Materialidade em auditoria e carga fiscal

Abstract

Given the globalization of commercial trade, the need to evaluate accurately the companies’ financial statements presented to their stakeholders is higher. In that sense, auditing has become an important activity as well as its regulation. The concept of materiality – which is the acceptable level of misstatements that do not influence significatively the financial statements -, has been widely discussed and studied in order to understand the factors that influence it the most. Given that, this dissertation sought to understand if somehow the tax burden that companies face is relevant when auditors determine the materiality. To evaluate this matter, since there is no obligation to disclosure materiality in auditing reports in Portugal contrary to the United Kingdom where the materiality has to be disclosed, an empirical study was made, where a group of the 100 biggest companies from United Kingdom were analyzed, namely their materiality and tax burden, between the years of 2016 and 2021. First, a descriptive analysis of the different companies was made, highlighting the patterns of evolution in each sector and afterwards the relationships between some variables were identified, through three different linear regression models. The main conclusions of the analysis were that tax burden has a significant impact in the dependent variable, being the materiality in the first two models whereas it is the percentage of the benchmark chosen by the auditor to determine materiality in the third model.

Date of Award	13 Dec 2023
Original language	Portuguese
Awarding Institution	Universidade Católica Portuguesa
Supervisor	Ricardo Cunha (Supervisor)