Tax Avoidance Practises and Firm-specific Characteristics: Empirical Evidence from the Egyptian Listed Companies

Abstract

Tax avoidance is the companies’ action toward circumventing or mitigate their tax payment in legitimate way. Egypt suffers from higher rate of tax avoidance in the last decade due to a package of local and global events that might affect the financial stability of the Egyptian listed companies. The aim of this study is to assess the main determinants of the tax avoidance practise in the Egyptian context for the period from 2015 to 2018. To this end, the study utilizes the OLS regression with robust standard errors based on 672 firm-year observations. The results reveals that the tax avoidance practise in Egypt is a function of a set of firm-specific factors, namely financial distress, profitability, size and growth opportunities. Specifically, the companies suffering from higher financial distress have bigger tendencies to aggressively conduct their tax planning. Also, the highly profitable companies are more willing to engage in tax avoidance activities. In addition, the bigger the company’s size, the higher motivation toward the tax avoidance practice. Similarly, the more potential growth opportunities companies utilize the higher the impetus to avoid the tax payment. Finally, the study could not find any association between capital intensity nor leverage and tax avoidance.