동일감사인에 의한 세무조정업무의 수행이 법인세관련 공시품질을 제고하는가?

Abstract

When a tax return is filed, tax reconciliation items and amounts are exactly disclosed through the tax return, but when a financial information is reported, temporary items and amounts for calculating deferred corporate tax are disclosed through an auditor’s report. In practice, because a financial report precedes a tax report and the purposes of what they report are different, an error in permanent or temporary differences may occur. The errors in temporary and permanent differences greatly affects reliability of financial status and tax accounting disclosure. This study investigates whether providing tax reconciliation service by external auditor decrease the errors in temporary and permanent differences occurring from book-tax timing differences(differences in the time between a financial and a tax report). And this study empirically analyzes high quality audits mitigate the errors in temporary and permanent differences occurring from book-tax timing differences. This study also examine the relationship between auditor changes and the errors in temporary and permanent differences occurring from book-tax timing differences. With 1,048 firm-year observations collected over the period from year 2004 to 2006, we empirically test these predictions. The sample firms are all listed firms in Korean Stock Exchange, December year-end firms, and firms do not belong to banking industry. Among total sample, 458 firm-year observations are those who have the errors in temporary and permanent differences and the remaining 590 firm-year observations are those who have no errors in temporary and permanent differences occurring from book-tax timing differences. And 193 firm-year observations are those who provide tax reconciliation service by external auditor and the remaining 855 firm-year observations are those who do not provide tax reconciliation service by auditor. Also, And 174 firm-year observations are those who change auditors and the remaining 874 firm-year observations are those who do not change auditors. Empirical findings are summarized as follows; First, consistent with the prediction, there is significant negative association between the tax reconciliation service by auditor and the book-tax differences in the time between a financial and a tax report. Second, high quality audits is negatively related to the book-tax differences in the time between a financial and a tax report. Third, there is significant positive association between auditor changes and the book-tax differences in the time between a financial and a tax report. This results indicate that the tax reconciliation service by auditor, high quality audits and auditor no-change improve the overall quality and transparency of tax accounting disclosure.