Conceptual conformity of deferred tax accruals: evidence from Germany and the United Kingdom

This article argues that it is more appropriate to model the relation between deferred tax accruals and subsequent tax payments using a first-difference model rather than the levels model employed in the extant literature. We then use the difference model to assess the conceptual conformity of deferred tax accruals by testing if changes therein predict changes in tax payments. Using a combined sample of British and German firms we report conceptual conformity for deferred tax liabilities but not for deferred tax assets. By allowing UK and German firms to have different relations between deferred tax accruals and tax payments, we investigate the impact of country-specific factors, including the taxation system, on this predictive ability. We find conceptual conformity for deferred tax liabilities in both countries but report conceptual conformity for deferred tax assets only for German firms. Finally, we find that the introduction of the Accounting Law Modernization Act (Bilanzrechtsmodernisierungsgesetz (BilMoG)) in Germany in 2010 has brought the relation between changes in deferred tax accruals and changes in future tax payments of German and UK firms much closer together. Currently, the only notable difference between UK and German firms related to deferred tax liabilities pertains to the lag between changes in deferred tax liabilities and changes in tax payments that we attribute to differences in the tax depreciation rates of each country.