The Impact of IFRS/IAS Adoption on Corporate Income Taxation in Ghana

Abstract

Studies in a multiplicity of reporting jurisdictions worldwide have revealed considerable divergence in the impact of IFRS/IAS adoption on taxation. There is minimal empirical study on the tax impacts or effects of reporting entities following the transition from GNAS to IFRS by Ghanaian listed companies. The study therefore investigates the changes to corporate taxes, deferred tax and net tax assets (liabilities) using a sample of entities from the Ghana Stock Exchange over the period 2007 / 2006 to 2008 / 2007 which encompasses the move from GNAS to IFRS, particularly IAS 12.The research design was predominately quantitative in nature and cross-sectional in approach. The population for the study was all companies’ listed (42 companies) on the Ghana Stock Exchange (GSE) as at December 2015. The study used a sample of 22 listed entities after deducting invalid search results, companies that previously did not use GNAS as well as not using Ghana Cedis as their currencies, delisted entities since 2007 and free zone entities.The adoption of IFRS/IAS led to a few more listed companies paying less taxes and majority not having any changes in their tax burdens following the restatement of accounts from GNAS into IFRS/IAS. Overall, the paired sample t-test of GNAS and IFRS on reported tax amounts showed no differences between IFRS and GNAS computed amounts. Largely, 90.1% of firms observed did not report any changes to current tax assets. Whiles 94.5%, 86.4% and 59.1% of observations reported negative changes in deferred tax assets, current tax liabilities and deferred tax liabilities respectively. In terms of industry sectors, the manufacturing / trading industry saw a positive change of 13% in current year tax expenses burden whiles the financial / insurance / information technology industry reported a decrease of 13.3% in current year tax expenses liability.A further and in-depth longitudinal study could be done to study the trend of tax burdens as well as the pattern of effective tax rates of listed companies since the adoption of IFRS/IAS in Ghana since this one provide mixed impacts.