Objective: “The purpose of this study is to investigate the effect of auditor industry specialization on audit fees and audit report lag. In addition, this study examines the effect of audit report lag on the relationship between auditor industry specialization and audit fees”.
Method: “In this research, the data of 132 companies admitted to the Tehran Stock Exchange during the period from 2014 to 2023 were used. Also, in this research, Standard Audit Fee Model and multivariate linear regression with fixed effects has been used”.
Results: “The results showed that the auditor industry specialization does not affect the audit fee. However, the auditor industry specialization has a significant effect on the audit fees by mediating the audit report lag. Also, the results have shown a significant negative effect of the auditor's specialization in the industry on the audit report lag”.
Conclusions: “In general, this research shows that companies that contract with audit firms with specialization in the industry pay less due to the expertise of the audit firm and the timeliness and brevity of their audit reports”.