We investigate whether mandating the disclosure of qualitative tax information affects cor-porations’ ability to engage in aggressive tax planning. Reducing tax avoidance of multina-tional enterprises (MNEs) has become the subject of intense public debate in the last dec-ade. As a potential countermeasure, increased tax transparency has recently emerged as an effective policy tool to fight base erosion and profit shifting. However, not all types of tax information, which corporations are requested to disclose, might have an impact on their tax planning. Using the UK setting, we first analyze the association between voluntary disclo-sure of qualitative tax information and tax aggressiveness and we document a negative rela-tion. Secondly, treating the introduction of mandatory tax strategy reports for large UK cor-porations as an exogenous shock to public disclosure requirements, we study the effect of mandating qualitative tax disclosure on corporate tax aggressiveness. Our results suggest that such policy tools do not significantly affect the level of a corporation’s aggressive tax planning.
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