The Effect of Audit Quality, Financial Reporting Aggressiveness and Tax Aggressiveness on the Cost of Debt in Southeast Asia

Abstract

This study aims to analyze the effect of audit quality, financial reporting aggressiveness and tax aggressiveness on the cost of debt (study on Southeast Asian pharmaceutical companies). This research is interesting to study where different with other research of this research uses a sample of pharmaceutical companies in Southeast Asia and the period is before and after covid where pharmaceutical companies are an industrial sector that have a lot of profits when other industrial sectors have loss profit. The population in this study is a pharmaceutical company in 2018 - 2021. Determination of the research sample uses the purposive sampling method. Which sample there are 101 (There are 22 firm form Indonesia, 12 firm form Philippines, 23 firm form Malaysia, 21 firm form Singapore, 10 firm from Thailand and 13 firm form Vietnam).   The results of this study The results indicate that the significance value of the Audit Quality variable is below 0.05 and the beta value is negative. The results that the significance value of the aggressiveness of financial reporting variable shows that the significant value is less than 0.05 with a positive beta value. The results show that the value of tax aggressiveness shows that the value of sig. below 0.05 with a positive Beta value. It can be concluded that tax aggressiveness has a significant effect on the cost of debt (study of Southeast Asian pharmaceutical companies). Conclution is the financial reporting aggressiveness variable has a significant effect on the cost of debt, the greater the earnings management policy is carried out, the greater the company's debt costs so need the special focus from government to management cuase it relate with tax.