The influence of firm’s specific characteristics on extent of voluntary disclosures for the manufacturing companies :

Abstract

Financial reporting and disclosures are methods for keeping investors well informed, present business environment makes compliance with only mandatory disclosure not sufficient nor appropriate to meet users' needs for corporate information. This calls for additional information requirement; this additional information is known as voluntary disclosure. The objective of this study was to examine how significant firm specific characteristics influence the extent of the voluntary disclosure in the annual reports of all manufacturing companies listed at Dar es salaam stock Exchange in the category of industrial and allied. Secondary data were collected from annual report of the companies, observation of 35 annual reports for the period of five years (2016-2020) was employed. With help of EVIEW software, data were analyzed using descriptive, correlation and regression analysis where the study found that significant positive relationship between extent of voluntary disclosure and external auditors’ size, capital structure and shareholding structure, whereas other variables were found insignificant including audit committee, profitability, and firm size. The study recommends that significant relationship of the variables should not be the only criteria for voluntary disclosure, voluntary disclosure enhance transparency and accountability, moreover the study recommend for companies to keep well-balanced of the variables that enhance voluntary disclosure.