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207466

The Effect of Audit Committee’s Characteristics on the Audit Report Timeliness: Empirical Evidence from the Uk

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Last updated: 04 Jan 2025

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Abstract

This paper examines the association between the attributes of the audit committees (ACs) and the audit report timeliness for UK FTSE350 companies over the period 2017 to 2019. In particular, we investigate the impact of AC's attributes, namely, independence, gender, financial expertise, activity and size; as prescribed by the UK Corporate Governance code (2018) on the audit report lag (ARL). To this end, we employ the OLS regression with robust standard errors based on 633 firm-year observations. Our results indicate that AC's independence and meeting frequency are associated with a reduction in audit report delay. However, the results also indicate that AC's gender, financial expertise and size do not influence the audit report timeliness. More interestingly, the UK listed companies, which issue their annual reports during the busy reporting period tend to have longer ARL. In contrast, the high audit fees are significantly associated with shorter ARL. Contrary to the propositions of the critical mass theory, additional analysis reveals that high representation of female directors in ACs would deter the financial reporting timeliness, since it is associated with longer ARL. Our results are also robust for alternate measures for ACs' attributes of size, activity and expertise.The findings of our study highlight the importance of ACs, as an internal governance mechanism, in enhancing the timeliness and the quality of companies' financial reporting. It accentuates the role of independent director, as well as the ACs' meeting, in alleviating any disputes and settling any issue that might hinder the external auditors to release timelier audit report. Our findings also direct the attention of the UK regulators to the importance of providing a clearer definition of the financial expertise required by ACs' members. In addition, our results also direct the attention of the UK companies to the importance of choosing the female directors' members in ACs based on their qualification and expertise, rather than their mere representation to satisfy the UK CG recommendation.

DOI

10.21608/acj.2021.207466

Keywords

Audit committees’ attributes, audit report lag, Corporate Governance, FTSE 350, UK

Authors

First Name

Laila Mohamed Alshawdfy

Last Name

Aladwey

MiddleName

-

Affiliation

Accounting, Faculty of commerce, Tanta University

Email

laila.eladawi@commerce.tanta.edu.eg

City

Tanta

Orcid

-

First Name

Adel Hassan

Last Name

Elgharbawy

MiddleName

-

Affiliation

Accounting and Information System Department, College of Business and Economics, Qatar University

Email

adelelgharbawy@gmail.com

City

-

Orcid

-

Volume

58

Article Issue

5

Related Issue

28483

Issue Date

2021-09-01

Receive Date

2021-10-31

Publish Date

2021-11-16

Page Start

231

Page End

272

Print ISSN

2682-4183

Online ISSN

2682-4191

Link

https://acjalexu.journals.ekb.eg/article_207466.html

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https://acjalexu.journals.ekb.eg/service?article_code=207466

Order

7

Type

المقالة الأصلية

Type Code

759

Publication Type

Journal

Publication Title

مجلة جامعة الإسکندرية للعلوم الإدارية

Publication Link

https://acjalexu.journals.ekb.eg/

MainTitle

The Effect of Audit Committee’s Characteristics on the Audit Report Timeliness: Empirical Evidence from the Uk

Details

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Article

Created At

22 Jan 2023