고객의 손해배상청구가능성과 세무당국의 벌금부과가 세무대리인의 의사결정에 미치는 영향

Economic sanctions are among the major environmental factors that affect tax preparers’ reporting decisions. The tax authority imposes a monetary penalty on tax preparers’ aggressive reporting decisions. Also, tax preparers could get claimed for compensation from clients when the tax administration imposes a penalty on their clients that was induced by the tax preparer’s aggressive advice. Nevertheless, prior studies analyzed only the tax preparer penalty, without considering the client’s claims, in their investigation of the effect of economic sanctions on tax preparers’ reporting decisions. This study was conducted to examine the effects of economic sanctions on tax preparers’ reporting decisions by simultaneously considering their claim for compensation from their clients and their penalty from the tax authority. There are two independent variables in this study: the probability of the claim of tax preparers from their clients, and the tax preparer penalty from the tax authority. The dependent variable is the degree of aggressiveness of the tax preparers’ tax reporting decisions, which refers to whether or not a tax preparer makes a decision that is advantageous for his/her clients. This study develops two hypotheses on two independent variables. The third hypothesis on the effect of the interaction of these two independent variables was tested, because the effects of the two variables may differ based on the tax reporting decisions of the tax preparers. This study used 2x2 subject groups for experiments. The first independent variable, the probability of the claim for the tax preparers, was manipulated by two levels: a high probability and no probability. The second independent variable, the tax preparer penalty, also had two levels: a 20% and no(0) of unreported incomes. The dependent variable, the aggressiveness of the tax preparer’s reporting decision, was measured using an 11 point scale. To verify the hypotheses, an experiment among tax preparers was performed by requiring them to answer a fictitious tax scenario on a highly complicated and ambiguous problem. The questionnaire was distributed by email to 1,360 tax preparers who were certified tax accountants or certified public accountants in Seoul, Korea. As a result of three periodic requests, 123 effective data were analyzed. According to the results of the data analysis, the claim for compensation significantly affected the tax reporting decision. On the other hand, the tax preparer penalty did not show a statistically significant impact on the tax reporting decision. Additionally, covariance analysis of the four groups was performed according to the order of the magnitudes of the sums of the two independent variables, because the two independent variables can be regarded as economic sanctions from the viewpoint of tax preparers. According to the results, the aggressiveness was lessened by imposing a tax preparer penalty, but the aggressiveness increased when the probability of the claim from clients increased. The aggressiveness did not change when the tax preparer penalty was added to the clients’ claims. The result of this additional analysis means that tax preparers usually consider the clients’ claim more serious than the tax preparer penalty. These results imply that imposing penalties on tax professionals for their tax reduction decisions in ambiguous cases does not always reduce the aggressiveness of the tax preparers. In this study, even when the tax authority imposed tax preparer penalty, the tax preparer did not react in accordance with the policy maker’s expectations if there was a possibility of reparation. Therefore, as the possibility of a claim had an impact on the tax preparer’s tax reporting decision, the tax authority should consider the juridical relationship of the reparation between the tax-payer and the tax professional when it deliberates on economic sanctions on the aggressive tax reporting decision of tax preparers.