Abstract:

This study aims to investigate the factors that influence auditor report timeliness, which is the time it takes external auditors to release the audit report from the closing date of financial statements. The study provides empirical evidence from six GCC (Bahrain, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates) for a period of ten years from 2012 to 2021 and covers 590 companies with 5900 firm observations. This study, to the finest of the knowledge of the researcher, covers a new geographical area (GCC) with different variables over a period of 10 years. Data has been collected from the Thomson Reuters, the annual reports, and the corporate governance reports.

The auditing firm, corporation, and governance practices elements influencing auditor report timeliness were studied using a descriptive research design. Specifically, it investigates the effect of board characteristics, such as independence, size, and role duality, as well as ownership structure such as institutional ownership and governmental ownership, in addition to the type of audit firms, on the audit report timeliness. A Multiple regression model was created to examine the influence of the specified internal and external corporate governance factors on the timeliness of audit reports.

The findings reveal that board size and the proportion of independent directors are significant and negatively associated with audit report timeliness. Furthermore, governmental ownership is positively and highly significantly related with audit delay, implying that the higher the amount of government ownership, the more time auditors spend on the job to finalize the audit report However, the institutional ownership’s coefficient is negative and have a significant association with the audit delay. Additionally, findings show that that audit firm type is not significant to audit report timeliness. Subsequently, this study could give insight to different financial users and stakeholders on the factors effecting the audit report timeliness.

Keywords: audit report timeliness, board size, board independence, governmental ownership, institutional ownership, audit type, GCC countries.