The effect of the company's operating characteristics and the characteristics of the audit office on the effective relationship of the audit committee with the period of issuing the audit report: an applied study on companies registered in the Egyptian Stock Exchange

This research aimed to study the effect of audit committee effectiveness as one of the internal mechanisms of governance on audit report lag, as well as the effect of a set of moderator variables related to the operational characteristics of the company and audit firm characteristics on the relationship between audit committee effectiveness and audit report lag. To achieve this goal, the researcher derived the hypotheses of the research by reviewing the previous studies. To test the hypotheses, an empirical study has conducted using sample data of 100 companies listed in the Egyptian stock exchange during the period from 2016 to 2018. The study found that there is an adverse and significant effect of the audit committee effectiveness on audit report lag, which means accepting the first hypothesis. In addition, the adverse effect of the audit committee effectiveness on the audit report lag varies according to size of the company, size of the audit firm, and auditor industry specialization, but it does not affected by profitability of the company, and thus the second, fourth and fifth hypotheses were accepted and the third hypothesis was not accepted.
With regard to the diversity of  the company's operations and its impact on the relationship between audit committee effectiveness and audit report lag, the researcher has conducted an additional analysis by inserting the diversity of the company's operations as a moderator variable on the relationship between audit committee effectiveness and audit report lag, while the significant moderator variables in the fundamental analysis were processed in the additional analysis as control variables. The study found that there is no significant effect of the diversity of the company's operations through the indicator of the presence of export operations on audit report lag, and the interaction between the degree of diversity of the company's operations and the audit committee effectiveness has no significant effect on audit report lag. To verify the accuracy of the main findings of the research, the researcher performed a sensitivity analysis, where an alternative measure was used for audit report lag, and an alternative measure for audit committee effectiveness, the simple and multiple regressions was re-analyzed and the results were almost identical to the fundamental model.