國際會計準則委員會(IASB)與美國財務會計委員會(FASB)希望停止使用穩健原則而改採中立原則取代之。但企業之所以採取穩健的會計處理是基於建立投資者與債權人對企業的信心,以及減少營運成本。Watts (2003, 2005)指出節稅的動機促使企業選用穩健的財務報導。穩健原則在租稅構面上具有降低課稅所得與反應財稅差異之功能,其主要為有利於減輕企業的租稅負擔。 本文主要在探討租稅動機的穩健原則與所得之關係。本文以1998年至2007年台灣上市公司為研究對象,採用Basu (1997)的盈餘-報酬模型,用以比較財務所得與課稅所得在穩健處理之差異,且使用淨值-市價模型(Qiang, 2007)衡量穩健水準以驗證稅負成本是否為影響非條件穩健之因數。結果顯示平均而言(1)公司傾向使用條件穩健處理降低財務所得;(2)公司傾向使用非條件穩健處理降低課稅所得;(3)在觀察期間發現公司平均採用不穩健的會計環境下,稅負成本會顯著影響非條件穩健水準,但二者呈現負向關係。因此根據上述研究結果,租稅構面為引發公司傾向採用穩健會計之動機,與Watts (2003)之結論一致。
The recent joint project of the IASB and the FASB concludes that conservatism should be excluded from the qualitative characteristics of accounting and be replaced with neutrality. Watts (2003a) indicates that a place for conservatism in financial accounting and reporting, because business and economic activities are surrounded by uncertainty, which result in asymmetries in information and loss functions among the investors and the creditors, and reduce the expenditures. One of the demands for conservative accounting results from the taxation (Watts, 2003 and 2005). Accounting conservatism consists of conditional and unconditional conservatism (Beaver and Ryan, 2005). They employ influence on reducing taxable income and reflecting book-tax differences in order to tax savings. The main purpose of this paper is to discuss the relationship between tax-motivated conservatism and income. We examine Taiwan’s listed companies for the sample period of 1998-2007, and based on regression model by Basu (1997) and Qiang (2007). Our empirical results indicate that (1) the increase in the timeliness of book income over taxable income is greater for negative returns than positive; (2) regarding the intercept in the taxable income regression to be positive and to be lower than intercept on book income; and (3) taxation will affect unconditional conservatism. Therefore, our findings are consistent with Watts’s (2003a) views that taxation is one of demand for conservative accounting.