Not all companies undertake CSR from an ethical point of view. Among the other reasons for undertaking CSR are:

Many companies use CSR as a business strategy for promoting their brand & products, to gain customer & societal acceptance, image building & to distract public attention from their unethical practices by guiding policy debates towards spurious concerns. 

In India, there is yet another reason for undertaking CSR. CSR has been made mandatory by the new companies Act & companies are required to plough back at least 2 per cent of their net profit on upliftment of the society. These norms apply to companies with at least Rs 5 crore net profit or Rs 1,000 crore turnover or Rs 500 crore net worth.

Also, lacking a  CSR strategy can be risky for business in today's milieu considering stakeholder pressures and in some cases, CSR activities are regarded as a kind

of investment or a tool for increasing sales. 

Despite all the motives for CSR mentioned above, I have not yet come across studies or arguments where CSR was undertaken to reduce taxes. One possible reason could be that it would require a huge amount of CSR expenditure to make any tangible differences in taxes which could be obtained by use of other tax planning strategies much more easily.

Adopting a CSR postion for tax avoidance is certainly possible, but may not be a very good tax strategy. For the US specifically, the organization must be a C corporation, and the deduction is limited to 10% of net taxable income (before NOL and the charitable contribution and a few other things). The rest can be carried over for 5 years. See the instructions for Line 19 of IRS Form 1120 for details. From an ethics point of view, I think your clients/customers might feel very deceived to find that a company's CSR policy is based on self-interest rather than the good that comes from giving.   These guys looked at this:

Chun Keung Hoi, Qiang Wu, and Hao Zhang (2013) Is Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) Associated with Tax Avoidance? Evidence from Irresponsible CSR Activities. The Accounting Review: November 2013, Vol. 88, No. 6, pp. 2025-2059.

CSR values can increase the market share of the firm. Hence I believe that it cannot be a hidden agenda for companies to reduce tax

No,I don't think so.There is no such hidden agenda at all.In India,now as per the new Companies Act,2013, the provisions regarding CSR have been specified in detail.Now it is not at all a voluntary excercise,rather it has become mandatory in nature.

In my opinion, CSR can be described as a dual paradigm for both financial and social objectives. Empirical analyses on CSR impact revealed that CSR could be interpreted as an explicit tool for tax reduction and for various shareholders' concern; however, the social and ethical effects of CSR agenda are also significant for corporate performance. 

This question is too general and would be difficult to test. The links between accounting earnings and taxable earnings vary from one country to another based on laws set out in that jurisdiction. If companies wish to reduce tax contributions there are legal and illegal methods of doing so that are unrelated to CSR. Moreover there are a number of reasons why companies might engage in CSR unrelated to taxation. If you tried to run simple associations between proxies then my expectation is that any finding would be spurious and/or there would be a large omitted variable problem. It might be possible to run analysis using sophisticated modelling techniques but you would need to think long and hard about this.

In our course at Manchester http://www.patrickmcnutt.com/blog/bargaining-dispute-resolution-2/ we explored CSR as example of 'business ethics' a  box-ticking exercise  towards good governance, & promoted' ethics in business', eg , measure CSR from an ethical maturity index derived in class as a consultancy tool building on J-curve effect http://www.patrickmcnutt.com/news/governance-and-ethical-maturity-index-2/

The answer is NO.

Thanks for all response Do you evidence to share for us about this case? I just give views like this. Are you sure the Companies don't put CSR cost in their income statement? For example in direct or indirect expense as a part of labor cost for development skills.

There are two aspects of this problem:

1. Corporate donations may reduce tax burden (CIT) - thus may become a kind of a tax shield. However, in that case CSR costs always exceed benefits from the tax shield and must have other purposes. Than CSR costs are not only donations. 

2. CSR may be used by polluting companies as an argument against raising environemntal taxes. It is well known that self-regulation helps postponing or softening regulation introduced by the government. Than this case is not tax evasion - it is lobbying.

regards!

Thanks for your response Anna. its nice views and keep in touch

Its not possible in contemporary scenario, in the developed nations.

Maybe You'll find something interesting in the article:

Lanis R.A., Richardson G.B., Corporate social responsibility and tax aggressiveness: An empirical analysis.

Journal od Accounting and Public Policy, vol. 31, iss. 2, 2012

Best regards!

Dear,

In the current scenario, my opinion is that we are still far from it. From my experience, companies carry out and publicize their social actions as a kind of marking of the "good entrepreneur". Some actually do a great job, but it's the minority.

The study that is in the following link was carried out at a cooperative credit institution, here in Brazil. I invite you to meet.

All the best!

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/287212428_The_Union_Makes_Life_Program_in_the_context_of_social_responsibility_the_contributions_of_Sicredi_Upper_Uruguai

Article The Union Makes Life Program in the context of social respon...

Thanks for Veena nice response. Thanks for Aleksandra with suggest article however could you share me  a full text. Thanks Osmar I will interested if we continue discus next. For you all thanks and keep in touch

yes, its possible to predict but hard to validate.  Ideal would be to conduct mixed research method, may be lucky if you get policy /governance documents that should tell you the tax strategy and objectives. Alternatively you could use the finances and link the variables such as investment in CSR compare with earnings (equity) with ETR and disclosure details etc

Thanks for your views Sangita its very interesting and keep in touch

Edwin,

You may find these articles useful.

Dear Edwin,

I think that in practice it can indeed be possible (e.g. in cases Anna mentioned previously). There are simply many ways to reduce taxes.

However, the other question is whether companies dare to (want to) do this anymore (if they have done this) because of much negative attention and public criticism on tax avoidance and aggressive tax planning...This can cause some serious reputation costs nowadays.

Also a lot of (institutional) investors find responsible tax strategy more and more important, which might also push companies to reconsider whether they want to make use of suspicious tax planning strategies.

However, how CSR is perceived and used is much dependent on the culture (& state) where companies operate. Same counts for tax planning...

prof. Hans Gribnau and also myself have written few pieces on tax planning and CSR (you can find them on our ResearchGate profiles or in SSRN). We also argue that engaging in CSR can have extrinsic and intrinsic motivation, which might be interesting for you to look at. 

Tax planning in the context of CSR and related Corporate Governance issues are the focus of my PhD research. You can contact me if you wish to discuss more on this topic.

Best wishes,

Ave

Thanks for your views Ave and keep in touch

Dear edwin,

Unfortunately I've got only abstract of that article, But I found another one, very similar, and from the same author.

Maybe it will be usefull for You,

Best regards

Any incentive to encourage do a good deed is a passive behavior. There can hide more games than paying direct tax.

The best way to encourage social responsibility is the leaders show social responsibility to influence the general public to give a hand to the needed people. On the other hand, the needed people should know how doing self control without only be a taker without be a giver. Even as simple as showing gratitude, many people do not know how to feedback right. Only can see their greedy and hardly to get satisfied. No matter how good that you treat them.

The bottom line to me is the moral cultivation awaken to let people notice their own responsibility as a member if the family, group, community and country. It is more important to let people do it from their inside instead of from outside pushing or incentive.

yes...agreed. CSR can be help to reduce tax liability and they are using tax credit to gain the CSR too.