Investigating the Effect of Expertise and Size of the Audit Committee on Voluntary Disclosure of Companies Listed on Tehran Stock Exchange

Voluntary disclosure of corporate information is a mechanism to reduce information asymmetry between managers and people outside the organization, reducing agency costs and improving reports’ transparency. The present study investigated the impact between expertise and audit committee size on voluntary disclosure of information between 2013 and 2015 in Tehran Stock Exchange companies. A list of voluntary disclosure cases was prepared for measuring the amount of voluntary disclosure of information in the annual report by studying and reviewing the accounting standards and laws applicable to information reporting and the Botosan checklist. The size and expertise of the audit committee are the audit committee’s features. To test the possible association between the amount of voluntary disclosure of information and these characteristics of the audit committee, analysis and correlation were done on 81 companies listed on the Tehran Stock Exchange during three years. Furthermore, after data collection using the Systematic Removal Method, the research hypotheses were tested using a cross-sectional regression model and Eviews Software. The results reveal that only the audit committee’s size positively and significantly affects the voluntary disclosure of information. Also, no significant effect was observed between the expertise and voluntary disclosure.