This study examines the effect of corporate tax enforcement on managerial self-dealing, with a focus on manipulated gifts of insider stock. Prior work suggests that managers employ a variety of manipulative techniques to maximize their personal tax benefits from donating corporate stock, such as strategically timing gifts based on private information and fraudulently backdating gifts to the date with the highest price. Building on prior literature suggesting that the tax authority can discipline managerial misconduct, we hypothesize that IRS scrutiny from a corporate tax audit raises managers' perceived risk of detection, who refrain from making manipulated stock gifts while the firm is under audit. Using a novel, firm-specific measure to identify firms under audit, we find direct evidence that heightened scrutiny from tax enforcement serves as an effective monitoring mechanism and reduces managers' self-dealing behavior.

本研究考察了公司税收执法对管理人员自我交易的影响，重点关注被操纵的内幕股票赠与。先前的工作表明，经理们使用各种操纵技术来最大化他们通过捐赠公司股票获得的个人税收利益，例如根据私人信息战略性地安排礼物时间，以及欺诈性地将礼物回溯到最高价格的日期。基于先前的文献表明税务机关可以惩处管理人员的不当行为，我们假设 IRS 对公司税务审计的审查提高了管理人员的察觉风险，他们在公司接受审计时避免进行操纵的股票赠与。使用一种新颖的、特定于公司的措施来识别受审计的公司，