This paper reviews and evaluates research about tax information in financial statements. Historically largely overlooked
by both financial accounting and tax researchers, no area of tax research in accounting is presently attracting more
scholarly attention than is accounting for income taxes. Applying skills developed in and questions imported from
mainstream financial accounting research, the empirical studies have concentrated on the role of the tax accounts in
earnings management and the extent to which the market prices the tax information that is contained in the financial
statements.
AFIT studies have been conducted primarily by accounting scholars with expertise in both financial accounting and taxation,
a sufficiently rare combination that has served as a barrier to researching this complex area of financial reporting. We hope that
this review will encourage, expedite, and guide further AFIT study. We also hope that this paper will expose scholars from
finance, economics, law, and other fields to the ongoing AFIT work, interest them in both producing and consuming its
knowledge, and guide them toward questions of interest. We conclude our review with a summary of our findings.
The paper begins with a discussion of four features of AFIT that distinguish it from other financial reporting areas
(all firms pay taxes, an important user of the tax information in the financial statements is an adversary—the taxing
authorities, the tax information can serve as an alternative measure of income, and income tax expense is not a component