The Determinants of the Reporting Lag for Jordanian Companies Listed on the Amman Stock Exchange

Abstract

The main objective of this study is to investigate the determinants of the Reporting Lag for Jordanian companies listed on the Amman Stock Exchange for the year 2004. This study examined the relationship between the Reporting Lag(the length of time from a company’s fiscal year-end to the date of receipt of annual reports by Jordanian Securities Commission) and Several Independent Variables: (1) ِAudit Report Lag, (2) Company Size, (3) Profitability of the Company, (4) Company Age, (5) Gearing, (6) Sector Type , (7) International Association of Auditor , (8) Type of Audit Opinion , (9) Reliance on Other Auditor, (10) Market Type. The multiple regression analysis is used to test the hypotheses of the study. The results for the population of 157 listed Jordanian companies on Amman Stock Exchange show that the following variables: (1) Audit report lag , (2) Gearing , and (3) ) Sector Type are significantly related to the Reporting Lag . The other seven variables are not significantly associated with the Reporting Lag . The results also show that reporting lag is longer for manufacturing companies that have high gearing and have delayed audit report. The Adjusted R2 of the model is 66.6% . Descriptive statistics shows that the mean reporting lag is 82 which is less than the legally stipulated time period (120 days) by (38 days). The study recommends to modify the legally stipulated time period to enhance the timeliness of annual reports, and enforce the audit firms not to delay their reports through creating party as Association of Jordanian Public Accountants to monitor the timeliness of audited annual reports. To improve the predictive power of the reporting lag, further research may include additional variables such as probability of bankruptcy of companies, complexity of operations, and ownership concentration of companies