Tax Avoidance: Social Responsibility and the Moderator Role of Family Ownership

The company's most important goal is to maximize shareholder wealth, so balancing social goals with economic concerns (tax costs), which can reduce shareholder wealth, has become an important issue in academic research in recent years, Which has led to the development of a literature on social responsibility and tax avoidance. The purpose of this study is to investigate the effect of social responsibility and family ownership on tax avoidance according to the framework of agency theory and stakeholder theory.  It also examines the role of family ownership in the relationship between social responsibility and tax avoidance. 

In order to test the research hypotheses, 75 companies listed on the Tehran Stock Exchange during the years 2011 to 2019 were examined. To test the research hypotheses, multivariate regression with a combined data model was used. 

The results show that corporate social responsibility has a negative and significant relationship with tax avoidance. Nor does family ownership regulate the relationship between social responsibility and tax avoidance.. 

The existence of corporate social responsibility reduced tax avoidance in the companies under study. The results of this section are consistent with Freeman (1984) Stakeholder Theory, which believes in a two-way relationship between companies and stakeholders. On the one hand, companies must create value for their stakeholders, and since the payment of taxes by companies is in the public interest. Companies that engage in social responsibility activities have not paid their share of taxes and are less inclined to avoid taxes. On the other hand, social responsibility activity is a kind of productive investment and helps to attract investors and in the long run will improve the performance and upgrade the social base of companies. Therefore, it can be said that socially responsible companies will improve their financial performance in the future by paying taxes now.Family ownership was an overlap with social responsibility, but its interaction with social responsibility did not strengthen the link between social responsibility and tax avoidance. The reason for rejecting the second hypothesis can be argued that family-owned companies do not take risks because of their last name, and consider the company's name and reputation as a legacy to be passed on to their children. So, in fact, the concept of reputation has created the overlap of family ownership with social responsibility; therefore, its interaction with the social responsibility variable has not strengthened the relationship between social responsibility and tax avoidance.