Analysis of The Corporate Effective Tax Rate in Brazil: A study focusing on ETR and Current ETR.

Abstract

This study aimed to analyze the effective tax rate of public companies operating in stock market in Brazil over a period between 2003 and 2013, both to the total effective tax rate (ETRt) as the curren (ETRc), seeking to verify evidence of the presence of tax management. This analysis consists of (i) to assess whether average tax burden is upper, equal or less than the statutory rate of 34%; (ii) verify that the ETR suffered influence of RTT adjustments arising from the introduction of IFRS; (iii) identify proxies (size; profitability; inventory; properties, plants and equipment; debt; and deferred tax expenses) which may explain the variation in ETR. The results showed that: (i) companies have a significantly lower ETR than the statutory tax rate; (ii) companies reported a lower ETR on the full adoption of IFRS period; (iii) the ETR has relation to size (negative), debt (positive) and components of assets (positive); and (iv) there are deferral strategies considering the negative sign of deferred taxes in relation to the current ETR. The results confirm the practice of tax management and also demonstrate that the resulting RTT adjustments resulted in a lower tax burden, confirming previous studies that estimated less conservative earnings after the beginning of the convergence process. Finally, we observed that larger companies have a lower tax burden and that in general companies adopt choices that allow the deferral of taxes on income.