The following post comes to us from Scott Dyreng of the Accounting Area at Duke University, Jeffrey Hoopes of the Department of Accounting & Management Information Systems at Ohio State University, and Jaron Wilde of the Department of Accounting at the University of Iowa.
In our paper, Public Pressure and Corporate Tax Behavior, which was recently made publicly available on SSRN, we examine whether public scrutiny related to firms’ tax avoidance activities has a significant effect on their tax avoidance behavior. In contrast to U.S. regulations that only require disclosure of significant subsidiaries, the U.K.’s Companies Act of 2006 (“Companies Act”) requires firms to disclose the name and location of all subsidiaries, regardless of size or materiality. Although the U.K. law went into effect in 2006, in 2010, ActionAid International, a global non-profit dedicated to ending poverty worldwide, discovered that approximately half of the firms in the FTSE 100 were not disclosing the name and location of all subsidiaries. ActionAid’s finding was prima facie evidence that the Companies House was not enforcing the subsidiaries disclosure requirement. More importantly, the fact that some firms chose not to comply with the law suggests that the cost of disclosing detailed information on subsidiaries was greater than the benefit of a more complete information environment for the non-compliant firms.