The impact of corporate governance and ownership structure on audit report lag : evidence from Malaysia

Abstract

Timeliness is an essential characteristic of financial reporting to promote investors’ confidence in the capital market and to enable them to make decisions. The delay in releasing the annual financial report, which is highly influenced by the length of the audit process, would make the financial information less useful as it has lost its relevancy. In addition, a new regulation on shortening the timeframe for the issuance of annual reports which was proposed by Bursa Malaysia triggers the idea of this study to extend the literature on audit report lag. Thus, the main objective of this study is to examine the impact of corporate governance mechanisms and ownership structures on audit report lag among Malaysia’s listed companies. The audit report lag is measured based on the number of days between the date of financial year end to the date of auditor report. The corporate governance mechanisms consists of board multiple directorships, audit committee size, audit committee meetings, and audit committee qualifications. Meanwhile, the types of ownership structures are managerial ownership, government ownership and foreign ownership. The resource dependence theory and agency theory are applied to explain the framework of this study and tested on the sample of 243 Malaysian listed companies for the financial year ended 2012. The results show that boards with multiple directorships, government ownership, auditor type, audit opinion and firm performance have significant negative associations with audit report lag, while audit committee meeting is found to be positively significant with audit report lag. However, the other four variables (managerial ownership, foreign ownership, and audit committee size and audit committee qualification) are found to have insignificant relationships with audit report lag.