1. Introduction
The financial accounting consequences of tax-reporting decisions are of first-order importance.
Numerous papers have documented the importance of the effect of a tax-reporting
decision on a firm’s financial accounting earnings in understanding firm behavior, as
reviewed by Shackelford and Shevlin (2001) and Hanlon and Heitzman (2010). We investigate
two related issues in this study. First, we ask why managers focus on the financial
accounting consequences instead of the cash flow consequences of tax-reporting decisions.
Second, we compare two accounting measures—one based on cash taxes paid (CTP) and
the other based on the liability for unrecognized tax benefits (UTB)—to determine which
accounting measure will better reflect differences in tax aggressiveness across firms