ABSTRACT

This study investigates the nexus between Chief Executive Officers’ attributes and corporate tax avoidance in selected Sub-Saharan African countries (SSA).

The Ex post facto research design was adopted and secondary data were sourced from the annual reports of 220 listed companies for the period 2009 to 2018. These companies were pooled from the Nairobi Securities Exchange, Nigerian Stock Exchange, and Johannesburg Stock Exchange as at 30^th June, 2019. Corporate tax avoidance was measured using the Henry and Sansing tax measure while the Generalised Method of Moments (GMM) was used to estimate the dynamic models for this study.

Findings from the econometric analyses revealed that CEO gender had a significant relationship with corporate tax avoidance and that female CEOs were associated with higher levels of corporate tax avoidance. A significant relationship was found to exist between the tenure of the CEO and corporate tax avoidance and long tenure CEOs were associated with lower levels of corporate tax avoidance. CEO educational background and corporate tax avoidance did not have a significant relationship while CEO overconfidence had a significant relationship with corporate tax avoidance and overconfident CEOs were associated with lower levels of corporate tax avoidance. Also, corporate governance was found to significantly moderate the relationship between CEO attributes and corporate tax avoidance while corporate tax avoidance was not significantly different in the Sub-Saharan African countries examined. Based on these findings, the study concludes that CEO attributes significantly determine the level of corporate tax avoidance and corporate governance significantly moderates the relationship between CEO attributes and corporate tax avoidance in SSA. The study recommends among others that tax authorities can employ CEO profiling technique based on the variables examined in this study as additional tools to select companies for random tax audits and investigations since the attributes of CEOs were found to significantly relate to corporate tax avoidance.