On June 21, 2022, Ken Klassen (University of Waterloo) presented the paper "Tax Aggressive Behavior and Voluntary Tax Disclosures in Corporate Sustainability Reporting" at the TRR 266/TAF Research Seminar. The paper is co-authored work with Jilian R. Adams and Elizabeth Demers (all University of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada).
In this study, the authors analyze determinants of firms’ decisions to disclose tax information and the degree to which they provide a specific type of a tax disclosure: a country by country report. In particular, they focus on two tax measures as potential determinants: the effective tax rate, which is easy to observe, and aggressive international income shifting, which is rather difficult to detect. They show that less tax aggressive firms have greater propensity to voluntarily disclose tax information, while more aggressive tax strategists opt for lower levels of transparency.
Kenneth Klassen is the KPMG Professor of Taxation at the School of Accounting & Finance at the University of Waterloo. His research explores the effects of taxation on the business decisions of corporations. A primary area of inquiry throughout his research career has been multinational tax planning. Ken’s research is published in the premier academic accounting and tax journals in North America. He is the past senior editor of the Journal of the American Taxation Association and is a current editor at Contemporary Accounting Research. Ken is presently ranked 8th on the BYU listing for tax research for all years and all methods.
Professor Klassen holds a B.A. and M.Acc. from the University of Waterloo, and an M.S. in Statistics and PhD in Business from Stanford University. He joined the University of Waterloo in 1994 and spent two years at the University of Georgia in 2006 – 2008. Professor Klassen is the Director of the Waterloo Centre for Taxation in a Global Economy that holds biennial symposia jointly with the University of Texas at Austin. He is the academic member of the CPA Canada Tax Policy Committee that provides a link between the profession and the Canadian government.
