비상장기업의 세무보고 공격성이 재무제표의 비교 가능성에 미치는 효과

This study examines how tax aggressiveness of unlisted firms affects the comparability of financial statements. Although tax avoidance of listed firms is frequently discussed in previous studies, there is sparse research on the tax avoidance and financial statement comparability. To fill this gap, this paper provides empirical evidence on the relations between the tax aggressiveness and the financial statement comparability of unlisted firms where the ownership of a firm is less likely to be separated from the management of a firm. In this paper, the comparability of financial statements is estimated using three measures from De Franco et al.(2011)：net income comparability, cash flow comparability, and total accrual comparability. On the other hand, tax avoidance is measured by the following two steps. First, we estimate 5-year cumulative cash effective tax rate (CASH ETR) and 5-year cumulative GAAP-based effective tax rate (GAAP ETR) following Dyreng et al.(2008), and partition the sample into quintiles based on each measure. Tax aggressive firms are defined as those in the lowest quintile (Donohoe and Knechel 2014). The final sample consists of 16,383 (16,882) firm-years from unlisted firms based on CASH ETR (GAAP ETR) over 6 years from 2008 to 2013. Our major findings are as follows. First, after controlling for several factors that affect financial statement comparability, all three comparability measures (i.e., net income comparability, cash flow comparability, and total accrual comparability) appear to be significantly greater for tax aggressive unlisted firms than other unlisted firms when tax aggressive unlisted firms are classified as those in the lowest quintile in terms of CASH ETR. Second, tax aggressive unlisted firms are likely to have greater net income and cash flow comparability compared to other unlisted firms when tax aggressive unlisted firms are defined as those in the lowest quintile based on GAAP ETR. These results indicate that tax avoidance of unlisted firms can increase comparability of financial statements, suggesting more tax aggressive reporting has positive relations with financial reporting quality in terms of financial statement comparability. Due to non-separation of ownership and control in the unlisted firms, tax avoidance of unlisted firms is likely to be far from opportunistic behavior or rent extraction of managers frequently discussed in the listed firms. Also, unlisted firms are more likely to be smaller size with less complex corporate structure compared to listed firms, which seems to result in the positive relations between tax aggressiveness and comparability of financial statements. This study contributes to the related literature as this is the first study which investigates the relations between tax aggressiveness and financial statement comparability of unlisted firms. Finally, the findings of this paper can shed a further light to potential investors (creditors) who make investment decision on unlisted firms as well as regulatory bodies by providing useful insight on the unlisted firms.