Does Signatory Auditor Tax Expertise ReduceTax Reporting Aggressiveness?

主講人 : 齊保壘 教授

While a large body of literature investigates the determinants of tax aggressiveness, there is conflicting evidence on whether auditors’tax expertise curbs or facilitates clients’tax aggressiveness. However, prior studies examine auditors who also provide non-audit tax services to their clients, which provides the auditor with confounding or conflicting incentives. We predict that signatory auditors with tax expertise, who do not provide non-audit tax services, reduce tax aggressiveness, because tax aggressiveness increases misstatement risk. We test our prediction using Chinese data, which allows us to identify Certified Tax Agents as tax-expert auditors and perform the analysis using auditors who do not provide non-audit tax services. We find that audit clients of signatory auditors with tax expertise, who do not provide non-audit tax services, are less likely to engage in tax aggressiveness. Consistent with a causal relation, we find that an exogenous decrease in tax rates, which reduces clients’incentives to engage in tax aggressiveness, weakens the effect of tax-expertise on tax aggressiveness. We also find that tax-expert auditors attenuate the type of tax aggressiveness that increases tax-related misstatement risk, and that the channels through which tax-expert auditors constrain tax aggressiveness include audit adjustments that increase taxable income.

主講人簡介：

西安交通大學管理學院會計與財務系教授、博士生導師，財政部全國會計領軍人才、陜西省青年杰出人才、西安交通大學青年拔尖人才，陜西省工商管理類教學指導委員會秘書長。國際知名學術期刊Asia-Pacific Journal of Accounting and Economics、《會計學季刊》副主編。研究領域包括審計、信息披露、公司治理、財務報表分析等，在The Accounting Review、Contemporary Accounting Research、Auditing: A Journal of Practice and Theory、Journal of Accounting and Public Policy、Accounting Horizons、Accounting and Business Research、Accounting and Finance、Asia-Pacific Journal of Accounting and Economics、The International Journal of Accounting、《管理世界》《會計研究》《管理工程學報》《南開管理評論》《管理評論》《管理科學》等國內外著名學術期刊發表論文60余篇。研究成果分別獲得2017年、2020年教育部高等學校優秀科研成果（人文社科類）二等獎和三等獎，多次獲得陜西省科學技術二等獎和三等獎。獲得2023年度陜西省高等學校科學技術研究優秀成果特等獎。主持國家自然基金項目多項，其中青年基金項目的結項成績為“特優”。