조세회피와 회계감사 보수의 관련성에 관한 연구

Tax expense and net income are affected by tax avoidance. Firms that practice high tax avoidance tend to have a high audit risk of being audited and of audit failures because tax laws inherently have ambiguities of application and interpretation. Our main objective in this paper is to examine whether tax avoidance is associated with audit fees. Generally, tax avoidance is defined as an attempt to reduce tax obligations. But the internal constraints of tax laws cause firms to make distorted tax decisions, because tax laws have ambiguities in both application and interpretation. From the view point of an auditor, firms with high tax avoidance require relatively high quality and extensive audit techniques since the audit risk is high. Therefore, this study compares audit fees for firms with high tax avoidance to firms with low tax avoidance. This paper uses two methods of tax avoidance measurement. First, the approach developed by Desai and Dharmapala(2006) isolates the component of the estimated book-tax differences that are not explained by total accruals. The book-tax differences scaled by the lagged value of assets and the total accruals scaled by the lagged value of assets are used to measure tax avoidance via the residuals of regression model. Second, we use the long-run accumulated effective tax rate to cover the short-run effective tax rate. The result of this study is that the coefficient on tax avoidance is positive and significant at the 10% level without reference to the tax avoidance measurement method. Therefore, the hypothesis is proven. The positive and significant coefficient on tax avoidance variable indicates that firms with high tax avoidance affect audit fees due to increasing audit risk. Tax avoidance creates high audit risk of audit failure for an auditor, since firms with low tax expenses are frequently reviewed and caught by the Financial Supervisory Service or by the National Tax Service. As found in previous research, the asset variable profoundly affects audit fees. The leverage, and Big4 audit firms’ variables are positively and significantly associated with audit fees. In contrast, the growth variable is negatively and significantly associated with audit fees. The ratio of exports to sales, and operating cash flows variables are not significant to audit fees. The audit opinion variable on the model, including year and industry dummy variables, is not significant to audit fees. The contribution of this paper is to suggest that in making decisions about audit fees, we should not only consider total assets but also audit risk in relation to tax avoidance.