신고담당이사의 업무특성과 주식소유가 감사보고시차에 미치는 영향

[Purpose]This study verifies whether the characteristics of a reporting officer are associated with the firm’s disclosure lag. Whereas in the US, Chief Financial Officers (CFOs) assume the duties of the reporting officers, in Korea there does not exist a specific job title for the reporting officers and instead various executives take up the role. Therefore, we analyze the impact of the reporting officer’s characteristics (the main duties and the share ownership) on the audit report lag and report filing lag. [Methodology]The sample consists of non－financial listed KOSPI firms during 2014－2016 and final sample is 1,864 firm－years. We manually collected data about business reporting officers and data of auditor’s report date and filing date. [Findings]We find that if the reporting officer is in charge of the general accounting－related duty or internal accounting controller, then the audit report and report filing lags decrease discernably. This result suggests that not all the reporting officers have the same ability and authority to influence and control the financial reporting process, but only the reporting officer whose job is directly related to financial reporting process can decrease the firm risk and audit risk, resulting in improved audit efficiency. Second, such positive effect of reporting officer on the filing lag is more pronounced when he(or she) has share ownership in the company. Such result implies that the share ownership of the reporting officer decreases the agency cost and increases the motive to disclose timely financial information to investors. [Implications]This study is meaningful in that it presents reporting officers’ characteristics as one of the internal control mechanisms which could affect audit report lag and audit report filing lag. Therefore, we expect that our study results will help firms to build more efficient internal governance and auditors to prepare proper audit planning according to firms’ reporting officer characteristics.