5. Conclusion
This paper applies agency theory in examining the influence of financial reporting lag, and board characteristics and their impact on firm performance. Just because Ghana’s company code requires reporting by a certain date does not mean that the law is always complied with, hence the need to investigate how the law is being complied with.
In the light of the lack of previous studies on timeliness of financial reporting practices by GSE listed firms, this study attempts to fill this gap by investigating the timeliness of financial reporting among Ghanaian companies. Financial reporting lag is measured by computing the number of days that elapse between the company’s year-end and the date of the auditor’s report, i.e. ARL. Firm’s performance is measured by using ROE and ROA. The descriptive statistics indicate that over the three years, the mean value of financial reporting lag (ARL) is 86 days (SD 21 days), minimum is 55 days and maximum is 173 days. The findings show that none of the listed firms is able to comply with the requirement. So far no company has been sanctioned for non-compliance. This confirms the finding of Agyeman et al. (2013) who posit that Ghana has sufficient laws and regulations with respect to CG, but the major challenge is the absence of active devices for their effective enforcement.
The regression analysis results indicate that ARL has a negative statistically significant relationship with ROE and ROA, as less number of days used by the independent auditors to sign the annual report could increase the firm’s performance. The implication is that when financial performances of companies are high (good news), companies have the tendency to disclose this situation early to the public. Companies with poor financial performance also tend to have long financial reporting lag. The findings also suggest that firms with good financial performance tend to have fewer problems with their auditors thus reducing the time taken by the auditors to perform their audit work.
