The relationship between business strategy and tax avoidance: The modifying role of financial experts on the audit committee

This study seeks to examine the impact of the financial expertise of audit committee members on the relationship between business strategy and corporate tax avoidance. To assess the type of companies' applied strategy (aggressive or defensive), the Ittner and Larcker (1997) scoring system was used. For this purpose, effective tax rate (ETR) and book tax differences (BTD) were used for assessing tax avoidance and the ratio of financial experts to the number of audit committee members was used to calculate the financial expertise of audit committee members. The sample consists of 154 companies listed in Tehran Stock Exchange during 2015 - 2019. Collected data were analyzed using panel data multivariate regression model. The results showed that audit committee financial experts play only advisory role (tax avoidance promote) for defensive companies. Moreover, results indicate that accounting experts do like role of audit committee financial experts and they don’t play their supervision role in the tax planning for aggressive companies.