中国会计制度下基于报表数据估算当期所得税费用的误差及其影响

The Estimated Error of Current Income Tax Expense Based on Statement Data under China Accounting Standards and Its Impact

企业所得税问题是财政学、金融学、会计学等学科领域的重要研究方向。企业所得税费用及其构成是学者们构建实证指标时的常用信息。已有研究直接通过财务报表(利润表和资产负债表)估算当期所得税费用,而在中国现行会计制度下,这一估算方法存在误差。为评估误差大小,我们从财务报表附注中手工搜集了2007~2018年所有A股上市公司实际披露的当期所得税费用。经过对比发现,采用财务报表信息估算的当期所得税费用有较大误差。误差金额超过100万元的样本达27%,平均误差金额717万元,占利润总额2.8%。进一步,我们以不同学科下的3个研究主题(企业避税的影响因素、所得税对资本结构的影响、所得税信息的价值相关性)为切入点,考察了上述误差对已有研究的影响。结果显示,修正估计误差后,核心实证指标的信息含量以及实证结论的可靠性均有大幅提升。因此,开展微观企业所得税的实证研究时,了解所得税会计核算及其信息披露规则至关重要。本文结论也适用于其他采用了国际财务报告准则的160多个国家和地区。

Corporate income tax is an important research direction in the fields of public finance,finance and accounting.Corporate income tax expense and its composition are general information when scholars construct empirical indicators.Existing studies have directly used information of financial statements(including income statement and balance sheet)to estimate the current income tax expense of enterprises,however,there are errors in this estimation method under the current accounting system in China.To evaluate the error,we manually collect the actual disclosed current income tax expense of all A-share listed companies from 2007 to 2018 from the notes to the corporate financial statements.Through comparison,it is found that there is an obvious error in the income tax expense estimated by using the information of financial statements.The percentage of samples with an error of more than 1 million accounts for 27%,and the average error amount of total samples is 7.17 million,which accounts for 2.8%of the total profit.Furthermore,we examine the economic consequences of this error by taking three research topics from different disciplines(influencing factors of corporate tax avoidance,impact of income tax on capital structure,and value relevance of income tax information)as the pointcuts.The results show that the information content of core empirical indicators and the reliability of empirical research conclusions are greatly improved after correcting the estimation error.This paper argues that it is very important to understand the income tax accounting and information disclosure rules when carrying out the empirical research on micro enterprise income tax.The conclusions of this paper can also be applied to other 160 countries and regions that have adopted International Financial Reporting Standards.