We examine whether tax audits become more efficient if tax auditors have access to audited financial statements and information about statutory audit adjustments. We extend the standard tax compliance game by a statutory auditor to analyze the strategic interactions among a firm issuing financial and tax reports, a statutory auditor, and a tax auditor. For medium-powered tax auditor incentives and firms that place a high weight on book income, we show that granting the tax auditor access to information on statutory audit adjustments increases firms' tax compliance, raises tax revenues, and decreases tax audit frequency. Thus more information sharing between statutory and tax auditors could be an important but so far overlooked policy instrument to combat tax evasion and increase tax audit efficiency. However, we also highlight the limitations of this approach. The efficiency effect of information sharing turns out to be ambiguous in many constellations and depends on the strength of tax auditor incentives and the weight that firms place on book income.

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This paper examines the relationship between depreciation and future impairment losses.This relationship exists, since impairment losses can only be recognized if the carrying amount of an asset exceeds a certain recoverable amount that can be defined in different ways. Sufficiently large depreciation charges in the beginning of the asset's useful life make it very unlikely that an impairment acutally occurs in future periods. In the context of a multi-period agency model with ex ante long-term investment, and ex post shortterm effort incentives, we will show that this relationship causes a tradeoff during the useful life of the asset. In order to induce efficient investment decisions, the investment cost has to be allocated over future periods according to a specific depreciation schedule. However, those depreciation charges decrease the likelihood that impairment losses will occur in later periods. Therefore the information content of the performance measure will be decreased as well. We apply our result to impairment tests according to IFRS and US-GAAP, the accounting for goodwill, and accounting rules for similar problems.

An insolvency administrator replaces the manager of an insolvent firm to devise and organize a liquidation or reorganization plan in the creditors' interest. In the course of the process, the insolvency administrator presents the most favourable option from his perspective, and the creditors choose to accept or reject this plan. Conflicts of interest arise because the insolvency administrator, as the better-informed party, considers in his proposal liability risks and reputational issues that are beyond the creditors' scope. We model this conflict as a Bayesian game and find that, under those compensation schemes typically used in real-world regulations, optimal creditor satisfaction and efficient decisions concerning the economic future of the insolvent firm will never be achieved simultaneously.