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醫療財團法人的租稅優惠與社區公益服務
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exempt interest and educational research expenditure is higher than that between tax-
exempt interest and uncompensated care services expenditure. This may be due to the fact
that uncompensated care services is free of charge activities. Although such activities can
improve the hospitals’ reputation, the activities will reduce operating earnings and thus are
not conducive to survival in medical market. Besides, the educational research
expenditure is an investment by nature. For example, investments in human resources,
equipment and apparatus can help hospitals improve medical service operation and
quality. Therefore, non-profit hospitals tend to invest more resources in educational
research and reduce uncompensated care services spending. In addition, the regression
results show that tax-exempt interest and community benefit service expenditure are not
significantly correlated, possibly because when a medical juridical person is considered to
be a non-profit hospital, it is not based on community benefit services but on the juridical
person’s characteristics and the percentage of expenditure in revenue (60%), or the fact
that community benefit services are affected by other factors or the total expenditure of
community benefit services is a fixed amount of expense. The regression results of
uncompensated care service expenditure and community benefit service expenditure are
not consistent with the purpose of offering not-for-profit hospitals tax benefits to
encourage them to engage in uncompensated care service activities. Although the
regression results of educational research expenditure are consistent with previous
expectation, the contribution of educational research activities to community health is
indirect and thus is a community benefit service in a broader sense.
4. Research Limitations/Implications
Due to the limits of data structure and variable definition, the limitations of the
empirical results in this paper should be noted. Firstly, both tangible and intangible
benefits of community benefit service were included. The tangible benefits was measured
through price or costs, and intangible external benefits were neglected. Secondly, when
computing the tax-exempt interest, we used the concept of potential tax burden and
overlooked the behavioral change of non-profit hospitals in tax levying. Without tax
benefits, the income of non-profit hospitals would decrease. Because the income effect
could reduce the supply of community benefit services and thus reduce medical costs,
non-profit hospitals’ income might increase, and the tax-exempt interest might also rise.
Therefore, this study might underestimate tax-exempt interest amount. Thirdly, in the
computation of the tax benefit derived from business income tax exemption, we adopted