The impact of stock dividends policies and non-executive managers on avoiding tax payment in companies listed in Tehran Stock Exchange

Abstract

Reducing pre-tax profits or tax evasion is an important tax issue. Taxes are based on corporate profits, and corporate governance principles act as a balance between the agency’s theory and stakeholders. The purpose of this study is to investigate the effect of stock dividends policies and the role of non-executive managers on tax avoidance in companies listed in Tehran Stock Exchange. For this purpose, 108 companies have been surveyed between 2014 and 2020. The result of studying 756 year-observation in the form of compositional data and unbalanced panel using the generalized least squares method, indicates a negative and significant relationship between profit dividing policy and tax avoidance. The results also show that there is a positive and significant relationship between non-executive board members and tax avoidance and among the control variables, company size, return on assets, financial leverage, intangible assets, investment intensity in fixed asset, total accruals and R&D costs have a significant relationship with tax avoidance.

Keywords

• tax avoidance
• stock dividends policies
• independence of the board
• non-executive managers