Multinational Tax Avoidance and Anti-Avoidance Enforcement: Firm-level Evidence from Developing ASEAN Countries

We use firm-level data from ASEAN5 to examine the significance of tax-motivated profit shifting by multinational enterprises and to analyze how anti-avoidance measures mitigate the profit shifting. We show that (1) tax-motivated profit shifting is statistically and economically significant, especially for manufacturing firms, (2) auditing and transfer-pricing scrutiny is more effective in reducing profit shifting than documentation requirement alone, and (3) tax-motivated profit shifting is prominent for large firms, while anti-tax avoidance measures result in the absence of profit shifting detected from small manufacturing firms. The findings have important implications for developing countries with weak governance but dependent on MNEs.