Managerial Ethics for Tax Transparency: Findings in Chilean Companies

Background: The OECD has reported that companies that represent 83% of the market capitalization in Latin America maintain the trend of disclosing information on sustainability, with Chilean companies ranking first for the 2021 period. Thus, these sustainability standards constitute positive aspects to consider for organizational ethical development, with the aim that ethics fulfills the function of being a first preventive barrier, especially in sensitive areas such as tax transparency. Objective: This study reveals the current trend on organizational ethical development in the tax field, based on interviews with the tax teams of 30 Chilean companies with the highest market capitalization published in the period 2021, allowing evidence of their ethical behavior in relation to good tax practices. Method: The methodology includes a sample of 51 interviews of people who make up the tax teams of 30 Chilean companies with the highest market capitalization, allowing differences between several groups of variables to be detected using the Chi square test. Results & Conclusion: The results show that despite the high commitment of the respondents to tax compliance and good practices in tax transparency, only 33% of them declare that they know the tax sustainability standards at an expert level, corresponding to the segment of people over 40 years of age and with a master's degree. Likewise, only 41% of those surveyed declare that they have participated in the disclosure of the company's tax strategies. On the other hand, the results confirm that although a high percentage of those surveyed believe that a robust organizational ethical strategy prevents and minimizes situations of tax avoidance or evasion, 63% of them estimate that it is still necessary for companies to continue advancing in higher quality standards of ethics in compliance with tax obligations.