Effects of Board Size, Board Committees Characteristics and Audit Quality on Audit Report Lags

The paper examines the effects of board size, audit committee characteristics and audit quality on audit report lag (ARL) of listed banks in Nigeria. Using a sample of 14 banks, the study covers a five year period from 2008 to 2012. The findings of the study based on robust OLS model reveals that audit quality represented by the Big 4 firms has a significant impact on ARL. Board size, board meetings, total assets as well as board gender also have significant positive associations with ARL. However, the study is not able to find a significant relationship between audit committee size, risk management committee size and board expertise on ARL. Generally, shareholders should maintain the use of big 4 so that report is presented at the right time to enhance confidence of the stakeholders as well as regulators. The current study is limited to few corporate governance characteristics of the listed banks. Other potentials variables such as Company complexity, ethnicity, leverage and IFRS complexity is not included and beyond the scope of this study. Their inclusions could have given clearer picture of the determinants of Audit Report Lag in Nigerian listed banks. (C) 2016 Published by Future Academy www.FutureAcademy.org.uk