• Management & Information Systems Review
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• v.29 no.1
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• pp.79-96
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• 2010

The purpose of this study is to investigate factors that affect corporate CEOs' tax avoidance, ultimately helping find how to fundamentally prevent the avoidance, establish a tax system that ensures tax payers' compliance and revise tax laws and regulations in a positive way. For the purpose, this researcher surveyed corporate CEOs with a questionnaire that contained many questions of various types, which was developed based on previous studies. Findings of the study can be summarized as follows. Main factors affecting tax avoidance were the application of tax provisions, the ability to understand tax laws and the expectation of tax avoidance. The more corporate CEOs' were influenced by the first and the third factors, the higher their propensity for tax avoidance was. On the contrast, corporate CEOs were lower in propensity for tax avoidance when they were more able to understand tax laws. Regarding the three factors' relative influences, tax avoidance was most affected by the expectation of tax avoidance, followed by the ability to understand tax laws and the application of tax provisions in order. Meanwhile, a multi-regression analysis using the sequential deletion technique showed that tax avoidance were affected by the application of tax provisions and the expectation of tax avoidance and that tax avoidance was most influenced by the application of tax provisions, followed by the expectation of tax avoidance. These findings indicate that the degree of corporate CEOs' tax avoidance may vary depending on social and environmental changes that their business face. Meanwhile, positive factors such as tax-bearing capacity and the procedure of tax calculation and negative factors such as management ethics and tax authorities' regulation are all thought to be not helping prevent tax avoidance.