This study has examined the variability of corporate ETRs for large Malaysian large listed
companies in the new tax regime. Seven accounting variables are used to explain the
relationship between company characteristics and variations in their ETRs. The explanatory
variables are company size, leverage, capital intensity, returns on assets, inventory
intensity, foreign operations and multinational company. The analyses are based on a
balanced panel sample of 294 (1470 firm-years) of Malaysian public listed companies for
the year 2000 to 2004. Fixed and random effects models are used to measure, not only
companies observed heterogeneity, but also unobserved companies heterogeneity, such
as managers’ strategies and tax specific effects that will also affect their ETRs.
The results from this study suggest that the corporate effective tax rates differ considerably
between companies from the same sector and between sectors during the period 2000 to
2004. The average ETRs for all sectors fall below the statutory tax rate of 28%, that is,
20.4% for ETR1 and 22.49% for ETR2. The statistical tests confirmed the variations of
corporate ETRs within and across sectors. This study also found that companies that
paid higher effective taxes are from properties, trading and services and constructions
sectors. Nevertheless, the study found that on average the sample companies experienced
a stable corporate effective tax rates throughout the investigation periods 2000 to 2004,
that is, during the new tax regime.
The empirical results provide a significant and negative relationship between return on
assets (ROA) and ETRs. This indicates that highly profitable companies are able to avoid
tax through the tax incentives or investment in the tax exempt income activities. The study
also found a significant positive relationship between company size and ETRs. Thus, the
positive relationship indicates that larger companies face higher income tax burdens. The
results from a random effects and pooled OLS models provide additional evidence for
leverage and capital intensity. The study found that highly leveraged and highly capital
intensive companies face lower ETRs. Additionally, this study found evidence that
companies use international operations to reduce their income tax burdens. Further, the
statistical results observe that ETR1 measurement which is based on the current tax
expense, seems to provide better results in all specifications. Finally, it is important to
condition for unobserved company heterogeneity in the specifications.
Thus, the empirical results confirmed that Malaysian corporate tax system provides
significant amount of tax incentives to companies. However, the variability in corporate
ETRs indicates that the tax incentives only benefit certain companies. Hence, this
raises issues of inequity and non-neutrality of the present corporate tax system. Further,
the current study provides at least a partial explanation as to the attributes of companies
that systematically avoid taxes while other companies pay their fair share of taxes
during the year 2000 to 2004. Therefore, the findings from this study can provide
important risk assessment tools to tax authorities for tax audit and investigation exercise,
and hopefully may be able to assist the government in designing tax laws that would
minimize undue tax avoidance.
CORPORATE EFFECTIVE TAX RATES: A STUDY ON MALAYSIAN PUBLIC LISTED COMPANIES
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The use of financial data instead of actual tax data to measure the corporate tax liability,
however, limits the results of this study. Since, the findings from this study indicate the
existence of aggressive tax planning activities among the sampled companies; therefore,
future research should examine tax strategies used by large companies in their tax planning.