Tax Avoidance and Asymmetric Costs Behavior

The purpose of the current study is to investigate the relationship between tax avoidance and asymmetric costs. Generally, shareholders expect managers to pursue their personal interests, so they attempt to reduce tax liabilities and tax avoidance because of the additional benefits of reducing contingent liabilities are more than the expected additional costs. Managers of a company often face issues such as planning and control of the business. In the planning stage, managers need costs information to predict future costs. Since changes in future costs can be determined based on the sales revenue changes, the amount of spending and costs can be predicted based on their relations with this factor. The results of hypotheses testing of 112 listed companies on the Tehran Stock Exchange during 2006-2015 showed that tax avoidance has a positive and significant relationship with the costs changes at the time of falling sales. In addition, when there is a fluctuation in cash flows, tax avoidance has a negative and significant relationship with costs changes.