비영리법인의 조세유인에 의한 비용배분: 사례연구

Not-for-profit organizations are subject to taxation on the income earned from revenue-generating activities(RGA), while they are tax-exempt on the revenues funneling from proper-purpose activities(PPA). This case study investigates whether not-for- profit organizations have incentives to shift expenses from PPA to RGA by analyzing expense allocation behaviors of a not-for-profit company (A Corporation, henceforth) in the media industry. This study differs from the previous studies on this topic in the following two respects: First, unlike in the U.S., the Korean tax law rigidly stipulates the manner of allocating the expenses common to the two activities of not-for-profit organizations. Thus, Korean not-for-profit organizations are more likely to exhibit the expense-shifting behavior, if at all, in assigning expenses individually to PPA or RGA rather than in allocating the expenses common to the two activities. Thus, this study focuses on the expense-shifting behavior with respect to the individual expenses, ignoring the common expenses. Second, while the extant studies are plagued with some conceptual problems with identifying a tax-neutral expense-allocation behavior (i.e., the expenses that would be allocated to PPA or RGA had there been no tax incentives), this study attempts to avoid the problem by categorizing the total expenses into operating and non-operating expenses and then separately identifying a tax- neutral allocation for each of these expenses. The main results are summarized as follows: First, since the relative sales proportions between the two activities are a good proxy for the tax-neutral allocation of operating expenses (CGS, SG&A expenses), the proportion of operating expenses allocated to RGA is compared to the relative sales proportion of RGA. The former is found to be higher by 0.69%p than the latter, the proxy for the tax-neutral allocation. Further, this study adopts profitability as a proxy for the tax-neutral allocation. The profitability of A Corporation’s RGA is compared to that of two profit organizations which operate in the same media industry. It is discovered that the gross profit rate of A Corporation’s RGA is lower by 12.02%p than that of the profit organizations. These two findings strongly support the possibility of the tax-induced expense-shifting behavior of A Corporation. Secondly, as for non-operating expenses (interest expenses, donation expenses, etc.), the relative sales proportions are not at all a good proxy for the tax-neutral allocation. Thus, we use the proportion of the operating expenses allocated to RGA as a proxy for the tax-neutral allocation of non-operating expense. It is found that the proportion of the non-operating expenses allocated to RGA is higher than the tax-neutral allocation by 13.97%p. However, since some non-operating items (e.g., losses from disposal of PP&E or LT investments) required by the tax law to be allocated to RGA have nothing to do with the tax incentive, we also perform the same analysis by excluding those non-operating expenses and find that the proportion of the non-operating expenses allocated to RGA is lower than the tax-neutral allocation by 7.29%p. This result tells that as for the non-operating expenses, the allocation may well be done simply in accordance with the tax rule, regardless of the tax incentive, implying that the result of the previous studies might be biased because they fail to consider the tax rule relating to the non-operating expense allocation. This study also demonstrate that the common expenses, even if their allocation method is specified in the law, are also likely to be allocated more to RGA.