Corporate Social Responsibility,Outside Directors And Tax Aggressiveness

As the cases in which Chinese enterprises are judged to be in violation of tax laws increase year by year,how to actively adjust tax aggressiveness to avoid reaching the boundary of tax laws and avoid corporate tax risks has gradually become the focus of domestic scholars.At present,foreign research has widely believed that managers will consider the impact of corporate social responsibility when making tax aggressiveness decisions;and begin to pay attention to the role of outside directors in strategic support when managers balance the relationship between corporate social responsibility and corporate tax aggressiveness.Domestic scholars’ research on the relationship between corporate social responsibility and corporate tax aggressiveness has only just begun,and little attention has been paid to the role of outside directors in regulating the relationship between the two.Analyzing the concept of tax aggressiveness,this thesis attempts to explore the relationship between corporate social responsibility,outside directors and tax aggressiveness,which is of great significance for the prevention of tax risks.Based on the research framework of stakeholder theory,social contract theory and risk management theory,this thesis analyzes the relationship between corporate social responsibility,outside directors and corporate tax aggressiveness,and uses Chinese A-shares listed companies in 2011-2017 as a research sample,and then constructs an empirical research model and uses regression analysis to conduct data testing.The research finds that:(1)the higher degree of fulfilling social responsibility,the more enterprises tend to reduce tax aggressiveness;(2)outside directors will influence the relationship between corporate social responsibility and tax aggressiveness as a moderating variable.When outside directors account for a significant proportion of the board of directors,the suppression of tax aggressiveness by corporate social responsibility is weakened.Then,the thesis divides the sample into a high-tax aggressiveness group and a low-tax aggressiveness group for regression analysis.It finds that the weakening effect of outside directors on the relationship between corporate social responsibility and tax aggressiveness is more prominent when the degree of tax aggressiveness is low,outside directors no longer weaken the negative correlation between corporate social responsibility and corporate tax aggressiveness when the degree of tax aggressiveness is high.Furthermore,this thesis studies the impact of ownership and industry difference on corporate social responsibility,outside directors and tax aggressiveness.The empirical results show that for both state-owned companies and private-owned companies,and for industries with good social responsibility performance,their corporate social responsibility has a negative correlation with corporate tax aggressiveness.For the moderating role of outside directors,outside directors in state-owned enterprises,information technology industry and wholesale and retail industry have weakened the relationship between corporate social responsibility and tax aggressiveness.Outside directors of private-owned enterprises and other industries have no obvious moderating effect.The conclusions of this thesis confirm that corporate social responsibility can effectively curb corporate tax aggressiveness,but when the tax aggressiveness are not high,the outside directors will weaken the negative correlation between corporate social responsibility and tax aggressiveness.The conclusions of the study remind Chinese enterprises to strengthen the implementation of social responsibility and the construction of outside director system to control corporate tax risks,and also help Chinese tax departments to identify key enterprises for tax surveillance.