AUDIT

This study examined the impact of audit committee characteristics on financial reporting quality in Nigerian telecommunication companies. The research adopted an ex-post facto design and relied on secondary data obtained from the published annual reports of four major telecommunications firms MTN, Airtel, Glo, and 9mobile for the period 2015 to 2024. Financial reporting quality was measured by the timeliness of financial statements, while audit committee independence, size, meeting frequency, and financial expertise served as the explanatory variables. The data were analyzed using descriptive statistics, correlation analysis, and multiple regression techniques with the aid of Stata 13. The diagnostic tests confirmed the absence of multicollinearity, heteroskedasticity, and autocorrelation, ensuring the reliability of the model. The regression results revealed that audit committee independence, size, meeting frequency, and expertise did not have a statistically significant effect on financial reporting quality in the sampled firms. The overall model also lacked explanatory power, suggesting that audit committee characteristics, as currently structured in Nigerian telecommunications companies, may not be strong determinants of reporting timeliness. The findings indicate that compliance with governance requirements does not automatically translate into higher reporting quality unless audit committees actively perform their oversight roles. The study concludes that while audit committees are vital for corporate governance, their effectiveness depends more on active engagement, independence in practice, and professional competence than on formal attributes such as size or meeting frequency. It recommends that regulatory authorities and company boards focus on strengthening the functional capacity of audit committees by providing continuous training, enforcing genuine independence, and prioritizing quality over quantity in audit committee activities.

This study examines the relationship between board audit committee characteristics and corporate financial performance in 50 selected companies listed on the Nigeria Stock Exchange Group (NGX) from 2018 - 2023. The study was carried out by extracting data from the annual reports for the period on which the secondary data and panel regression analysis were used. Corporate Financial Performance was represented by board size (BDSIZE), board independence (BDIND), audit committee size (ACSIZE), audit committee independence (ACIND), audit committee meeting frequency (ACMF), audit committee financial expertise (ACEXP) and two control variables leverage (LEV) and firm size (FSIZE), which formulated seven research hypotheses from each of the variables. The result of the finding revealed that board size (BDSIZE), audit committee size (ACSIZE), audit committee independence (ACIND), and audit committee financial expertise (ACEXP) have a positive and significant effect on corporate financial performance, audit committee independence has a positive but insignificant effect on the financial performance, while board independence (BDIND), frequency of audit meetings (ACMF), and firm size (FSIZE) have a negative and insignificant effect on corporate financial performance. These findings highlight the importance of strengthening audit committee composition and competencies to enhance financial performance and investor confidence.