GOVERNANCE MONITORING MECHANISM AND FINANCIAL REPORTING TIMELINES OF LISTED MANUFACTURING FIRMS IN NIGERIA

In today's global financial environment, corporate governance mechanisms play a critical role in ensuring the timeliness and accuracy of financial reporting. It is as a result that this study attempts to unfold the influence of governance monitoring mechanisms on financial reporting timeliness of listed manufacturing companies in Nigeria. The study was anchored on agency theory and theory of inspired confidence. The population of the study consists of 21 consumer goods firms listed on the Nigerian st Exchange Group as at 31 December, 2023 while sample size of 20 was arrived at after filtering firms with incomplete financial statements. The study used multiple regression technique of analysis. Using regression analysis, the result revealed that professional accountants, audit independence and audit size were found to be negatively insignificant whereas gender diversity, managerial shareholding and audit fee appeared to be positively significant. Based on the findings, the study recommends that board of directors of consumer goods manufacturing companies should incorporate more professional accountants in the board as larger proportion of professional accountants have the tendency of increasing the financial reporting timeliness of the listed manufacturing companies in Nigeria and viceversa; increase the proportion of female directors in the board as it has empirically been found to have positive and significant impact; ensure that auditors are given full independence to work efficiently. Also, measures tailored at ensuring corporate financial reporting timeliness and accountability programmer in the manufacturing industry through a well-framed mandatory corporate financial reporting within the stipulated period of time without any prejudice to the stakeholders' decisionmaking processes. covering all aspects of social, environmental and economic performance.