关键词: 加计扣除, 盈余管理, 研发投入, 研发效率

Abstract:

Through studying the literature on pretax additional deduction policy in recent years, investigating enterprises and analyzing the information and data from the investigation, this paper found out that companies may use pretax additional deduction policy to manage earnings. According to the literature, investigation and analysis, we proposed two hypothesizes. The first one is that companies would increase the R&D expense after they enjoy the preferential policy and the second one is what we have obtained from our investigation. We found some evidence and get some valuable conclusion through analysis. Firstly, the complexity of R&D makes the possibility for earnings management. During the implement of pretax additional deduction policy, the companies must make their bookkeeping methods standard and employee a person to do this. Due to the complexity of R&D activities, it is difficult to separate the expense into different subjects in practice. Though investigation, we found that the R&D activities would happen with other types of activities in many aspects. For example, some of the salary would belong to the research personnel and we should record this part as R&D expense, but it is difficult for us to know how much should be recorded as R&D expense because the research personnel can also do some other things, such as management, which are not R&D activities. Another example is that the site, where research and development department work, may be shared with other departments, which make it difficult to divide the rent. Secondly, pretax additional deduction policy allows some subjective choices during accounting, which provides the possibility for earnings management. For example, R&D can be separated into two parts: research and development, and the research expense should be expensing and the development expense should be capitalized, but the partition of research and development is decided by the person. Thirdly, the policies about R&D expense were changeable and different, which may cause earnings management. Pretax additional deduction policy enacted in 2008 said that the subject which can enjoy preferential policies must fall in the scope regulated by the New and High Technology Areas with the Government′s Primary Support, but the rules became laxer in 2013. The companies may be not able to follow the change and even make more expense which can be deducted, but the extra expense may be unusable for R&D. Lastly, the inadequate supervision may also cause earnings management. According to the policy in 2008, the companies can only submit the materials when they apply for the privileges and did not have to wait for approval. Companies can decide which expense to be deducted by themselves. According to the previous analysis, we proposed the second hypothesize which is that the companies made more use of the R&D expense to make earnings management after pretax additional deduction policy enacted.In this paper, we do not use the common method to check earnings management. We all know that there are two types of earnings management: real earnings management and the other. The real earnings management is that the companies make earnings management thought changing the production and operation. Although, the type of earnings management is real earnings management, it is difficult to find out through the common model. For example, when the companies increase the R&D expense which is used to research and develop, the administrative expenses can also increase and then the model will fail. So we verify the second hypothesize in two stages. The first is that the change of ROA of the companies decreased after pretax additional deduction policy enacted. We use this method to check whether the companies make earnings management because we think that decreasing the change of ROA is an important goal of the companies when they make earnings management. The second is that the discretionary accruals of the companies decreased after pretax additional deduction policy enacted. According to the previous research, we found that it is difficult to find out real earnings management and if companies can use pretax additional deduction policy to do more real earnings management, they will do less other earnings management. By checking whether the change of ROA of the companies decreased and whether other earnings management decreased, we can find out whether companies do the real earnings management. If the companies do the real earnings management after pretax additional deduction policy enacted, we can draw a conclusion that the companies make earnings management by making more use of R&D expense. In order to verify the hypothesizes, we make some empirical analysis. This paper tested the effectiveness of pretax additional deduction policy by using the methods of double difference and sectional study. The research objects we chose are pretax additional deduction policy enacted in 2008 and expanding the deduction range in 2013 promulgated by the ministry of finance. This paper chose the listed companies which were high-tech enterprises during 2006 and 2014 as the test group, and chose the list companies which were not high-tech enterprises during 2006 and 2014 as the control group.The research showed that (1) after pretax additional deduction policy enacted ,compared to the controlled group, the R&D expense of the test group increased significantly, which showed that the policy facilitates the investment of R&D; (2) the policy had no significant effect on the improvement of the R&D efficiency; (3) compared to the controlled group, the change of ROA and the discretionary accruals of the test group decreased significantly, which implied that after the implementation of the policy, the enterprises had used the policy to achieve the purpose of smoothing the profit instead of using accrual earnings management, a noticeable earnings management method.At last, this paper made some suggestion that the government should consider the characteristics of industries, increase the enforcement and transparency of the policy. From the perspective of earnings management, this paper provided new literature and data on the effect of pretax additional deduction policy implementation to R&D efficiency.

Key words: pretax additional deduction, earnings management, R&D investment, R&D efficiency