Impact of Corporate Governance Attributes on Tax Planning of listed Manufacturing Companies: A Comparative Study between Nigeria and Malaysia

Abstract

The serious decline in the price of crude oil in recent years has led the state government to look for new sources of revenue and becomes strict and aggressive to the assessment and collection of revenue from the existing sources. This study examines the impact of Corporate Governance Attributes on Tax planning of listed manufacturing companies in Nigeria and Malaysia. The corporate governance parameters include board size and CEO tenure while tax planning is proxied by the effective tax rate and firm size as control variable. The objective is to determine if there is a relationship between corporate governance attributes and tax planning which in turn may improve firm performance. The study adopts comparative and ex-post facto research design and will utilise panel data from annual reports and accounts of the listed companies for the period of five years (2014-2018). The Data were analysed using a panel regression technique to assess the effect of the independent variables on the dependent variable. Hausman specification test was conducted to choose between fixed and random effect estimation and the p-value is0.9863 which insignificant. The resultsfrom random effect estimation modelindicates a negative and significant relationship between CEOT, FSIZE and ETR and a positive relationship between BSIZE and ETR.Therefore, the study concludes that corporate governance mechanism plays a significant role in tax planning and Nigerian manufacturing companies pays high tax charges as compare to Malaysian food and beverages companies.