기업의 세무보고 공격성의 결정요인에 관한 실증적 연구：재벌 여부 및 시장유형을 중심으로

This study empirically investigates whether Chaebol firms are more tax aggressive than non-Chaebol firms, and also whether KOSDAQ (Korea Securities Dealers Automated Quotaion) listed firms are more tax aggressive than KOSPI (Korea Composite Stock Price Index) listed firms in Korea. Prior literature on determinants of tax avoidance, most studies that primarily investigate whether fundamental firm characteristics, incentive-based managerial compensation, corporate governance, board characteristics, ownership structures, corporate social responsibility, and labor unions etc affects the tax avoidance activities. However, these studies do not examine whether a association between Chaebol Group (Chaebol firms vs. non-Chaebol firms) and tax aggressiveness, and also a association between market type (KOSDAQ firms vs. KOSPI firms) and tax aggressiveness. The unique feature among Korean firms is the prevalence of large business groups called Chaebols and, the differential natures between Chaebol and non-Chaebol firms drive tax avoidance behavior to diverge between two groups. Meanwhile, KOSDAQ market has served as a major channel for external financing to help develop technology intensive industries led by promising small and medium entities since 1996. Market control system, however, behind the rapid expansion of the market in terms of capitalization, leading to frequent management moral hazards such as embezzlement at initial public offering, back door listing via detours such as equity swaps and M&A, lack of adequate disclosure, tax evasion attempts, illegal equity disposal, upward earnings management, stock price manipulations etc (Kim and Kwon 2007；Choi et al. 2010). These features suggest that both Ghaebol firms and KOSDAQ firms with the tax aggressive activities are higher. Because, given both their the organizational complexity and their greater opportunities of Ghaebol firms, and also the lower level of corporate transparency or financial reporting quality of KOSDAQ firms to take significant influence, the dominant owners skim more of the tax savings and may also benefit more from potential rent extraction, as compared to managers in non-Chaebol firms and KOSPI firms respectively. Hence, when aggressive tax planning increases financial and organizational complexity, managers’ financial reporting and disclosure choices may not serve to mitigate the increased opacity (Balakrishnan et al. 2012). Therefore, this paper hence hypothesize that Chaebol firms exhibit significantly higher levels of tax aggressiveness than non-Chaebol firms, and also hypothesize that KOSDAQ firms exhibit significantly higher levels of tax aggressiveness than KOSPI firms. For analysis, this study measure tax aggressiveness using long-term GAAP ETR and CASH ETR over the five-year period introduced by Dyreng et al. (2008), and classify firms as tax aggressive if they are in the lowest quintile of GAAP ETR or CASH ETR by year within the same industry following Donohoe and Knechel (2014). The second measure this study employ is the GAAP ETR*(－1) or CASH ETR*(－1) as tax avoidance. This study sample covers listed firms in non-financial industries with fiscal year-end in December from 2007 to 2014. The empirical findings of this paper are following. First, after controlling for several factors that affect tax avoidance, this study finds that Chaebol firms compared to non-Chaebol firms exhibit a significantly higher level of tax aggressiveness or tax avoidance. Second, after controlling for several factors that affect tax avoidance, this study finds that KOSDAQ firms compared to KOSPI firms exhibit a significantly higher level of tax aggressiveness or tax avoidance. These result is consistent with this study results using both GAAP ETR and CASH ETR measures, and using both indicator variable and continuous variable as tax aggressiveness measures. Overall, these results show a significant difference between Ghaebol and non-Chaebol firms, and also a significant difference between KOSDAQ and KOSPI firms appear to generally engage in tax avoidance activities. To sum up, these results indicates that Chaebol firms exhibit a higher level of tax aggressiveness, and also KOSDAQ firms exhibit a higher level of tax aggressiveness. This result suggest that the larger agency conflict between Chaebol firms’ owners and shareholders or between KOSDAQ firms’ owners and shareholders dominates Chaebol or KOSDAQ owner’ decisions about tax aggressiveness. This study contributes to the related literature as this is the first study which investigates the association between Chaebol firms or market type and tax avoidance, and this paper contributes toward a better understanding of the impact of Chaebol firms and KOSDAQ firms on tax reporting practices. This is, the results of this study is useful our understanding of the determinants of tax reporting aggressiveness. Additionally, this study provides important implications to investors, practitioners, and regulators.