Issues In Financial Reporting Lag

This paper examines the issues in financial reporting lag. It specifically attempts a critique on some important conceptual and practical issues that are worth pondering about when assessing the concept of financial reporting lag. Particularly, the paper identified and discussed four (4) of such issues which include: regulatory issues, external auditor-related issues, issues regarding early/late disclosure of 'good' or 'bad' news; and issues relating to the conceptualisation and measurement of financial reporting lag. As part of its critical evaluation, the paper disputes the existing pattern of definition and measurement of financial reporting lag and equally proposed a similar, but strikingly different approach to its conceptualisation and measurement. After the discussions of all other issues, the paper took its position by conjecturing that financial reporting lag is entirely inevitable, but can be avoided. By way of policy implication, the paper supports the idea of accelerated financial reporting proposals by some advanced countries in order to reduce financial reporting lag, in as much as the reliability of the reports are not traded-off as a result. The paper opens up two possible avenues for further studies; firstly by testing the new proposed measurement of financial reporting lags; and secondly by examining the implication of implementing an accelerated financial reporting framework in a developing market like Nigeria.