Audit committee effectiveness and financial reporting timeliness: The case of Tunisian listed companies

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to investigate whether there is any relationship between the effectiveness of an audit committee and the financial reporting timeliness of Tunisian listed companies as proxied by external audit delay (AD). Analysis focuses on five audit committee characteristics: authority, financial expertise, independence, size and diligence. Empirical tests address 162 firm-year observations drawn from Tunisian listed companies during 2011-2013. Multivariate analyses indicate that audit committees with members who have financial expertise are significantly associated with shorter AD. Thus, the results suggest that audit committee financial expertise contributes to the improvement of financial statements' timeliness. The audit committee attributes examined in this study were based on DeZoort et al. (2002) framework. There could be other aspects of audit committee effectiveness such as audit committee tenure and audit committee chair characteristics,...