Corporate Governance and Tax Avoidance

Abstract

Separating management jobs and ownership imposes agency problem among different groups of stakholders. Corporate Governance in organizations is a mechanism for mitigating the problem. Also, in different organizations, tax computation and payment is viewed as an interesting subject. Investors demand for increasing earnings and firm’s value that make them to reduce the amount of taxes and may lead to less payment of taxs. Nevertheless, the public ask for companies’ recognition of fair amount of taxes and companies’ regular payments of taxes. In this environment, corporate governance may create balance between the public’s and companies’ interests. This study investigates the relationships between some indexes of corporate governance, such as institutional ownership, board independency and board size, and the issue of tax avoidance. For this purpose, we studied 146 companies listed in the Tehran Stock Exchange, during 2001-2012. The results from 1227 firm-year data within an unbalanced panel data model showed no significant relationship between corporate governance and tax avoidance. Additionally, findings showed a negative significant relationship between control variables of profitability and firm’ size, and a positive significant relationship between tax auditing and tax avoidance.

Keywords

• corporate governance
• institutional ownership
• board independence
• board size
• tax avoidance