected consequences of XBRL in an emerging country.

Results are from a sample of firms from one emerging country.

It becomes important and necessary to develop more and better taxonomies with standardized extensions related to taxes information in the XBRL financial reporting to support the tax administrator’s performance in assessing firms’ tax avoidance and tax risk. The authors underscore the importance of improving taxes tags, including tags from financial statements and the disclosure section. This study may also inform policymakers in other countries that more adequate tax tags are needed to leverage benefit from XBRL adoption in monitoring and assessing corporate tax avoidance and tax risk.

This study is among the first to test an explanation for the moderating role of XBRL adoption on the association between managerial ability and corporate tax avoidance and tax risk.

This chapter investigates the effects of the corporate sector on the effectiveness of selected tax compliance instruments in the context of large corporate taxpayers belonging to the finance, manufacturing, and service sectors. Applying multilevel logit models based on real tax office and survey data from Bangladesh, it is found that the filing compliance of large corporate taxpayers is influenced by penalty, tax audit, and taxpayer services, while reporting compliance is influenced by tax audit, criminal prosecution, and tax simplification. In the case of payment compliance, two coercive instruments – penalty and tax audit – have been found to be statistically significant. However, when sector characteristics are considered, the extent of the influence of these instruments, and, in some cases, their statistical significance changes. This suggests that the effectiveness of tax compliance instruments, among other things, largely depends on the sector affiliation of corporate taxpayers. Overall, this study establishes that corporate sector plays an important role in the effectiveness of tax compliance instruments, with the caveat that findings might be different if working definitions of the study variables were measured differently.

This chapter proposes that tax education, proxied by Master of Science in Taxation (MST) degree, has substantial influence on chief financial officers’ (CFOs) knowledge, skill sets, values, and cognitive preferences and further influences their decisions in tax reporting. By empirically examining the relation between CFOs with MST degree and their companies' tax compliance based on US data between 2004 and 2016, we find that CFOs with MST degree are associated with improved tax compliance, suggesting that US MST education, beyond general accounting education, cultivates graduates with higher levels of professionalism and ethics in the field of taxation. Moreover, we find that CFOs' tenure, age, and compensation influence the relation between tax education and tax compliance, suggesting company's compensation and employee policies influence executives' tax decisions. Finally, we find that pressures from financial reporting and CEOs with accounting educational background could alleviate the role of CFOs with accounting educational background in tax reporting, while institutional owners could strengthen the role of CFOs. This chapter provides evidence regarding the social implication of MST program and has important managerial implication to tax compliance, executive recruitment, and corporate governance.

This paper aims to examine whether tax disclosure in Global Reporting Initiative (GRI)-based sustainability reporting mitigates aggressive tax avoidance.

This study uses a multiple regression method for 714 nonspecially taxed firms listed on the Indonesia Stock Exchange in 2014–2018.

The findings demonstrate that disclosing tax payments in GRI-based sustainability reports reduces aggressive tax avoidance. Additional analysis indicates that the number of GRI-based sustainability reports positively affects aggressive tax avoidance. However, disclosing tax payments in multiple GRI-based sustainability reports negatively affects aggressive tax avoidance.

Recent prior studies demonstrate that aggressive tax avoidance does not indicate an organizational culture that devalues corporate social responsibility. This paper argues that firms cannot find the link between tax and corporate social responsibility when tax payments are not incorporated in sustainability reports. GRI considers tax a sustainability issue and seeks to institutionalize this concept by recommending that firms disclose taxes in their sustainability reports. This research analyses whether disclosing taxes in GRI-based sustainability reports may serve as a form of soft law by convincing firms that tax is a sustainability issue, thereby reducing their tax avoidance. This topic has received little attention in previous research.

Multinational enterprises (MNEs) are increasingly seeking to demonstrate their commitment to sustainability and inclusiveness within the societies they operate in, often by highlighting the amount of tax they pay. The author proposes to summarize channels through which tax impacts the achievement of sustainable development goals (SDGs) and analyze them in relation to a single goal, SDG 10 (reduced inequalities) in a single region (the Central and Eastern Europe, CEE). The impact of tax is often ambivalent, but above all it is hard to quantify as there are many stakeholders involved and corporations still tend to disguise their internal information. The author analyzes MNEs’ operations in the CEE region to better understand how reporting standards influence the achievement of SDG 10, focusing on country-by-country reporting (CbCR) and non-financial reporting of European banks and other corporations who publish CbCR on a voluntary basis. The authors perform a quantitative analysis of CbCR data and a qualitative investigation of 201 non-financial reports by 30 MNEs. From the theoretical viewpoint, this research may help to construct a framework to evaluate the tax impact of a given company. Given that, this chapter also outlines why and how it can be beneficial for MNEs to publish voluntary reports it can also serve to motivate increased voluntary participation of MNEs in the transition to sustainability.

International Accounting Standard (IAS) 12 requires the disclosure of a tax reconciliation (TR). The purpose of the TR is to explain the differences between the corporate effective tax expense and the corporate theoretical tax expense. In this paper, the authors investigate which institutional pressures influence the level of disclosure of the TR.

The study draws on an empirical archival approach in which the level of disclosure is first measured and then associated with institutional pressures. The sample comprises 120 companies listed on the Paris stock exchange, i.e. a highly institutionalized setting.

The findings show a wide variation in the level of disclosure of the TR across the sample and that all three types of isomorphism (coercive, normative and mimetic) are associated with disclosure.

The paper deals exclusively with TR given its importance to a wide range of users. Additional tax information available in annual reports, most of the time at an expert level, may be the subject of further research.

The results have important implications for standard setters, regulators, and practitioners as the research outlines the institutional pressures at work in corporate reporting policies and pushes forward the debate on fiscal transparency.

This paper documents the influence of institutional pressures on the level of the TR disclosure at a country level. It contributes to the literature on corporate tax disclosure which mainly focuses on differences across countries. An innovative ad hoc index is used to measure information completeness.

We examine the relationship between tax-related accounting misstatements and changes in the uncertain tax benefits accrual account in the year of the disclosure of a misstatement. We find that the disclosure of a tax-related misstatement is associated with an increase in unrecognized tax benefits during that year. We show that the increase in unrecognized tax benefits in the year of disclosure is from uncertain tax positions taken in prior periods. Overall, this finding is consistent with increase in financial reporting conservatism upon disclosure of tax-related accounting misstatement.

The purpose of this study is to examine the impact of managerial ability on corporate tax risk and long-term tax avoidance using the upper echelons theory.

This study uses a quantitative method with regression models, using a sample of listed firms on the Indonesia Stock Exchange from 2011 to 2018.

The regression results report that managerial ability negatively influences tax risk and positively impacts long-run tax avoidance. Companies with more able managers have a relatively lower tax risk and greater long-run tax avoidance. The results reveal that firms with managers that possess greater abilities are more committed to long-run tax avoidance while concurrently maintaining a lower level of their tax risk. The impacts the authors report are statistically significant and robust, as proved by a series of robustness checks and additional tests.

This study only includes firms from one developing country.

The empirical results might be of interest to board members while envisaging the benefits and costs of appointing and hiring managers, as well as to the tax authority and the other stakeholders interested in apprehending how managerial ability influences corporate tax risk and long-run tax avoidance practices simultaneously.

This study proposes and tests an explanation for the impact of managerial ability on corporate tax risk and long-run avoidance simultaneously in the context of an emerging country.

The purpose of this paper is to empirically test whether corporates, via publicly disclosed sentiment and in response to government initiatives such as domestic corporate tax reform measures that address transparency, are beginning to view tax as a fourth dimension of corporate social responsibility (CSR).

To determine whether corporate attitudes towards tax are changing, representations about the corporate entity by a variety of stakeholders and through numerous channels were analysed using Leximancer software. These representations were in response to four distinct Australian domestic tax reform measures instituted during and subsequent to the Australian Government Senate Inquiry into corporate tax avoidance. The use of Leximancer, a data-analysis and mapping software that automates the coding of document text, delineates concepts and identifies themes, is well suited to the nature and size of the data used (Lodhia and Martin, 2011) and ensures the validity and reliability of the results (Dumay, 2014).

This paper provides evidence on the efficacy of global and domestic tax-reform measures that target tax avoidance through transparency. This is demonstrated by a progressive change in corporate attitudes towards tax and suggests a transition, albeit nascent, from the aggregate view to the real entity view of a corporation. As such, this study provides evidence of the inception of a corporate conscience when it comes to tax, whereby tax is instituted as a fourth dimension of CSR.

Using a theoretical framework which adopts the historically accepted views of the firm, the authors argue that a shift from the aggregate view to the real entity view of a corporation will have the following implications: an expansion of the dimensional factors of CSR (economic, social, environmental and tax); a new standard or definition of corporate responsibility which encompasses both legal and moral considerations and has transparency at its core (Narotzki, 2016); and a new outlook where consumers realise that they have the power to influence and demand action from corporates.

This paper uses state-of-the-art software to empirically test the efficacy of global and domestic tax reform measures that target transparency, ultimately providing evidence supporting the adoption of these measures and the recognition of a new dimension of CSR, tax.