Abstract

Inevitably, an accurate and timely financial statement contributes enormously to the success of manyorganizations. Therefore, accuracy and availability about financial information is vital for investors andshareholders in order to ease their decision making process. This paper aims to analyze the relation between thecharacteristics of corporate governance; board independence, ownership concentration, audit committeeindependence, expertise, meeting, size, internal audit investment and audit report lag among companies listedunder Bursa Malaysia. The samples covered are among 180 companies listed at Bursa Malaysia for 2009 and2010. The samples were chosen randomly from 843 companies, the population. Descriptive statistics have beenused to provide better perception of the length of time needed by an auditor, to complete an audit. The resultsshow that in average, the companies took about 100 days to complete their audit report with maximum andminimum days of 148 days and 26 days respectively. In addition, regression analysis was used to provideempirical evidence on which variables had strong bonding with audit report lag. The outcomes elicit that auditcommittee size, ownership concentration; organization size and profitability are significantly associated withaudit report lag. However the other six variables (audit committee independence, meetings, expertise and typesof auditors) were found to have insignificant relationship with audit report lag.

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