Does Signatory Auditor Tax Expertise ReduceTax Reporting Aggressiveness?

主讲人 : 齐保垒 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.

主讲人简介：

西安交通大学管理学院会计与财务系教授、博士生导师，财政部全国会计领军人才、陕西省青年杰出人才、西安交通大学青年拔尖人才，陕西省工商管理类教学指导委员会秘书长。国际知名学术期刊Asia-Pacific Journal of Accounting and Economics、《会计学季刊》副主编。研究领域包括审计、信息披露、公司治理、财务报表分析等，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》《会计研究》《管理工程学报》《南开管理评论》《管理评论》《管理科学》等国内外著名学术期刊发表论文60余篇。研究成果分别获得2017年、2020年教育部高等学校优秀科研成果（人文社科类）二等奖和三等奖，多次获得陕西省科学技术二等奖和三等奖。获得2023年度陕西省高等学校科学技术研究优秀成果特等奖。主持国家自然基金项目多项，其中青年基金项目的结项成绩为“特优”。