Corporate Governance Attributes and Likelihood of Financial Statement Fraud

ABSTRACT

The study examined the impact of corporate governance attributes on the likelihood of financial statement fraud in Nigeria. It specifically attempts to explain the behaviors of six selected corporate governance attributes (board size, board independence, audit committee financial expertise, institutional, foreign and CEO share ownerships) and their individual impacts on the likelihood of financial statement fraud, proxied using the Beneish M-Score fraud prediction model. The study adopted the longitudinal research design. Secondary data were utilised as collected from the audited annual financial statements of the thirteen (13) commercial banks listed on the Nigerian Exchange Group (NGX) between years 2012 to 2020. The analyses involve the application of descriptive statistics and correlation matrix, while the panel data regression technique was employed for the purpose of testing the research hypotheses.