企业税收筹划外文翻译文献

企业税收筹划外文翻译文献

企业税收筹划外文翻译文献

(文档含中英文对照即英文原文和中文翻译)

Corporate Tax-Planning Effectiveness: The Role of Compensation-Based

Incentives (Ⅰ)

John D. Phillips University of Connecticut

ABSTRACT

This study investigates whether compensating chief executive officers and

business-unit managers using after-tax accounting-based performance measures leads to lower effective tax rates, the empirical surrogate used for tax-planning effectiveness. Utilizing proprietary compensation data obtained in a survey of corporate executives, the relation between effective tax rates and after-tax performance measures is modeled and estimated using a two-step approach that corrects for the endogeneity bias associated with firms' decisions to compensate managers on a pre- versus after-tax basis. The results are consistent with the hypothesis that compensating business-unit managers, but not chief executive officers, on an after-tax basis leads to lower effective tax rates.

KEYWORDS tax planning; performance measures; endogenous treatment effects.

I. INTRODUCTION

Effective tax planning, defined by Scholes et al. (2002) as tax planning that maximizes the firm's expected discounted after-tax cash flows, requires managers to consider their decisions' after-tax consequences. In this paper, I investigate whether after-tax accounting-based performance measures lead to lower effective tax rates (ETR), my empirical surrogate for tax planning effectiveness.1 The ETR, an income-statement-based outcome measure calculated as the ratio of total income tax expense to pre-tax income, generally measures the effectiveness of tax reduction strategies that lead to higher after-tax income. A lower ETR, however, can only proxy for tax savings and does not always imply that after-tax income and/or cash flows have been maximized.2 Despite this limitation, the ETR has been used to measure the effectiveness of spending on the tax function (Mills et al. 1998) and corporate tax department performance (Douglas et al. 1996). Also, lowering the ETR is frequently cited as a way to increase earnings (e.g., Ziegler 1997) and increase share price (e.g., Mintz 1999; Swenson 1999).

Accounting research has addressed the relation between accounting-based compensation and managers' actions (e.g., Larcker 1983; Healy 1985; Wallace 1997). This paper is the first to address whether after-tax accounting-based performance measures motivate managers to take actions that help lower their firms' ETR and does so at both the chief executive officer (CEO) and business-unit (SBU) manager levels.

Prior after-tax performance measure research has focused only on the determinants of compensation CEOs using pre- versus after-tax earnings (e.g., Newman 1989; Carnes and Guffey 2000; Atwood et al. 1998; Dhaliwal et al. 2000) and provides no evidence concerning after-tax compensation's effectiveness in lowering a firm's tax liability. Extending this investigation to the SBU level is motivated out of the apparent conflict between arguments that taxes should be allocated to SBU for incentive compensation purposes (e.g., McLemore 1997) with empirical observations that a majority of firms do not do so (e.g., Douglas et al. 1996).4 The current investigation provides evidence concerning the incremental effectiveness of explicitly motivating CEOs and SBU managers to incorporate tax consequences into their operating and investment decisions.

A common issue in cross-sectional studies that attempt to link a particular management accounting choice to an outcome measure is that all sample firms may be optimizing with respect to the choice being investigated (Ittner and Larcker 2001). Without addressing the endogeneity of a firm's choice, it is difficult to provide evidence consistent with this choice leading to an improved outcome. To address this issue, the relation between ETR and CEO and SBU-manager after-tax performance measures is estimated using a two-step approach that helps correct for the potential endogeneity bias associated with these two choice variables. As a first step in implementing this approach, the Antle and Demski (1988) controllability principle is used to model a firm's decisions to adopt after-tax CEO and SBU-manager performance measures. To include a particular measure in a manager's compensation contract, this principle requires that the expected benefits from holding a manager responsible for a measure must be greater than the additional wage that must be paid to compensate the manager for the resulting additional risk and effort. Accordingly, an after- tax performance measure should be used as a contracting variable in a manager's incentive compensation contract only if the manager's involvement in tax-planning efforts leads to a difference between pre-tax and after-tax accounting results, which is generally reflected in the ETR. Consistent with prior research, the pre- versus after-tax CEO and SBU-manager selection models include variables that control for a firm's tax-planning opportunities because the presence of such opportunities reflect the extent to which a manager's actions can be expected to lower the ETR.

Even if a manager's efforts are expected to lead to a lower ETR, a firm will use an after-tax performance measure only if the expected benefits exceed the expected

costs of doing so. An after-tax performance measure is expected to lead to a lower ETR because it motivates the manager's increased cooperation with tax professionals to help identify, develop, and execute tax-planning strategies. McLemore (1997, 1) cites Hewlett Packard's tax director to support the need for SBU-manager involvement in tax-planning efforts:

Tax planning is only as good as being involved in the early stages of such things as business planning, strategic planning, and merger and acquisition work....Your tax department has to be represented at the table when those decisions are made. The evolving model for the future is the tight integration of tax people with business unit planning.

Costs associated with using after-tax performance measures include the additional wage that must be paid to compensate the manager for the increased risk due to potential tax law changes and the increased effort that results from including income tax expense in the compensation contract. Other potential costs associated with after-tax compensation include the administrative cost of allocating tax expense to a firm's SBU, increased tax examination costs, and increased tax authority scrutiny. Contrary to measuring after-tax compensation's benefits via observed ETR, there are no clear empirical surrogates for after-tax performance measures' costs. This study thus focuses on the realized benefits of compensating managers on an after-tax basis but does not provide evidence of the associated costs' magnitude.

Proprietary data obtained in a survey of corporate executives are used to construct certain test variables, including those indicating whether CEOs and SBU managers are compensated using after-tax accounting-based performance measures. Publicly available data are used to construct ETR and other test variables. The results are consistent with the hypothesis that compensating SBU managers, but not CEOs, on an after-tax basis leads to lower ETR, resulting in an estimated median tax savings of $13.3 million annually. Sensitivity tests performed on a subsample of firms with high simulated MTR (Graham 1996) provide further evidence that low-MTR firms' potential ETR-lowering actions that could have ambiguous effects on cash flows and after-tax profits are not driving this result. Further sensitivity tests help rule out the proportion of tax function outsourcing as an alternative explanation for the statistically and economically significant negative relation between after- tax SBU-manager compensation and ETR.

The results contribute to the accounting-based compensation literature by linking after- tax accounting-based performance measures to SBU-manager involvement that is incrementally effective in lowering firms' ETR. Consistent with Guidry et al. (1999) who document bonus-induced earnings management at the SBU level, this finding provides additional insight into the effect that SBU-manager accounting-based incentives have on managers' actions. Also, the estimated explicit tax savings resulting from after-tax performance measures provide corporate decision makers with information relevant to the design of SBU-manager incentive compensation plans.

The paper proceeds as follows. The next section sets forth the hypotheses tested in this study. Section III outlines the empirical models and estimation procedures used in testing these hypotheses. Section IV provides a discussion of the data and sample, including a brief overview of the survey used to obtain proprietary compensation data. Results are presented in Section V. The final section provides the conclusion and a discussion of the study's limitations.

II. HYPOTHESIS DEVELOPMENT

Newman (1989), Cares and Guffey (2000), and Atwood et al. (1998) investigate firms' choices of after-tax earnings as the contracting variable in CEO bonus plans. These studies hypothesize that firms with greater tax-planning opportunities, consistent with the Antle and Demski (1988) controllability principle, are more likely to use after-tax performance measures. Using proxies for tax-planning opportunities, these studies collectively find that multinational status, number of operating segments, firm size, and capital intensity are positively associated with after-tax CEO compensation. Atwood et al. (1998) also presents evidence that leverage is negatively associated with this choice.

企业税收筹划的有效性：基于对报酬的激励作用（上）

约翰D·菲利普斯康涅狄格大学

摘要

本研究探讨首席执行官是否修正主管和业务部门经理利用税后会计为基础的绩效措施，导致较低的实际税率，以报酬激励用于税收筹划的有效性。企业的主管由于被激励获得的专有报酬的数据，运用建模和估计这两个步骤来研究有效税率和税后性能指标之间的关系来更正企业的管理人员的决定，以修正相关的内生性偏置前与后的计税基础。结果与假设一致修正了业务部门经理，但是没有修正主管，关于税后导致较低的实际税率。

关键词税收计划；性能指标；内源性的处理效果

引言

有效的税收筹划，根据斯科尔斯等人的定义（2002），税收筹划，即最大限度地提高公司的预期税后净现金流量，要求管理者要考虑他们的决定所造成的税后结果。在本文中，研究是否以税后会计为基础的绩效措施，将导致较低的实际出口退税税率。实际的经验替代了出口退税的税务规划效力，一个基础的收入结果被合适的计量，所得税费用总额作为税前收入的一定比例，通常测量减税策略将导致更高的税后收入的有效性。较低的出口退税，然而，仅能够代理节税以及通常并不意味税后收入或者是现金流已经达到最大值。尽管有这一局限性，出口退税还是被用来衡量税收功能性支出的有效性（米尔斯，1998）和企业各部门税

务绩效（道格拉斯，1996）。另外，降低出口退税是经常被作为一种增加收入（齐格勒，1997）和使股价上升的手段(e.g. Mintz 1999; Swenson 1999)。

会计研究处理了以会计绩效为基础的薪酬和经理的行为之间的关系(e.g., Larcker 1983; Healy 1985; Wallace 1997)，本文是第一个从事这方面研究的文章：是否以税后会计为基础的绩效管理措施鼓励经理人员采取行动来降低他们公司的出口退税，并且首席执行官和事业部经理也要求做。在此之前的税后业绩计量研究只集中于首席执行官们的报酬的决定因素为预先的税后收益 (e.g., Newman 1989; Carnes and Guffey 2000; Atwood et al. 1998; Dhaliwal et al. 2000)，没有提供任何证据说明降低一个公司的税务负担与税后报酬的关系。这项调查扩展到了事业部层次，这些部门的报酬激励动机与减少税收的目的目的之间存在明显的冲突(e.g., McLemore1997)以及观察的经验是，大多数企业没有这样做(e.g., Douglas et al. 1996)。目前的研究提供的证据关于明确激励首席执行官和事业部管理人员纳入其经营和投资决策的税务结果的增量效益。

以某个侧面来研究出口退税与管理层薪酬的共同课题，衡量的结果是所有样本公司可优化关于被调查的选择(Ittner and Larcker2001)。如果不解决公司选择的内生性，很难提供一致的证据关于这选择导致改善的结果。为了解决这个问题，首席执行官和事业部经理关于税后绩效与出口退税的联系依旧采用两步方式估计，可以帮助对潜在的内生性与相关偏见这两个变量做出正确的选择。作为实施这一方法的第一步，the Antle and Demski (1988) 可控性原则是用来模拟一个公司的决定,通过对首席执行官和事业部经理税后绩效指标的衡量。要包括一个特别措施在经理人的薪酬合同中，这一原则要求持有一个衡量预期收益和负责任的经理更加努力工作来规避所支付的附加工资之间的额外风险。因此，税后绩效指标应作为一个激励经理人的获取额外报酬的方法，只有当经理的税务规划工作的参与导致了税前和税后核算结果之间的差异，这通常反映在出口退税上面。与以前的研究相一致，包括与首席执行官和事业部经理选择税后模型的变量，对于一个企业的税务筹划的机会控制，因为这种机会的存在会在某种程度上反映了经理人的行动，可以预期，将会降低出口退税。

即使通过经理人的努力，预计将导致较低的出口退税，公司将使用税后绩效指标只有当预期收益超过预期成本才这样做，税后业绩措施预计会导致较低的出口退税，因为它促使管理人员和税务专业人员加强合作以达成一致的，发展的，执行税收筹划策略，McLemore (1997, 1)引用惠普公司的税务主任支持税务规划工作需要事业部经理参与的必要性：

税收筹划这种事情也只有在被作为业务规划的早期阶段，战略上的规划，兼

并和收购工作……你的税务部门要在会议上，代表这些部门做出决定。对未来的发展模式是税务策划人与业务部门紧密合作完成的。

与使用税后业绩的措施有关的费用包括附加工资必须支付给经理以弥补由于潜在的税法变化增加的风险，使经理加倍的努力，包括，从合同中补偿个人所得税方面费用的增加的结果。与税后报酬有关的其他潜在费用包括向一个公司的事业部分配行政费用开支，税务检查成本增加，并增加税务机关审查频率。相反，通过观察出口退税的好处来衡量税后报酬，有没有税后业绩计量的成本效益明显的有经验代理人。因此，本研究着重于在管理者的基础上实现的税后补偿效益，但不提供相关的成本，规模的证据。

在企业主管的调查中所获得的专有数据用于构造并测试某些变量，说明是否包括那些首席执行官和事业部的经理们使用税后会计基础的绩效指标。公开数据用于构造出口退税和其他变量来测试，结果与假设一致，即事业部经理的报酬，但不包括公司首席执行官的，与税后导致较低的出口退税有关，估计使每年平均节省1330万美元的税款。模拟公司进行敏感性测试的子样本中，边际税率(Graham 1996)提供进一步的证据表明，低边际税率的公司将会有降低潜在出口退税的行动，可能对现金流量和税后利润不吻合这一结果产生模棱两可的影响。敏感性测试有助于进一步排除了税收职能外包的比例，作为另一种解释，统计上和经济上显示事业部经理的税后报酬和出口退税呈负相关。

研究结果有助于薪酬以会计为基础的著作，通过实施事业部经理参与的以税后会计为基础的绩效措施，是逐步降低企业出口退税的有效措施。符合Guidry et al. (1999)表明了奖金导致事业部盈余管理水平的不同，这一发现提供了更多的有洞察力的影响，事业部经理以会计绩效为基础对管理人员的行为进行激励。另外，明确的表明企业的决策者设计降低所得税费用的公司税后业绩会使管理层人员获得更多薪酬的措施来激励事业部经理。

该文章的过程如下：下一节阐述了在这项研究中测试的假设。第三节概述了经验模型和估计程序在测试中使用的一些假说。第四节提供了数据和样本的讨论，包括用于获得所有的用于调查的报酬数据的简要概述。结果列于第五章最后一节提供了一个结论，即关于该研究的局限性的讨论。

II. 假说发展

Newman (1989), Cares and Guffey (2000), and Atwood et al. (1998)调查作为税后盈利企业对首席执行官奖金计划包含变量的选择。这些研究假设，企业有更大的税收筹划的机会，与Antle and Demski (1988)的可控性原则一致，更有可能

使用税后业绩的措施。利用税收筹划的机会代理，这些研究都发现了跨国公司的地位，经营分部的数量，企业规模，首席执行官的报酬和资本密集度呈正相关，Atwood et al. (1998)还提出证据，充分利用这一负相关的选择。

Corporate Tax-Planning Effectiveness: The Role of Compensation-Based

Incentives (Ⅱ)

John D. Phillips University of Connecticut

Dhaliwal et al. (2000) also focuses on the relation between a firm's tax-planning opportunities and the decision whether to use after-tax earnings in CEO bonus plans, but measures planning opportunities using only realized tax credits and absolute values of firms' permanent book-tax differences. They exclude temporary book-tax differences such as those resulting from accelerated tax depreciation because these differences do not impact a firm's after-tax accounting earnings, the performance measure used in after-tax accounting-based bonus plans. Similarly, the ETR used in the current study is computed using total tax expense in the numerator, thereby excluding the effects of

temporary book-tax differences.

Consistent with prior literature, Dhaliwal et al. (2000) find that firms with greater tax credits and absolute values of permanent book-tax differences are more likely to compensate their CEOs on an after-tax basis. Because permanent differences can either increase or decrease taxable income relative to book income, they provide no direct evidence of an association between after-tax CEO compensation and lower ETR. The current study investigates this relation between after-tax CEO compensation and ETR. The first hypothesis, stated in alternative form is:

H1: Using after-tax performance measures in CEO accounting-based bonus plans leads to lower ETR.

This paper also extends the pre- versus after-tax compensation analysis to SBU-manager incentive compensation plans. The need for SBU-manager involvement in tax-planning efforts is consistent with the coordination task that arises when specialists require input and cooperation from non specialists (Milgrom and Roberts 1992). The firm's tax professionals not only need help from the firm's SBU managers in the identification of tax-planning opportunities, but also their cooperation in developing and executing strategies to capitalize on such opportunities.

In the context of lowering the ETR and increasing after-tax accounting income, how do SBU managers participate in efforts that increase tax credits and lead to permanent differences that lower taxable income? Colgate-Palmolive's CFO states that "Colgate man- agers routinely watch for ways to time remittances from overseas [which leads to higher foreign tax credits], maximize research and development tax credits...." (Mintz 1999, 2.) SBU managers can also help tax professionals formulate transfer prices (Ernst & Young 1999), which helps lower the ETR by decreasing (increasing) income reported in countries with tax rates in excess of (lower than) the U.S. tax rate.5 Other examples of SBU-manager involvement that helps lower the ETR include (1) determining whether a potential employee qualifies for a payroll-based tax credit before the hiring decision is made, (2) consulting with the firm's tax professionals prior to domestic location decisions to incorporate varying state and local tax rates as a factor in such decisions, and (3) helping tax professionals gather data necessary to document tax return reporting positions.

The above discussion suggests that SBU-manager involvement is helpful in lowering the ETR. It is possible that the pre- versus after-tax nature of the CEO's