تاثیر کیفیت حسابرسی بر میزان افشای داوطلبانه: شرکت های ثبت شده در بورس اوراق بهادار تونس The Effect of Audit Quality on the Extent of Voluntary Disclosure: Companies Listed in the Tunisian Stock Exchange

Besides discussing accounting choices, we can talk about the strategy of voluntary disclosure. Thus, accounting policy is not only in line with logic of optimization of accounting choices, but also of financial and accounting communication. That means that managers have a large opportunity for discretion and decisions allowing them to make public or not the accounting and financial information. The information quality has become a key area in accounting and knowledge management literature due to the high signal-to-noise ratio of non-essential content in knowledge and information diffusion and the lack of the information quality measurement (Hu et al. 1997). Thus, the strategy of voluntary disclosure is not a fortuitous act related to the forgotten mandatory disclosure, but in accounting it is considered a policy instrument that aims to reach certain objectives. Based on the idea that a good corporate governance guarantee is financial disclosure with a high level of quality, the firm should put in place a good strategic corporate governance that assures the protection of the stakeholder against managers’ opportunism. In this context several studies support that the audit quality helps a firm to enhance voluntary disclosure in annual reports (Datar et al. 1991; Piot and Janin 2004; Chalmers and Godfrey 2004; Mohd Ghazali and Weetman 2006; and Martins et al. 2016). Financial disclosure in annual reports has become the number one issue for accounting research, and, more specifically, voluntary disclosure has received a lot of attention from academicians, and much research is done both in developed in different contexts (Firth 1979; Bradbury 1992; Raffournier 1995; Smaili et al. 2009). The annual report is considered the significant element in overall disclosure practice because it is the most widely disseminated source of financial information on publicly held corporations (Arnold et al. 1984). However, voluntary disclosure in annual reports represent a resource in the nature of financial information beyond the required content in financial statements (Lakhal 2005; Kumar et al. 2008). Voluntary disclosure is to disclose more information than indicated by the law and is based on managerial incentives (Healy and Palepu 2001). The main question of this research is how far the audit quality characteristics influence the decision to make more voluntary information in the annual reports of listed companies in Tunisia. The principal objectives of this research are firstly to evaluate the level of voluntary disclosure in the annual reports of the listed companies in the Tunisian Securities Exchange (TSE) and secondly to examine the relationship between a number of characteristics of audit quality (Big 4, joint audit, and industry specialization) and the level of voluntary disclosure of these companies. Tunisia is a developing country, with an emerging capital market established in 1969 and has currently (as of June 2016) 83 listed firms, and whose economic environment has been subject to major changes in recent years. In this country, financial disclosure constitutes an under-regulated field that helps users evaluate management performance, lighten their perception of the firm, and evaluate the future profitability of their own investment. Several Tunisian firms do not disclose sufficient information in their annual reports. The empirical results conducted in the present context indicate that membership of the listeners to an international network audit, “Big 4”, improves the voluntary disclosed information. In addition to the size of the audit network “Big 4”, we found that the industry specialization of audit firms positively influences the level of voluntary disclosure published by the company. The rest of the paper proceeds as follows: the following section will be designed to present literature review. The third section will present the theoretical framework of audit quality and voluntary disclosure and the development of our hypothesis. The research method will be exposed in the fourth section, while the fifth section presents the findings and discussion. The last section includes our conclusions.