The Impact of the Mandatory Transition to IFRS on Auditor Report Lag – Applied Study to Companies Registered in the Saudi Stock Exchange

The aim of this research is to measure the impact of the mandatory transition to IFRS for companies registered in the Saudi stock exchange on auditor report lag on auditing their historical annual financial statements through an Literature review to hypothesis development, and then conducting an applied study to test of these hypothesis on a sample of (107) non-financial companies registered in the Saudi stock exchange during the period before the transition to IFRS (2015-2016) and beyond (2017-2018) with a total number of observations (428) observation  (companies / year).
 The results found a positive impact of the mandatory transition to IFRS for companies registered in the Saudi stock exchange on auditor report lag on auditing their historical annual financial statements, and that the impact is not different according to the size firm of the audit client's and the audit office size. The results also found that auditor report lag is negatively impacted by the type of opinion, while positively impacted by both the financial leverage and achieve the firm's audit client losses.
 The results of the sensitivity analysis showed a positive impact of the mandatory transition to IFRS for companies registered in the Saudi stock exchange on auditor report lag on auditing their historical annual financial statements, and that the impact is not different according to scale of the auditor report lag.  The results of the additional analysis showed that the auditor report lag is positively impacted by the audit office size, and negatively impacted by size firm of the audit client's, as control variables, and it is not impacted by both the end of the fiscal year and return on assets.