Shared Financial Services, Corporate Governance and Audit Report Lag

Organizations use shared services to provide back-office functions to internal organizational units. Nearly ninety percent of share services are in finance and accounting. For finance and accounting functions, one important task is to deliver timely financial reports and thus audit report lag becomes an important measure for its performance. We propose that shared financial services impact audit report lag both directly and through the interactions with some corporate governance characteristics. We plan to test our propositions with a sample of publicly traded Chinese companies. This study is expected to expand our understandings about the impacts of shared financial services in particular and the benefits of IT-enabled service delivery model in general.