IIARD International Institute of Academic Research and Development

IIARD INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF BANKING AND FINANCE RESEARCH (IJBFR )

E-ISSN 2695-1886
P-ISSN 2672-4979
VOL. 11 NO. 1 2025
DOI: 10.56201/ijbfr.v11.no1.2025.pg1.19

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Audit Committee Attributes and Financial Reporting Quality of Listed Deposit Money Banks in Nigeria

Etuk, Nyaknobong Jonah, Dr. Eno Ukpong, Dr. Emmanuel Emenyi

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Abstract

The quality of financial statement would not be achieved if the earnings are consistently manipulated and the audit committee default in their oversight function. The main objective of this study was to ascertain the effect of audit committee attributes on financial reporting quality of deposit money banks listed on the floor of the Nigeria Exchange Group for the period 2014 to 2023. The independent variable, audit committee attributes, was proxied by audit committee financial expertise, audit committee gender; while the dependent variable was proxied by earnings management. Ex post facto research design was adopted and secondary data were employed. The population of the study consisted of 13 listed deposit money banks and purposive sampling technique was employed to select 11 deposit money banks. The study employed robust regression technique was employed in analysing the data and the statistical package employed was STATA 14.2. From the analysis, it was found out that audit committee independence has a significant negative effect on Eckel’s income smoothing index of listed deposit money banks in Nigeria; audit committee financial expertise has a significant positive effect on the Eckel’s income smoothing index of the sampled deposit money bank; audit committee gender diversity has no significant effect on Eckel’s income smoothing index of listed deposit money banks in Nigeria; Thus, it was concluded that audit committee attributes have significant effect on financial reporting quality of listed deposit money banks in Nigeria. Based, on the findings of this study, it was therefore recommended among others that regulatory bodies should ensure that independent audit committee members with significant industrial experience and sound financial background form the majority of members of the audit committees as this could help tremendously in detecting earnings management and thus enhance financial reporting quality.

keywords:

Financial services, Accountability, Earnings Management.

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