The Impact of Adopting International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) on the Relationship between Audit Quality and the Readability of Annual Financial Report-Empirical Study on Egyptian Listed Companies

The research aims to study and analysis the relationship between financial statements audit quality, measured by auditor professional reputation, and the length (readability) of annual financial report, meas-ured by the number of footnotes, pages& words included within this report.In adition to test the impact of adopting international financial reporting stanandards (IFRS)on this relationship. The research includes a sensitivity analysis to examine the effect of expressing audit quality using auditor industry specialization instead of professional reputaion. An empirical study was used to test the two research hypotheses on a sample of 54 listed companies on the Egyptian stock market, during the period from 2014 to 2018 after excluding the first year of applying the recent version of the Egyptian accounting standards because it is a transition year. The total number of observations was 216 observations (firm – year). The empirical study was done by estimating multiple- regression models.
The research has revealed that, there is a significant negative (positive) relationship between auditor`s professional reputation and the length (readability) of annual financial report.There is a significant positive (negative) relationship between IFRS adoption and the length (read-ability) of annual financial report, plus IFRS adoption has a positive effect on the relationship between audit quality measured by reputation andthe length (readability) of annual financial report measured by the number of pages and words within financial report. Finally, the sensi-tivity analysis has revealed a significant negative relationship between auditor industry specialization and the readability of annual financial report based on the number of footnotes included within the report.