ISSN: 2265-6294

The Impact of Audit Committee Effectiveness and Audit Quality on Voluntary Disclosure: Evidence from Palestine

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Heba Numan Assad

Abstract

Due to its growing importance for institutions in maintaining the transparency of the financial statements and creating highly competitive environments, voluntary disclosure becomes an attractive issue that pays the researchers' attention. Besides, the subject of the audit committee, its effectiveness, and the audit quality are becoming critical topics on the agenda of organizations and governments seeking control tools that enhance the disclosures. Therefore, this paper examines the impact of the audit committee's effectiveness and audit quality on voluntary disclosure. The deductive approach is used, and the panel data is collected from the annual reports of the listed banks on the Palestine Stock Exchange (PEX) from 2015 to 2019. This empirical study uses an index of four main categories and 20 sub-categories to measure voluntary disclosure. Besides, the committee's effectiveness is measured by the size, independence, and meeting frequency, whereas the audit firm's size is used to indicate audit quality. SPSS software is used for analyzing the data. The study results reveal a positive effect of the committee size, meeting frequency, and audit quality on voluntary disclosure and an insignificant impact of committee independence on voluntary disclosure. The study recommends that the supervisory and the involved authorities focus on forming the audit committee to meet legal requirements, increasing the frequency of meetings, improving audit quality in banking institutions in Palestine, and boosting voluntary disclosure

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