Insiders’ perspectives of the effects of recent regulation on corporate taxation

Recent legislation and standard interpretations promulgated by governmental bodies and the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) have attempted to address several issues related to corporate taxation. These issues include the lack of transparency regarding specific tax transactions, the difficulty in reconciling the corporate tax return with the corporate income statement, the relative lack of disclosure of tax contingencies in the financial statements, and the impact of internal control on the reliability of the corporate tax return. While the stated objectives of several recent regulations have included improvements in the areas of corporate tax compliance and transparency of financial statements, it is unclear whether these regulations have resulted in the desired effects. This study analyzes the perceptions of 223 corporate tax executives regarding the effects of Internal Revenue Announcement 2002-63, Schedule M-3 of IRS Form 1120, FASB Interpretation Number 48 (FIN 48), and Section 404 of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act. The findings indicate that the respondents perceive an overall increase in tax return transparency and corporate tax compliance as a result of Schedule M-3 and FIN 48; yet the ability of corporations to engage in tax planning has decreased as a result of FIN 48. The respondents also perceive that both FIN 48 and Section 404 of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act have increased their reliance on outside sources for tax compliance work.     

Do Publicly Disclosed Tax Reserves Tell Us About Privately Disclosed Tax Shelter Activity?

We examine whether public disclosures of tax reserves recently made available through Financial Interpretation No. 48 (FIN 48) reflect corporate tax shelter activities. Understanding this relation is important to corporate stakeholders and researchers keen to infer the aggressive nature of a firm's tax positions from its tax reserve accrual. Our study links public disclosures of tax reserves with mandatory private disclosures of tax shelter participation as made to the Internal Revenue Service's Office of Tax Shelter Analysis. We find strong, robust evidence that the tax reserve is positively associated with tax shelters, while other commonly used measures of tax avoidance are not. Based on out‐of‐sample tests, we also show that the reserve is a suitable summary measure for predicting tax shelters. The tax benefits of tax shelters are economically significant, accounting for up to 48% of the aggregate FIN 48 tax reserves in our sample.     

Inter‐temporal changes in analysts’ forecast properties under the Australian continuous disclosure regime

Corporate disclosure regulations are important mechanisms for investor protection. This study examines the inter‐temporal changes in analysts’ forecast properties over the period 1988–2001 as Australia’s continuous disclosure regulation and enforcement intensity changed. The effectiveness of the continuous disclosure regime has been a question of interest since its inception, but research in this area is limited. Our results suggest that analysts’ forecast accuracy and dispersion improved for sample firms in response to the proposal and introduction of continuous disclosure regulations. However, following increased enforcement from 1998, analysts’ forecast dispersion deteriorated for small firms, possibly due to a decrease in private information received by financial analysts as regulators became more proactive in enforcing the ban on selective disclosure.     

The Disciplinary Role of Financial Statements: Evidence from Mergers and Acquisitions of Privately Held Targets

This study examines whether requiring the disclosure of audited financial statements disciplines managers’ mergers and acquisitions (M&As) decisions. When an M&A transaction meets certain disclosure thresholds, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) requires the public acquirer to disclose the target's audited financial statements after the merger is completed. Using hand‐collected data, I find that the disclosure of private targets’ financial statements is associated with better acquisition decisions. Furthermore, I find that this disciplining effect of disclosure is more pronounced when monitoring by outside capital providers is more difficult and costly, and when other disciplining mechanisms are weaker. Finally, these findings are robust to several alternative explanations, such as monitoring from blockholders and voluntary disclosures. In sum, the evidence suggests that the ex post mandatory disclosure of private targets’ accounting information disciplines managers’ acquisition decisions and improves acquisition efficiency.     

Entry and capital structure mimicking in concentrated markets: The role of incumbents’ financial disclosures

We examine whether the public availability of product market incumbents' financial disclosures leads to greater capital structure mimicking of incumbents by entrants. Exploiting a change in disclosure enforcement for German private firms in the mid-2000s, we find entrant-incumbent mimicking rises substantially in concentrated markets once incumbents' financial statements are publicly available. Additional tests exploring potential mechanisms are more consistent with interfirm learning underlying the effect than alternative channels. Our findings shed light on the effects of competitor financial statement disclosure on private firms’ initial financing decisions and highlight how capital structure dependencies among peer firms arise.     

Strategic Subsidiary Disclosure

Although subsidiary disclosures in firms’ filings with the Securities and Exchanges Commission (SEC; Exhibit 21) represent the most granular required public disclosure of a firm's geographic footprint, little is understood about the quality of the disclosure, and anecdotal evidence suggests firms may not fully comply with the disclosure requirements. We use data provided by multinational firms to the Internal Revenue Service regarding their foreign subsidiary locations to explore the accuracy of public subsidiary disclosures on Exhibit 21 of Form 10-K per SEC rules. The overall incidence of nondisclosure is low, suggesting that most firms comply with Exhibit 21 disclosure rules, and that for most applications, Exhibit 21 disclosures provide a reasonable proxy for locations of significant subsidiaries. Nevertheless, there is some evidence of nondisclosure, particularly when subsidiaries are in tax havens, when the firm is more highly scrutinized in the media, or when the firm has other characteristics consistent with low-quality disclosures such as SEC comment letters.     

The Impact of Information Processing Costs on Firm Disclosure Choice: Evidence from the XBRL Mandate

This paper examines the effect of market participants’ information processing costs on firms’ disclosure choice. Using the recent eXtensible Business Reporting Language (XBRL) regulation, I find that firms increase their quantitative footnote disclosures upon implementation of XBRL detailed tagging requirements designed to reduce information users’ processing costs. These results hold in a difference‐in‐difference design using matched nonadopting firms as controls, as well as two additional identification strategies. Examination of the disclosure increase by footnote type suggests that both regulatory and nonregulatory market participants play a role in monitoring firm disclosures. Overall, these findings suggest that the processing costs of market participants can be significant enough to impact firms’ disclosure decisions.     

Compliance with pension‐related mandatory disclosures and debt financing

Using hand‐collected data on the level of pension‐related mandatory disclosures required by International Accounting Standard 19 Employee Benefits, we test whether compliance levels with these disclosures convey information that affects firms’ access to the public instead of the private debt market, as well as the cost of their new debt issues. We document a higher tendency to access the public debt market for firms with higher levels of pension‐related disclosure. Furthermore, we find that firms with higher levels of pension‐related disclosure enjoy a lower cost in terms of issuance of public debt, but not a lower cost for private debt issues. Thus, the benefits of disclosure in reducing information risk are only realisable when creditors rely heavily on financial statements in their decision making, due to the limited access to private information. Additional tests reveal that high compliance levels effectively mitigate the negative effect of pension deficits on the cost of public debt. These findings provide novel evidence in the extant literature on the role of mandatory (and, in particular, pension‐related) disclosures on firms’ debt financing. They also have important policy implications.     

Does Private Country-by-Country Reporting Deter Tax Avoidance and Income Shifting? Evidence from BEPS Action Item 13

To combat tax avoidance by multinational corporations, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development introduced country-by-country reporting (CbCr), requiring firms to provide tax authorities with a geographic breakdown of their profitability and activities. Treating the introduction of CbCr in the European Union as a shock to private disclosure requirements, this study examines the effect on corporate tax outcomes. Exploiting the €750 million revenue threshold for disclosure and employing regression-discontinuity and difference-in-differences designs, I document a 1–2 percentage point increase in consolidated GAAP effective tax rates among affected firms. I also find evidence consistent with a decline in tax-motivated income shifting, starting in 2018. These results suggest that, although private geographic disclosures can deter corporate tax avoidance, so far, the regulations have had a limited effect on tax-motivated income shifting. My findings have policy implications for the global implementation of private CbCr and extend the debate on public versus private disclosure of tax information.     

Reporting of book-tax differences for financial and tax purposes: A case study

Recent events in financial and tax accounting have brought the issue of financial accounting for tax expenses to the forefront of both the accounting profession and academia. Complexities abound on both sides, from ASC 740/FAS 109 and ASC 740-10/FIN 48 issues on the financial accounting side to the Schedule M-3 and Schedule UTP reporting requirements on the tax side. This complexity has created a vacuum in accounting curricula, as bits and pieces of the total puzzle are covered in the intermediate accounting and tax courses, without a comprehensive, integrated review in one place.     

Determinants of Financial Ratio Disclosure Patterns of Australian Listed Extractive Companies

We investigate the disclosure patterns of Financial Ratios (FRDs) within the annual reports of 111 Australian listed resource companies over the period 2002 to 2006. Disclosure of financial ratio information increased over this period with a significant increase in disclosures recorded in the first full‐year annual report prepared following adoption of IFRS. The results of logistic regression analysis demonstrate that income tax and firm size are factors that are significantly associated with financial ratio disclosures. This study contributes to an understanding of the extent, trends and rationale behind resource firms’ financial ratio disclosure practices in Australia.     

Downlistings in European exchange-regulated markets: The role of enforcement

This paper investigates the potential role of enforcement action in shaping firms’ decisions to opt out of highly regulated stock market regimes. Our analyses are set in the German environment, where firms may choose to “downlist” from an EU-regulated to an exchange-regulated stock market, thereby circumvent mandatory preparation of IFRS financial statements and enforcement oversight. We find that downlisting firms are more likely to have been censured by enforcement bodies for erroneous accounting, compared to a sample of control firms, and that this association is more pronounced for severe or controversial errors. This finding is consistent with enforcement actions creating costs for firms and managers. Event study analyses show that market price reactions to firms’ downlisting announcements are negative in about one out of two cases. This suggests that in quite a few cases, managers, by downlisting, may be protecting private benefits rather than the interests of equity holders. Additional analyses reveals that about half of our sample firms continued to prepare IFRS financial statements on a voluntary basis after the downlisting. Taken together, our results contribute to the literature on the economic consequences of the EU’s IAS and enforcement regulation by suggesting that some firms adopt avoidance strategies to opt out of enforcement supervision.     

Private communication among competitors and public disclosure

I study how private communication among competitors affects their public disclosures. Theory suggests that competing firms can use public disclosure to coordinate, and predicts less public disclosure when there is more private communication. Using data on strategic alliances, I predict and find that firms that enter strategic alliances with competitors reduce their public disclosure, and that the reduction is more pronounced for alliances that allow for more private communication.     

Do Declines in Bank Health Affect Borrowers’ Voluntary Disclosures? Evidence from International Propagation of Banking Shocks

I examine whether declines in banks’ financial health affect their borrowers’ disclosures. Prior studies indicate that, in relationship lending, banks and borrowers rely on private communication, rather than public disclosures, to resolve information asymmetries. When banking relationships are threatened, borrowers must turn to new funding sources, inducing them to reconsider their disclosure policies. This paper predicts that borrowers, whose banking relationships are threatened by declining bank health, change their public disclosures of forward‐looking information. Using the emerging‐market financial crises in the late 1990s as shocks to the health of certain U.S. banks, I find that affected banks’ U.S. borrowers increase both the quantity and informativeness of their management forecasts following these shocks compared to borrowers of unaffected banks. The results are similar using conference calls or the length of the Management's Discussion and Analysis section as alternative proxies for voluntary disclosure. Overall, these results provide new insights into the impact of availability of relationship lending on firms’ disclosure choices.     

Mandatory IFRS adoption and management forecasts: The impact of enforcement changes

We examine how concurrent enforcement changes affect the positive relationship between mandatory IFRS adoption and firms’ voluntary disclosure. We show that the increase in the issuance of management forecasts after IFRS adoption is smaller for firms from IFRS-mandating countries with concurrent enforcement changes than for those from countries without such changes. We find no difference in the increase of forecast informativeness between firms from IFRS-mandating countries without concurrent enforcement changes and firms from non-IFRS-mandating countries; however, firms domiciled in IFRS-mandating countries with concurrent enforcement changes exhibit a significantly smaller increase in forecast informativeness. Our findings suggest that better IFRS enforcement distinctly weakens (strengthens) the positive effect of IFRS adoption on voluntary (mandatory) disclosure.     

Taxes and Financial Constraints: Evidence from Linguistic Cues

Using a new measure of financial constraints based on firms’ qualitative disclosures, we find that financially constrained firms—firms that use more negative words in their annual reports—pursue more aggressive tax planning strategies as evidenced by: (1) higher current and future unrecognized tax benefits, (2) lower short‐ and long‐run current and future effective tax rates, (3) increase in tax haven usage for their material operations, and (4) higher proposed audit adjustments from the Internal Revenue Service. We exploit the unexpected closures of local banks as exogenous liquidity shocks to show that firms’ external financial constraints affect their tax avoidance strategies. Overall, the linguistic cues in firms’ qualitative disclosures provide incremental information beyond traditional accounting variables or commonly used effective tax rates to reveal and predict tax aggressiveness, both contemporaneously and in the future.     

Externalities of public firm presence: Evidence from private firms' investment decisions

Public firms provide a large amount of information through their disclosures. In addition, information intermediaries publicly analyze, discuss, and disseminate these disclosures. Thus, greater public firm presence in an industry should reduce uncertainty in that industry. Following the theoretical prediction of investment under uncertainty, we hypothesize and find that private firms are more responsive to their investment opportunities when they operate in industries with greater public firm presence. Further, we find that the effect of public firm presence is greater in industries with better information quality and in industries characterized by a greater degree of investment irreversibility. Our results suggest that public firms generate positive externalities by reducing industry uncertainty and facilitating more efficient private firm investment.     

Public Pressure and Corporate Tax Behavior

We use a shock to the public scrutiny of firm subsidiary locations to investigate whether that scrutiny leads to changes in firms’ disclosure and corporate tax avoidance behavior. ActionAid International, a nonprofit activist group, levied public pressure on noncompliant U.K. firms in the FTSE 100 to comply with a rule requiring U.K. firms to disclose the location of all of their subsidiaries. We use this setting to examine whether the public pressure led scrutinized firms to increase their subsidiary disclosure, decrease tax avoidance, and reduce the use of subsidiaries in tax haven countries compared to other firms in the FTSE 100 not affected by the public pressure. The evidence suggests that the public scrutiny sufficiently changed the costs and benefits of tax avoidance such that tax expense increased for scrutinized firms. The results suggest that public pressure from outside activist groups can exert a significant influence on the behavior of large, publicly traded firms. Our findings extend prior research that has had little success documenting an empirical relation between public scrutiny of tax avoidance and firm behavior.     

Response of Tax Credit Claims to Tax Enforcement: Evidence from a Quasi‐Experiment in Chile

Diesel in Chile receives different tax treatments depending on its use. If diesel is used in industrial activities, the diesel taxes paid can be fully used as a credit against VAT, but if it is used in freight or public transportation – basically trucks and buses – only a fraction of diesel taxes paid can be claimed as a tax credit for VAT payments. As a result of this different tax treatment, firms have incentives to use ‘tax‐exempted’ diesel in activities requiring ‘non‐tax‐exempted’ diesel. This tax wedge therefore generates an opportunity for tax evasion, especially for firms with multiple economic activities, one of them being transport. In this paper, we analyse the impact of a tax enforcement programme implemented by the Chilean Internal Revenue Service (IRS), where letters requiring information about diesel purchases and use and vehicle ownership were sent to around 200 firms in 2003. Using different empirical strategies to consider the non‐randomness of the selection of firms, the empirical results show consistently that firms receiving a letter decreased their diesel tax credits by around 10 per cent.     

The innovation consequences of mandatory patent disclosures

We investigate the effect of patent disclosures on corporate innovation. Using the American Inventor's Protection Act (AIPA) as a shock that increased patent disclosures, we find an increase in innovation for firms whose rivals reveal more information after the AIPA and a decrease in innovation for firms whose own disclosures are divulged to competitors as a result of the law. These findings suggest patent disclosures generate both spillover benefits and proprietary costs. Our findings provide justification for patent disclosure requirements by demonstrating positive externalities: rivals' disclosures facilitate a firm's innovation. However, we also highlight that mandatory patent disclosures can impose proprietary costs on firms. These results broadly contribute to our understanding of the real effects of disclosure, such that forcing firms to share proprietary information can be privately costly but beneficial to other firms.