Tax Aggressiveness and Accounting Fraud
研究了美国上市公司中税收激进行为与会计舞弊之间的关系，发现税收激进的公司更少发生会计舞弊，但结果依赖于税收激进性的衡量方式。
ABSTRACT There are competing arguments and mixed prior evidence on whether firms that are aggressive in their financial reporting exhibit more or less tax aggressiveness. Our research contributes to resolving this issue by examining the association between aggressive tax reporting and the incidence of alleged accounting fraud. Relying on several proxies for tax aggressiveness to triangulate our evidence, we generally find that tax aggressive U.S. public firms are less likely to commit accounting fraud. However, we caution that our results are sensitive to how tax aggressiveness is measured. More specifically, four (two) of the five (three) proxies for firms’ effective tax rates (book‐tax differences) load positively (negatively) during the 1981–2001 period, implying that fraud firms are less tax aggressiveness. Our inferences persist when we isolate the 1995–2001 period in which accounting impropriety steeply rose and corporate tax compliance steeply fell. Moreover, we continue to find that tax aggressive firms are less apt to fraudulently manipulate their financial statements when we apply factor analysis to identify tax avoidance with a common factor extracted from the underlying proxies and match on propensity scores to ensure that the fraud and nonfraud samples have very similar nontax characteristics.