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The research aims to investigate the moderating role of secrecy culture on the effect of tax enforcement on the likelihood that private firms hire external auditors.

The study generates more than 70,000 observations from 83 country-years from the World Bank Enterprise Survey 2018 dataset. Because the study focuses on private firms in emerging countries, data on publicly listed firms and firms from OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) countries are deleted. The secrecy culture data are generated from Hofstede's website. The data are then analyzed with logit analyses because the dependent variable is binary.

The results demonstrate that tax enforcement increases the likelihood that private firms hire external auditors. Further, secrecy culture weakens the relationship between tax enforcement and audit demand.

Governments in emerging countries need to encourage private firms to hire external auditors by intensifying tax enforcement because private firms often do not appreciate the importance of high-quality financial statements. However, secretive national culture may reduce tax enforcement's effectiveness in motivating private firms to hire external auditors. Hence, governments of highly secretive countries need to address this issue and find alternative ways to promote audited financial statements.

Audit demand of private firms in emerging countries is relatively understudied, especially concerning tax enforcement. Furthermore, the research also focuses on the moderating role of national culture (secrecy) in explaining the relationship between tax enforcement and audit demand.

The study aims to empirically analyze the effects of the presence of female top managers and owners on corporate tax compliance.

Data for analysis were sourced from the World Bank Enterprise Surveys that involved 23,178 private firms in 98 countries. The surveys used a stratified random sampling method by using three criteria, namely, firm size, business sector and geographic region, within each country. Further, data are analyzed using the ordinal logistic regression and supported by the marginal effect analysis.

The results show that the presence of female top managers and owners is a significant factor that underlies the firm-level tax compliance difference when firms exhibit relatively lower compliance.

Although this study shows that the determinants of corporate tax compliance are very complex, there are also crucial roles of top managers and owners' gender. This study advises firms to use the gender equality strategy to generate the best human capital, especially in their top management levels. Besides, this study can be helpful in designing policies that facilitate women to reach top managerial levels or to own businesses as an alternative method to enhance tax compliance for developing countries that fail to generate optimal corporate income tax revenues.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, no previous studies examine the effects of the presence of female top managers and business owners on firms’ tax compliance policies. This study contributes to extend the understanding of the important role of women in corporate strategic decision-making, especially in taxation policies in various developing countries.