Quality of Audit Report of the Listed Companies in Bangladesh : A Compliance Study

This study first identifies the importance of audit report for an organization and then tries to find out the quality of audit report of the listed Public Limited Companies (PLCs) in Bangladesh. The ten criteria were identified from the guidelines suggested by International Standard on Auditing (ISA) and were taken as benchmark for this study. A sample of 186 PLCs has been surveyed to determine the nature and extent of audit report disclosure by computing total score and an Audit Report Disclosure Index (ARDI). The results show that audit report disclosure varies widely within the sample companies with a mean score of 8.334 out of total score 10 (ARDI 83.98). The results also show that the audit firms are focusing more on auditors opinion, management responsibility, auditor responsibility, introductory paragraph and little focus is placed on title, auditor signature and auditor address. More over, the components that the audit company follows are varying from client to client; mostly they follow the British Model for audit reporting and did not give a proper thought in the audit report disclosure