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Temporary differences
Temporary differences are differences in the tax and book bases of assets and liabilities. These differences in bases result in taxable or deductible amounts in future years when the asset is recovered or the liability is settled. Consider, for example, the book and tax treatment of property, plant and equipment. Often the basis of property, plant and equipment is lower under tax rules than under GAAP because the tax laws mandate faster depreciation. Thus, GAAP will report higher assets and higher income than will the tax laws. Taxes remitted to the government will be lower early in an asset’s life due to the accelerated depreciation, but will be higher in future years, once the asset is fully depreciated for tax purposes but is still depreciating for book purposes. Thus, a liability is reported on the company’s GAAP balance sheet that measures the amount of the future tax liability that will be owed when the book depreciation becomes greater than the tax depreciation. This liability is called the deferred tax liability (DTL).
Likewise, companies will often report a deferred tax asset balance. Consider, for example, the treatment of bad debts坏帐. GAAP rules set up an allowance account (thus reducing the basis of the accounts receivable balance) while tax law does not. Thus, assets (and income) will be lower for financial reporting purposes than for tax purposes. Taxes remitted to the government will be higher this year, but will be lower in a future year when the bad debt is written off for tax purposes. Thus, on the balance sheet of the company, a tax asset is included that measures the amount of future tax benefit that will be available when the same bad debts that were expensed under GAAP this year are deducted for tax purposes in a future year.
An important consideration under GAAP, when recording any asset, relates to the probability of recoverability of the asset. Under GAAP, when a firm records a deferred tax asset, it must also assess its recoverability. If it is more likely than not that the asset will not be recovered, then the firm must reduce the net asset balance. In the case of the DTA, the net asset balance is reduced by recording a valuation allowancethat offsets the DTA balance. For example, if a company recorded a $1,000 deferred tax asset, but believes that it will only benefit by $700, then it will record a valuation allowance of $300. It is important to note that the offset to the creation of the valuation allowance runs through tax expense (and thus net income). Thus, in the preceding example, the creation of the $300 valuation allowance account would increase income tax expense and thus reduce net income by $300.#p#分页标题#e#
The tax footnotes in the financial statements are the best source of detailed information about temporary differences. Examining Fortune 50 firms from 1993 to 2007, Raedy et al. (2011) find that the number of accounts listed on the statement of deferred tax positions ranges from two to 28. Using similar data, Poterba et al. (2011) find that more companies have net DTLs than have net DTAs, and depreciation is the largest source of temporary differences. For some companies, the deferred accounts are very large, e.g., in 2004, 29% of the net-DTL companies had net DTLs that exceeded 5% of total assets. The largest DTL (DTA) is property, plant and equipment (other assets). The mean valuation allowance balance suggests that a majority of DTAs are not expected to provide a tax benefit.

Permanent differences
Whereas temporary differences arise because there are differences in when certain transactions are included on the balance sheet and income statement, other differences do not arise from timing issues, but rather are permanent in nature. For example, municipal bond interest is not taxed but is included in revenue for book purposes. Consequently, permanent differences do not create deferred tax assets or liabilities. Instead, permanent differences cause effective tax rates (income tax expense divided by pretax income) to differ from the statutory tax rates. For example, municipal bond interest is included in pretax income, but no tax expense is recorded. Thus, earning municipal bond interest results in a lower effective tax rate (ETR).
The tax footnotes of the financial statements provide information about permanent differences through a reconciliation of the effective tax rate to the federal statutory tax rate. All significant reconciling items must be disclosed. The governing principal (SEC Regulation S-X Rule 4-08(h)) http://www.ukthesis.org/dissertation_writing/Accounting/ defines significant as 5% of the statutory rate (1.75% for a 35% statutory tax rate). This high threshold typically results in disclosure of only a handful of permanent differences for any given firm-year. Permanent book-tax differences are not the only items that affect the reconciliation of the ETR to the federal statutory rate. For example, state and foreign taxes also cause the ETR of a company to differ from the U.S. federal rate. In fact, in their examination of the rate reconciliations of the Fortune 250 from 1993 to 2007, Raedy et al. (2011) find that the largest reconciling items are foreign and state taxes.
Unlike Poterba et al. (2011) and Raedy et al. (2011), who examine hand-collected data from the tax footnotes, most studies use computer-readable databases, which enable them to examine larger samples but prevent them from identifying the specific temporary and permanent BTDs. Thus, most studies tend to examine aggregations of temporary and permanent BTDs. Among other findings, they report that BTDs are disproportionately concentrated among the largest companies (Mills et al., 2002), and greater in the financial and information industries (Plesko, 2002). Furthermore, the determinants of BTDs include tax planning, earnings management behavior, and changes in financial accounting rules (Seidman, 2010), as well as changes in firm-level sales and the level of property, plant and equipment in a given firm (Manzon and Plesko, 2002).#p#分页标题#e#

Future research in earnings management
To summarize, a consistent pattern emerges from the extant research on earnings management: Firms use the tax accounts to manage earnings to meet analysts’ forecasts but not to manage towards other goals. Although this field has reached some maturity, a number of issues remain unresolved. The remainder of this section highlights eight unresolved research questions.

First, it is somewhat unclear why managers would not use the tax accounts to meet or beat prior earnings. In the survey by Graham et al. (2005), managers report that prior period earnings are an important benchmark. It is worth noting, however, that while 85.1% of surveyed executives indicated that EPS from the same quarter in the prior year is an important benchmark, only 54.2% responded that previous quarter EPS was an important benchmark. Thus, does the lack of research consensus about whether managers use the tax accounts to meet or beat prior earnings stem from which measure of prior earnings is used as the benchmark? Both Bauman et al. (2001) and Frank and Rego (2006) use prior year earnings as the benchmark and find no result consistent with this type of earnings management in the VA account. However, Schrand and Wong (2003) find that the valuation allowance is used as hypothesized when they define the prior earnings benchmark as the three-year historical average. In addition, Gupta and Laux (2008) find that tax cushion reversals are used to meet or beat prior earnings when they define prior earnings as earnings from the same quarter, one year previous. A related question is: Why do managers not exploit the subjectivity in the tax accounts to facilitate big baths?

Second, while Gupta et al. (2010) conclude that managers are not using the tax contingency to meet or beat analysts’ earnings forecasts, Cazier et al. (2010) conclude the opposite. Some resolution of this issue is required. Furthermore, Gupta et al. (2010) argue that the increased disclosures that are required under FIN 48 have decreased the use of the tax cushion to manage earnings. Does this mean that firms are now using the other approaches to manipulate the tax expense line item more, or has total management of the tax expense decreased?
Third, we have very little information related to whether and how the users of the financial statements ‘‘see through’’ the earnings management of the tax accounts. Do analysts and the market see through this manipulation? How effectively do the taxing authorities use what is reported in the tax accounts to assess the tax situation of the firm?

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