Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/224341 
Authors: 
Year of Publication: 
2016
Citation: 
[Journal:] Global Business & Finance Review (GBFR) [ISSN:] 2384-1648 [Volume:] 21 [Issue:] 1 [Publisher:] People & Global Business Association (P&GBA) [Place:] Seoul [Year:] 2016 [Pages:] 24-32
Publisher: 
People & Global Business Association (P&GBA), Seoul
Abstract: 
We expect that tax expenses will provide a last opportunity to meet an earnings target, and involve the complexity and discretion necessary for information asymmetry to persist. Hence, tax expenses are powerful settings to examine earnings management among a wide range of firms. Considering this background, we hypothesize that changes in tax expenses are related to whether firms miss their reported earnings of the previous year. We also examine the possibility and effectiveness of earnings management through tax expenses depending on the amount to be managed. Consistent with our hypothesis, we find that firms decrease the fourth quarter effective tax rate (ETR) to meet the previous year's reported earnings. However, tax expenses could be a successful tool to manage earnings, but only when unmanaged earnings are very close to a target. These results provide general evidence that tax expenses are used to manage earnings, and suggest that stricter external audit procedures for tax expenses are required to prevent self-interested discretion by managers on their firm's tax returns.
Subjects: 
Earnings management
Earnings target
Effective tax rate
Tax expenses
Persistent Identifier of the first edition: 
Creative Commons License: 
cc-by-nc Logo
Document Type: 
Article

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