Audit Reporting Lag In Malaysia: The Case Of MESDAQ

Timeliness is a very crucial aspect in assessing the accountability and the quality of financial reporting. Financial information could be accessed by users once the
auditor has issued and completed the annual reports. Therefore, the time taken to publish the annual report depends partly on the audit time taken to sign the audit
report. This paper aims to investigate the attributes affecting audit reporting delay. The sample is 118 MESDAQ companies listed in Bursa Malaysia and uses 2006 annual reports. It examines ten corporate attributes and three auditor attributes. The corporate attributes include the existence of independent internal audit department, the number of audit committee's meeting, firm size (proxied by total assets), audit complexity (proxied by total development costs and status of subsidiaries) financial
year-end, new listed company, change of financial year-end, number of subsidiaries and place of incorporation of subsidiaries. The three auditor attributes are the type
of audit firm (for company and its subsidiaries) and audit opinion. Regression analysis conveys that audit opinion, total research and development cost (R&D) and newly listed company are significantly related to audit reporting delay for companies listed in MESDAQ. The rest of the independent variables are not significantly associated with audit delay. The results of this study are discussed under findings and discussions section.