The Relationship Between Tax Avoidance and the Corporate Transparency in the Institutional Environmental and Accounting Information: The Case of Korea

Since the 1997, financial crisis in Korea, the problems of K orean corporations have been intensively emphasized, resulting in the devaluation of Korean firms in international capital markets. This study focuses on the transparency, The empirical results show that the relationship between corporate transparency and tax avoidance level is negative. This finding supports that companies consider various non-tax costs arising from tax avoidance in addition to tax costs when determining the optimal tax avoidance level. Specifically, firms with high corporate transparency are passive in tax avoidance because of the burden of various non-tax costs such as reputation risk caused by tax avoidance rather than the effect of reducing agent cost. This study sought to evaluate the effectiveness of tax avoidance with regard to tax costs and various non-tax costs with regard to all costs as suggested by Scholes.