Journal of International Accounting Auditing and Taxation最新文献

Numerous corporate scandals, in conjunction with managerial misbehavior, demonstrate both the need for effective compliance management systems (CMS) and the relevance of compliance reporting. Disclosure elements are a major differentiator when reporting on CMS. This study investigates whether the tone, top managers’ signatures, and visual elements affect financial analysts’ perceptions and decisions. We use several theories from cognitive psychology which suggest that positive tone, the presence of signatures, and the combination of textual and visual elements can induce more favorable perceptions of compliance disclosure. In a 2 × 2 × 2 between-subjects experiment with 148 financial analysts from Germany, we manipulate tone (positive vs. negative), top managers’ signatures (present vs. absent), and visual elements (present vs. absent) to measure analyst perceptions of reliability, understandability, and usability, as well as credit risk, purchase, and recommendation decisions. We then sum up these dependent variables to create two new variables, perceptions, and decisions. Our results suggest that negatively toned compliance disclosure positively affects financial analyst perceptions, unless it is combined with a visual, as well as their decisions, unless it is combined with both a signature and a visual element. Additionally, signatures and a visual element have an overall positive effect on analyst perceptions. The study’s results confirm the relevance of disclosure elements in compliance reporting, which should be of interest to preparers, users, auditors, and regulators of compliance disclosure.

We investigate whether accounting and non-accounting female financial experts on audit committees influence carbon disclosures. Based on a sample of listed firms from the United Kingdom for 2009–2015, our findings show that non-accounting female experts on audit committees increase carbon disclosures. Our results support the view that non-accounting female experts possess greater business knowledge and are skilled in foreseeing the impact of management’s decisions, thus, enhancing carbon disclosures. Furthermore, our results are robust to alternative estimation techniques and endogenous concerns. We also find that firms in less carbon-intensive industries benefit from higher carbon disclosure in the presence of female non-accounting experts on audit committees. This study contributes to the recent research on corporate governance and carbon disclosures. Further, it extends recent studies identifying the specific characteristics of female directors that enhance environmental disclosures. Moreover, we respond to the calls for research on the personal attributes of directors and carbon disclosures by examining whether the accounting and non-accounting expertise of female directors on audit committees affects carbon disclosures.

Performance-based bonus contracts trigger financial rewards if goals are attained, while performance-based malus contracts punish target failure by means of financial penalties. Recommended and demanded by various stakeholders, malus contracts can be a competitive alternative that curbs high executive remuneration—nevertheless, firms rarely implement them in executive remuneration packages. A reason for this may lie in the tax treatment of corporate losses and executive remuneration. We analytically examine the effects of the most common forms of corporate taxation (symmetric and asymmetric) and personal wage taxation (proportional and progressive) on a firm owner’s contract choice. Our findings show that neither symmetric corporate nor proportional wage taxation impede malus contracts. However, asymmetric corporate taxation tends to disadvantage malus contracts compared to bonus contracts. Furthermore, progressive wage taxation has the potential to make malus contracts less attractive. This insight can add to the explanation for why firms rarely use performance-based malus contracts.

In this study, we analyze the association between national culture and voluntary operational risk disclosure quality in the European Union banking industry. Complementarily, we assess whether the potential impact of culture differs between global banks and banks with low levels of internationalization. Finally, we consider the impact of the formal institutional environment. Our sample covers 15 countries, and we construct a disclosure score based on hand-collected data. Three main results were obtained. First, banks in societies that score higher on individualism or long-term orientation and lower on uncertainty avoidance or power distance have better disclosures. Second, in global banks, where executive board members interact with stakeholders from different cultures, these associations are absent. Finally, contextual factors also affect the association between culture and disclosure, but this substitution effect is weaker than the one we document for globalization. Our results are robust to instrumental variables estimation, the use of the GLOBE project’s cultural dimensions, and a subsample analysis of civil code law countries.

This paper examines the impact of corruption prevention practices on tax avoidance from a neo-institutional theoretical perspective. Our study also contributes to the existing corruption and tax literature by considering the moderating effect of corporate board characteristics on the association between corruption prevention practices and tax avoidance. Based on a sample of FTSE 350 United Kingdom (UK) listed firms, our findings illustrate that a firm’s commitment to good anti-corruption practices is linked with lower tax avoidance. Furthermore, corporate board characteristics complement anti-corruption practices in minimizing corporate tax avoidance. Our findings provide useful evidence to governments, regulators, and other stakeholders who aim to determine best business practices that could help in reducing the risk of corporate tax avoidance. In general, our findings are robust to alternative measures of tax avoidance and different types of multivariate regression methods, namely ordinary least squares, two-stage least squares and Tobit regression techniques.

Interactions between auditors and client management affect audit quality on an engagement because those interactions influence and incentivize auditor behavior and decision-making. I perform an experiment using 191 management participants to investigate (1) whether an auditor’s use of professional judgment or industry norms to justify proposed adjustments increases management’s evaluation of audit quality, and (2) whether these evaluations differ under principles-based or rules-based standards. I find that, although management views industry norms to be more credible, they disregard an auditor’s justification method and evaluate audit quality based on underlying accounting attributes when reporting under a more rules-based standard, such as US GAAP. However, when an accounting standard is more principles-based, such as IFRS, using industry norms positively influences perceptions of audit quality. Thus, when standards are less precise, auditors are incentivized to engage in herding behavior by defaulting to industry norms when determining appropriate accounting treatments. This study increases our understanding of the incentives and motivations faced by auditors in their interactions with client management under both rules-based and principle-based accounting standards.

Bilateral tax treaties are an integral part of the international tax system. Despite this, the accounting literature on tax treaties is almost non-existent, with the majority of the research being done in the public finance and tax law research fields. The goal of this paper is to spur interest among accounting and tax researchers to engage with this literature. In this paper, we suggest that there are several areas in which accounting researchers are well positioned to contribute to the tax treaty literature. We survey the existing tax treaty literature in accounting, public finance, and tax law, and we identify new opportunities for accounting researchers. These opportunities span a broad range of research methods including archival, behavioral and experimental, interpretive, and tax legal research. Perhaps most importantly, we suggest that the contributions that accounting researchers can make to the tax treaty literature may have meaningful impacts not only on the academic world but also on tax policy making and practice.

We conduct a literature review of 60 studies on the impact of book-tax conformity on earnings management. We review this relationship in public firms, and then in public versus private firms. We also review external factors that may affect this relationship, such as accounting standards changes/International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) adoption, tax law changes, tax enforcement, and external audits. Finally, we review the studies on book-tax conformity and earnings attributes. The results are inconclusive as to whether high book-tax conformity increases or decreases earnings management. We find that private firms manage earnings and taxes to a greater extent than public firms when book-tax conformity is strong and that IFRS adoption is not enough to reduce earnings management and increase tax compliance. Firms use negative discretionary accruals before tax rate reductions to achieve their tax planning goals. Finally, tax authority enforcement strengthens financial reporting quality and decreases tax avoidance, whereas stronger book-tax conformity reduces the information content and timeliness of accounting earnings. Based on our review, we provide suggestions for future research.