Corporate disclosure timing under IFRS: the case of emerging Georgia

Purpose - This study aims to examine the timing of corporate disclosure in the context of Georgia, an emerging market where a recent reform of corporate financial transparency mandated about 80,000 private sector entities to publicly disclose their annual financial statements. Design/methodology/approach - The main analysis covers more than 4,000 large, medium, small and micro private sector entities, for which the data is obtained from the Ministry of Finance of Georgia. This paper builds an empirical model of logit/probit regression, with industry fixed and random effects to investigate the drivers of the corporate disclosure timing. Findings - Findings suggest that the mean reporting time lag is 279 days after the fiscal year-end, that is nine days after the statutory deadline. Almost one-third (30%) of the entities miss the nine-month statutory deadline, while the timely filers almost unexceptionally file immediately before the deadline. Multivariate tests reveal that voluntarily filing entities completed the process significantly faster than those mandated to do so; audited financial statements take more time to be filed, whereas those with unqualified audit opinion or audited by large/international audit firms are filed faster than their counterparts. The author concludes that despite the overall high filing rates, the timing of corporate disclosure is not (yet) efficiently enforced in practice (but is progressing over time), whereas regulatory incentives prevail over market incentives among the timely filers. Originality/value - To the best of the author’s knowledge, this is the first study that explores corporate disclosure timing incentives in the context of Georgia. This study extends prior literature on the timing of financial information from an emerging country’s private sector perspective, with juxtaposed market and regulatory incentives.