We examine whether companies voluntarily disclose additional information about tax loss carryforwards when the recoverability is more uncertain. With this study, we aim to explain part of the huge cross-sectional variation in the tax footnote. To assess disclosure behavior, we hand collect data from notes of large German firms' IFRS financial statements and identify voluntarily disclosed information beyond the requirements of IAS 12. We find that uncertainty about the usability of tax losses has a significantly negative relation to the amount and quality of disclosure, controlling for other disclosure determinants derived from prior literature. These findings are robust for several indicators representing information and income uncertainty. Our findings suggest that managers anticipate the investors' need for more private information and disclose them voluntarily to send a signal of credibility to the market participants. It can be assumed that disclosing this information is less costly than facing potential risk premiums demanded by investors leading to higher cost of capital. This result indicates that part of the cross-sectional variation in the tax footnote can be explained by differing expectations to use the tax losses.
Acknowledgements: We thank the participants of the 2013 arqus Doctoral Workshop and participants at the 2018 European Accounting Association conference for their valuable comments on an earlier version of this paper. We are grateful to the Baetge research team for sharing the annual report quality data and thank Fabian Peitz and Isis Swoboda for excellent research assistance. We gratefully acknowledge funding provided by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation)-Project-ID 403041268-TRR 266.
This study examines GAAP effective tax rate (ETR) visibility as a distinct disclosure choice in firms' financial statements. By applying a game-theory disclosure model for the voluntary disclosure strategies of firms, in a tax setting, we argue that firms face a trade-off in their ETR disclosure decisions. On the one hand, firms have an incentive to enhance their ETR disclosure when the ratio offers shareholders 'favourable conditions', for example, higher expected after-tax cash flows. On the other hand, the disclosure of a favourable low ETR could attract the attention of tax auditors and the public and ultimately result in disclosure costs. We empirically test disclosure behaviour by examining the relation between disclosure visibility and different ETR conditions that reflect different stakeholder-specific costs and benefits. While we find that unfavourable ETR conditions are not highlighted, we observe higher disclosure visibility for favourable ETRs (smooth, close to the industry average, and decreasing ETRs). Additional analyses reveal that this high visibility is characteristic of firm years with only moderately decreasing ETRs at usual ETR levels, while extreme ETRs are not highlighted. Interestingly and in contrast to our main results, a subsample of family firms does not seem to highlight favourable ETRs.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.