오너리스크가 기업의 조세회피에 미치는 영향

Owner risk is a risk that can cause great damage to the company by illegal acts, inappropriate behavior, and arbitrary management of the chief executive officer, large shareholders, and chaebol chairman. We empirically analyzed the impact of owner risks on corporate tax avoidance. We expected that companies with large owner risks would be less likely to avoid taxes because of the potential for special tax audits. As a measure of a corporate owner risk in this study, the results of an annual survey on the company analysis experts by Hankyung Money were used. We measured tax avoidance in two ways: the accounting effective tax rate (GaapETR) and the cash effective tax rate (CashETR). In this study, two sample groups were used for empirical analysis. The first group is 600 firm- year observations belonging to 40 chaebol groups whose owner-risk scores were surveyed. The second group is 1,715 firm-year observations that sums up the companies belonging to the chaebol group whose owner risks are lower than the median and corresponding sample of 4 times for them. As a measure of owner risk, a true score was used in the first sample and a dummy variable in the second sample. Empirical analysis shows that companies with large owner risks in both samples reduce tax avoidance because of the increased likelihood of tax audits. These results were the same for both when tax avoidance was measured with GaapETR or CashETR. This study presents additional evidence in support of the study in Hoops et al. (2012) that the possibility of tax audits affects tax avoidance among the research trends that study the determinants of tax avoidance activities. It is also meaningful for the research that presented empirical evidence that illegal activities, arbitrary management and inappropriate behavior of the owner family can actually reduce corporate value by deterring the implementation of active tax planning strategies.