| Abstract [eng] |
The effective corporate tax rate is the percentage of corporate income tax paid by a company on pre-tax profit. Companies with a lower effective corporate tax rate pay less corporate income tax, indicating better tax planning and greater tax efficiency. This study evaluated the financial ratios that influence the effective corporate tax rate of companies in the real estate and consumer discretionary sectors. It was determined by applying multiple linear regression that the effective corporate tax rate of real estate companies is influenced by company size, debt to total assets ratio, return on assets and profit margin. The effective corporate tax rate of companies in the consumer discretionary sector is influenced by company size, inventory to asset ratio, return on equity and profit margin. Classification models have been proposed, allowing to assess, based on the values of financial indicators, whether the effective corporate tax rate of a company is higher or lower than the average effective corporate tax rate of a sector. After comparison of random forests, k-nearest neighbours, neural networks, and support vector machines classifiers, the best classification results were obtained using the random forest method. The accuracy of classifying real estate sector companies was 70,58 %, with a specificity (percentage of correctly classified companies with lower than sector average effective corporate tax rate) of 71,78 %, and a sensitivity (percentage of correctly classified companies with higher than sector average effective corporate tax rate) of 70,02 %. The corresponding indicators for companies in the consumer discretionary sector were: accuracy 67,56 %, specificity 65,33 % and sensitivity 69,48 %. The practical benefit of the proposed models is that a company can assess whether its effective corporate tax rate, based on its financial ratios, is higher or lower than the average effective corporate tax rate of a sector and identify the financial ratios that influence it. With this information, the company can adjust its tax and financial management strategy. |
