Purpose The purpose of this paper is to examine whether the characteristics of a CEO, that is, tenure and financial expertise, could affect the timeliness of an audit report. Design/methodology/approach Research data gathered from listed companies on the Tehran Stock Exchange during the four-year period 2013-2016. Findings The results obtained from model fittings indicated that there is only a negative and significant relationship between CEO financial expertise and natural logarithm of audit report lag and no significant relationship observed between the former and two other indices of timely audit report. Moreover, no significant relationship was found between the CEO tenure and other three indices of timely audit report. Originality/value This paper is the first study, which developed the literature of timely audit report using CEO tenure effect and financial expertise tests for timely audit reports in Iran.

PurposeThe main objective of the present study is to assess the potential impact of readability of financial statement notes on the auditor's report lag, audit fees and going concern opinion (GCO).Design/methodology/approachThe statistical population of this study includes all listed firms on the Tehran Stock Exchange (TSE) for the period of 2012–2017. The systematic elimination method is used for sampling and multiple regression and EViews software are used for testing the hypothesis models.FindingsThe obtained results show that there is a significant and positive relationship between audit report lags and readability of financial statements. Moreover, it is also revealed that readability of financial statements is positively associated with audit fees. Furthermore, the findings suggest a negative correlation between readability indexes and issuing GCOs, denoting hard-to-read statements is considered as a risk factor by auditors. Finally, the observations of our robustness tests suggest that the association between audit report lag and readability of financial statements is robust.Originality/valueThis is the first conducted investigation concerning auditor's response to the readability of financial statement notes in TSE. The outcome of current paper may pave the way for revising and developing Iranian accounting standards in order to give a fairer and clearer picture of financial reports.

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