Audit Committee and Audit Report Lag: A Literature Review

Abstract

The paper aims to review studies dealing with audit report lag or audit delay and the Audit Committee in accounting literature over the period of 2006-2022. Research on factors related among audit report lag and audit committee has become more widespread in recent years and there was a considerable upsurge in these papers. This study combines electronic and manual searches to identify relevant studies. The search was performed using keywords such as “audit committee” and “audit report lag” or "audit delay" or "audit lag" and in total, 35 published studies were identified. The findings show that the majority of research studies the relevance of audit report lag / audit delay to the effectiveness of the Audit Committee which represented by its key characteristics (size, independence, member financial expertise, frequency of meetings, presence of women). The future shows that researchers are turning to additional characteristics of Audit Committee members to check whether they relate to audit report lag. Finally, we stand for the future of research with suggestions for new researches.

Keywords: Audit Delay, Literature Review, Corporate Governance

JEL: M42, G34