The Effect of Ownership Structure, Company Size, And Audit Quality in Producing High-Quality Financial Statements

An applied study of a sample of banks listed in the Iraqi Stock Exchange))

Presented to

The Council of the College of Administration and Economics – Karbala University It is part of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of science in accounting

By

Murtadha Hassan Khalif Al-Ghanimi

Supervised by

Dr. Asaad Mohammed Ali Wahhab Al-Awwad

Abstract

The research aims to measure the impact of the ownership structure, company size, and audit quality in producing high-quality financial statements for a sample of commercial banks listed in the Iraq Stock Exchange. (23) banks remained, and accordingly (13) sample commercial banks were selected for the research, and their percentage amounted to (57%) of the sample size. To achieve the objectives of the research, the researcher used data for the research sample banks for the years (2011-2020).

The company’s ownership structure was measured by the following equation: Ownership structure = (number of shares owned by the company number of shares outstanding), in relation to the size of the company in this study was measured by the natural logarithm of the total assets owned by the company, measured using several quality audits. It is the auditor turnover, where (1) is given for auditor rotation every three years, and the number (0) is given to audit offices and firms that do not implement this procedure. The auditor’s professional specialization was measured based on a weighted market share metric if extracted by the product of market share ratio multiplied by portfolio share ratio.

The researcher used the method of quantitative and statistical analysis together to reach the results and conclusions, where the researcher used to test the hypotheses descriptive statistics and the correlation matrix and the linear interference test, and the most important conclusions reached by the research is that the ownership structure of major shareholders has no significant impact on the financial statements in the banks sample research Listed in the Iraqi Stock Exchange, and one of the factors that make the external auditor lose his objectivity and independence is the lack of professional skepticism in the audit process due to the long period of time that the auditor spends in the same place, and the results also showed that the financial statements in Iraqi banks in the research sample are appropriate , This means that there is an impact of accounting information (earnings per share, cash flow per share, book value per share) in the research sample companies.