The Relationship of Audit Opinion Improvement and the Disclosure timing of annual and interval financial information

This research investigates the impact of audit opinion improvement and it is magnitude on disclosure timing of annual and interim financial information of firms listed in Tehran Stock Exchange (TSE). It is assumed that audit opinion improvement is good news about firm. In addition¡ firms disclose good news earlier than bad news. So it is expected that firms with improvement in audit opinion of current year relative to previous year¡ issue their annual and interval reports earlier than others do. For this purpose¡ five hypotheses are developed and tested. The first two hypotheses address timing of annual financial information and next two hypotheses address that of interim financial information. The last hypothesis compares the impact of audit opinion types on timing of annual and interim financial reporting. In this research¡ data of 95 firms listed in Tehran Stock Exchange (TSE) between 2006 and 2013 are analyzed. This research is descriptive-correlative one which uses panel-data regression to analyze data.
The results of hypotheses show that audit opinion type impacts on timing of annual financial reporting. Audit opinion improvement also gives rise to earlier annual financial reporting. The results show that audit opinion type and audit opinion improvement have significant influence on timing of interval financial reports. Results of fifth hypothesis test also show that the impact of audit opinion types is greater on interim financial reporting than annual financial reporting.