تاثیر مدیرعامل اجرایی و تخصص در گزارش های حسابرسی به موقع شرکت های ثبت شده ایرانی The effect of CEO tenure and specialization on timely audit reports of Iranian listed companies

1. Introduction Financial reporting efficiency is considered as one of the leading factors for the quality of annual reporting. Such efficiency is typically implicit in well-timed information, which is a component of qualitative feature of information. As delay increases, the usefulness of disclosed information by companies will decline (Binti Hashimi and Binti Abdol Rahman, 2011). Financial reporting should be regarded as a part of responding process to inform the shareholders immediately of important updated information derived as a result of economic events during the previous fiscal year (Marziana et al., 2012). Furthermore, it is declared that timelier audit reports have several advantages. For example, it may cause higher public trust on audited financial statements, lower information asymmetry, favorable content of audit report, and higher audit output in companies with timelier audit reports (Mande and Son, 2011). Given the numerous advantages of timely audit report, the factors contribute to such phenomenon have gained more importance. However, the length of time spent by auditors may affect the timeliness of audited financial statements. It is also well confirmed that the demographic characteristics of managers have no significant effect on the objective of financial reporting (Francis et al., 2008; Bamber et al., 2010). Moreover, such characteristics could help the prediction of such objectives. Recent and limited studies on accounting found that such characteristics have remarkable effect on the process of financial reporting (Bamber et al., 2010; Jiang et al., 2013). Bamber et al. (2010) argued that CEOs could even have more influence on financial reporting disclosure style. On the other hand, Cheng and Lo (2006) declared that CEOs have the maximum power on a broad spectrum of decisions and they could specify what/when information could be disclosed. Hence, it is expected that such characteristics could affect the timeliness of audit report and in this case, the regulatory bodies, shareholders, investors, board of directors, and auditors should consider these features for the evaluation of manager. The focus is on the characteristics of CEO, in that it is the most important position in the management hierarchy. The relationship between CEO characteristics and the timeliness of audit report is based on the fact that financial reporting is the result of an interaction between managers and independent auditors (Baatwah et al., 2015). The managing director is finally the person in charge of supervision on accounting policies, records, and estimates that were provided by management throughout the year. If the CEOs were knowledgeable enough about the calendar of such a process, then using a timely method and by the auditor’s effort, the annual audit would be shorter because there are less required errors and modifications ( Jiang et al., 2013). The experimental observations backed such claims (Demerjian et al., 2013; Bamber et al., 2010) and indicated that the influence of managers is not a monotonic factor and it could be different regarding their characteristics (Bamber et al., 2010).