Thomas C. Omer

Does Company Reputation Matter for Financial Reporting Quality? Evidence from Restatements

In this study, we explore the association between company reputation and the likelihood of a financial statement restatement (i.e., a revealed misstatement). We focus on restatements because they are one of the most visible forms of impaired financial reporting quality, and we suggest that company reputation concerns will influence the reporting process and reduce financial statement misstatements (and ultimately restatements). We proxy for company reputation using measures based on Fortune’s America’s Most Admired Companies List. For a sample of 8,081 observations from 1995 through 2009, we find that companies with higher reputation scores are less likely to misstate their financial statements after controlling for CEO tenure, corporate governance, and audit fees (a proxy for audit effort). In addition, we find that companies with higher reputations have better accruals quality. We also find that company reputation is positively associated with audit fees even after controlling for corporate governance. These results are consistent with company reputation having an important effect on financial reporting quality and with the effect of reputation being distinct from that of corporate governance.

The Influence of a Firm’s Business Strategy on its Tax Aggressiveness

We examine the relation between a firm’s business and tax planning strategies. To identify firms’ business strategies we use a comprehensive measure of business strategy based on the theoretical framework of Miles and Snow (1978, 2003). Specifically, we first investigate whether a firm’s business strategy is associated with its level of tax avoidance. Next, we investigate the association between the firm’s business strategy and the extent to which it avoids tax in an aggressive manner. We find that firms following Miles and Snows’ Prospector (innovation and risk seeking) strategy avoid more taxes than both Defender firms (cost leadership and risk aversion) and firms following a more general (Analyzer) strategy. We find that Prospectors also appear to undertake more aggressive and less sustainable tax positions than Defenders. Thus, our business strategy measure appears not only to capture Prospectors’ taking advantage of tax planning opportunities that result from their innovation strategy, but also reflects their greater willingness to undertake risk and deal with uncertainty.

Understanding Audit Quality: Insights from Audit Professionals and Investors

Projects seeking to define, measure, and evaluate audit quality are on the agendas of auditing standards setters as well as audit firms. The Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (PCAOB) currently provides information regarding audit quality through the release of inspection reports, and the Board intends to establish and report audit quality indicators. To provide additional perspective on audit quality, we obtain auditors’ and investors’ views, definitions, and indicators of audit quality. We find that investors’ definitions of audit quality focus more on inputs to the audit process than do auditors’, and that investors view the number of PCAOB deficiencies as an indicator of overall firm quality. We find a consensus that auditor characteristics may be the most important determinants of audit quality, and that restatements may be the most readily available signal of low audit quality. We relate responses to a general audit quality framework, provide support for archival audit research, and identify additional disclosures that participants suggest could signal audit quality. Taken together, we provide evidence regarding the construct of audit quality in the post-SOX environment, evaluate many of the audit quality indicators proposed by the PCAOB, and suggest avenues for future research. Comprendre la qualit e de l’audit : points de vue de professionnels de l’audit et d’investisseurs

Company reputation and the cost of equity capital

In this study, we investigate whether companies with better reputations enjoy a lower cost of equity financing. Using a sample of 9,276 large U.S. companies from 1987 through 2011 and the reputation rankings from Fortune’s “America’s Most Admired Companies List�?, we find strong evidence that companies with higher reputation scores enjoy a lower cost of equity capital even after controlling for other factors that determine the cost of equity. In addition, we find that the effect of reputation on the cost of equity increases with the degree of information asymmetry, consistent with the reputation rankings providing information about company quality. We also find that changes in reputation are associated with subsequent changes in the company’s investor base, consistent with reputation rankings affecting investor recognition and improving risk sharing. We contribute to the cost of capital literature by identifying a unique determinant of the cost of equity, and to the reputation literature by demonstrating an important benefit that derives from creating and maintaining a high reputation.

Sustainable Tax Strategies and Earnings Persistence

This study examines whether the sustainability of a firm’s tax strategy provides information about the persistence of a firm’s pre-tax earnings and earnings components. We also investigate whether investors are able to determine the sustainability of a firm’s tax strategy and use it as a signal to correctly price the persistence of a firm’s pre-tax earnings and earnings components. Sustainability is an additional dimension of a firm’s tax strategy that focuses on maintaining consistent tax avoidance outcomes over time. Consistent with the sustainability of a firm’s tax strategy providing unique information about earnings persistence and reflecting managers’ expectations of future earnings, we find that firms with more sustainable tax strategies exhibit more persistent pre-tax earnings and earnings components. We also find that investors are able to infer the sustainability of a firm’s tax strategy and use it as a signal to assess the persistence of pre-tax earnings and earnings components.

Determinants and Consequences of Tax Service Provider Choice in the Not-for-Profit Sector

This study examines the determinants and consequences of tax service provider choice among not-for-profit (NFP) organizations. Understanding how clients choose among professional services firms for tax services is important both because of the economic significance of tax service revenues to public accounting firms and because of regulatory changes to the market for tax services following the Sarbanes-Oxley Act. Because public accounting firms compete with law and consulting firms for tax clients, we examine whether factors that influence the organizational structure of professions – client proximity and knowledge availability – influence clients’ decisions to purchase tax services. Using data from the U.S. NFP sector where the decision to purchase tax services is observable for all organizations, we find that NFPs are less likely to retain their auditor for tax services as distance to the auditor and knowledge availability increase. We document that self-preparing NFPs are more likely to misreport executive compensation on their return, and we find no differences in misreporting between auditor and non-auditor paid preparers. Finally, we find that NFPs receive lower donor contributions after changing from paid preparers to self-preparing the Form 990.

Do Director Networks Matter for Financial Reporting Quality? Evidence from Restatements

This study examines the effect of board of director connectedness on financial reporting quality, specifically the misstatement of annual financial statements. Because restatements are costly, it is important to understand whether firms with well-connected directors benefit from better access to the information exchanged through the director network. We examine multiple dimensions of connectedness and find that, after controlling for operating performance and corporate governance characteristics, firms with well-connected directors are less likely to misstate their annual financial statements, even in the presence of a board connection with another misstating firm. In particular, our results indicate that the negative effect on financial reporting quality of board interlocks to misstating firms can be offset by connections to other well-connected directors, by the speed at which directors can access information and by having directors who increase the likelihood of receiving more complete information through the boardroom network. We conduct several tests to address alternative explanations, as well as hold board composition constant to control for endogeneity, and find similar results. Our findings suggest that corporate boards with better-networked directors are less likely to adopt reporting practices that reduce financial reporting quality.

Corporate Transparency, Sustainable Tax Strategies, and Uncertain Tax Activities

We investigate whether the sustainability of firms’ tax strategies is associated with corporate transparency. We expect and find that firms with sustainable tax strategies are associated with more transparent information environments. Prior research shows that transparency is associated with better governance; we expect better governed firms to engage in more sustainable tax strategies and we find that firms with more sustainable tax strategies exhibit significantly higher return on assets, free cash flows and cash flows from operations, and higher Altman’s Z-Scores. We also find that the likelihood of engaging in uncertain tax activities is negatively related to both transparency and tax strategy sustainability. Finally, we find that firms with lower transparency record higher unrecognized tax benefits. These relationships are important because a firm’s degree of transparency significantly affects capital costs and value, and relying on the assumption that tax planning investments lead to more obscure information environments can be costly.

Examining the Association between Tax Risk and Tax Outcomes

This study develops an ex-ante measure of firms’ overall tax risk, allowing us to classify a firm as pursuing a more or less risky tax strategy relative to other firms, and examines the distribution of tax outcomes associated with levels of tax risk. Our study is important because tax practitioners and firms have begun to focus on managing tax risk to improve the expected outcomes of firms’ tax strategies, but researchers have not systematically measured ex-ante tax risk or its association with tax outcomes. Our results indicate that tax risk is negatively associated with future cash effective tax rates; however, the sustainability of a firm’s pretax earnings moderates this association. Relative to other firms, firms with sustainable or unsustainable pretax earnings pay significantly higher taxes for an equal increase in tax risk. Our results imply that firms earn returns for tax risk, but that return depends on nontax considerations.This study develops and validates an ex-ante measure of firm-specific overall tax risk. We define tax risk as the potential that current actions or activities, or the failure to take actions or pursue activities, will lead to future tax outcomes that are different from expectations. Tax risk arises from the interaction of economic risk and tax law uncertainty. An ex-ante measure of firm-specific tax risk allows us to classify firms as pursuing a more or less risky tax strategy relative to other firms. Our study is important because revenue authorities worldwide have increased their scrutiny of firms engaging in risky tax strategies and greater tax risk can impact the economic performance of firms’ investments. Tax practitioners and their clients engage in tax risk management to improve the expected outcomes of firm-specific tax strategies; however, researchers have not measured ex-ante tax risk or its association with tax outcomes. Our results document an association between our measure of tax risk and other measures of firm risk found in both the accounting and finance literatures. We also find a negative association between tax risk and cash effective tax rates, implying that, on average, firms manage tax risk effectively and earn returns (in the form of lower cash taxes paid) for engaging in higher tax risk. Thus, our results contribute to the ongoing discussion of corporate tax avoidance, as well as provide a replicable measure of firm-specific tax risk that researchers can use to examine questions about corporate tax avoidance more broadly.

Assessing Tax Risk: Practitioner Perspectives

This study examines whether the tax risk determinants identified by practitioners are incrementally informative of firms’ tax risk, compared to other measures used by recent research. We develop an empirical estimate of tax risk, relying on insights from managers, practitioners, and revenue authorities to identify firm characteristics and activities that generate tax risk. Our validation tests indicate that our estimate of tax risk is associated with higher UTBs and other firm- and market-based risk measures, lower future cash ETRs, and less persistent ETRs, consistent with our estimate representing firms’ tax risk. Moreover, our practitioner-based tax risk measure has incremental explanatory power for future cash ETRs relative to other tax avoidance and tax risk measures. Consistent with practitioners reacting to the factors that they argue create risk, we also find that auditors charge higher audit fee premiums to firms with greater tax risk. Finally, further tests reveal that our tax risk measure explains a substantial portion of UTBs, after controlling for measures of earnings management. Our results indicate that our practitioner-based tax risk measure represents a different construct from that captured by academic tax avoidance and tax risk measures and is useful for examining manager and practitioner decisions regarding tax risk.