A sizeable portion of US research has tried to assess the ‘fairness’ of the corporate income tax
system, that is: are companies treated in a non-discriminatory way under the corporate income
tax system. Similar research has, however, never taken place in the Netherlands. The goal of this
paper is to address this shortcoming. This paper examines whether an association can be found
between the variation in average effective tax rates (ETRs) among Dutch companies and
company characteristics such as size, asset mix, extent of foreign operations, performance,
leverage, being a public company and being a listed company. Controls are used for net
operating loss status, negative tax expense status, and interaction between firm size and net
operating loss status and negative tax expense status. The results in the paper are based on an
analysis of a pooled panel of company-level data from financial statements in the CD-ROM
REACH A datafile for five years, 1994 to 1998. In this paper two financial statement based ETR
measures are used. One ETR measure is based on income before taxes and another ETR measure
is based on cash flow. Results from a fixed effects generalised linear model provide support for
the conclusion that, after controlling for indirect effects, the taxation of corporate profits in the
Netherlands is fairly neutral. These results are supported by additional sensitivity analysis.