This research is designed to investigate factors affecting the book-tax gap in the Tunisian context. Despite the close link between financial and tax accounting in Tunisia, it has been discovered that accounting, and taxation appear to diverge considerably. Regression analysis results highlight that this reporting gap is largely attributable to legal differences between financial and tax accounting as well as to discretionary earning management practices. Noteworthy, the study under takes to examine several factors that constitute the basis on which previously elaborated researches to have been based, and, which appear to be consistent with the present work particular context. Relying on an eight-year database, relevant to the period 2005-2012, the major factors affecting the book tax gap in Tunisia turn out to be profitability, sales growth, discretionary accruals, price to earnings ratio and debt.

The present paper investigates the effect of book-tax differences on the accounting conservatism (as a proxy for financial reporting quality