Skatten i toppen? : -En studie om styrelse- & ledningsgruppssammansättningens påverkan på företagets skatteplanering

Sammanfattning: Introduction: Taxes result in a big cost for corporations which create an incentive for tax planning. Previous studies have demonstrated that it's the management team and the board of directors that influences to what extent the corporation is going to tax plan. We want to study underlying factors for how the composition of the groups affect the tax planning in a corporation based on four demographic traits; sex, nationality, age and duration. Purpose: The purpose with the study is to explain how the composition of the management team and the board of directors affect the corporations tax planning. Method: The study has a deductive approach where theories about the composition of the board of directors and the management team have been used to derive hypothesis. The empirical material has been collected from Nasdaq OMX Stockholm. Two different measures have been used to calculate the corporations tax planning. Results and Conclusions: The result of the study demonstrates that the composition of both the board of directors and the management team has an effect on corporations tax planning. In the board of directors the proportion of foreign members and the proportion of women had a negative effect on the level of tax planning in the corporation. In the management team the proportion of foreigners had a negative effect on the level of tax planning in the corporation. This study is a contribution to the research on tax planning as it has detected new factors that affect tax planning in corporations.