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This study aims to compare the usefulness of financial information in the Jordanian finance industry before and after applying eXtensible Business Reporting Language (XBRL) as a new regulatory requirement under International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS). Financial information usefulness is measured using the Nijmegen Centre for Economics (NiCE) disclosure index. This index examines IFRS-defined “qualitative characteristics of useful financial information”. These are relevance, faithful portrayal, understandability, comparison and timeliness.

To evaluate the formulated hypotheses, ordinary least squares regression analysis was used on a dataset consisting of 954 observations from the Jordanian financial industry, specifically the banking, insurance and real estate sectors, spanning the period from 2005 to 2022. The content analysis method has been used to quantify the extent of each characteristic of useful information disclosure.

The investigation validates that the utilisation of XBRL generally enhances the usefulness of financial information in terms of its “relevance, faithful representation, comparability, and timeliness”, although no association was found regarding the duration of understandability. To ensure effective adoption of XBRL in Jordan, it is essential to provide suitable infrastructure to XBRL suppliers and offer training to XBRL users.

This research advances the field and may be valuable in areas with minimal XBRL framework usage. This analysis can assist businesses in understanding how XBRL affects financial information quality in the age of technological adoption. The findings help regulators and policymakers monitor Jordanian enterprises’ technological adoption and propose IFRS-XBRL-compliant legislation. This could improve measurement and disclosure while protecting investors and integrity. Thus, this research shows that potential investors in Jordanian enterprises must understand and evaluate electronic financial report data. The findings affect business and policy, so executives, lawmakers and stockholders should evaluate them. As technology advances, practitioners and scholars must recognise XBRL’s potential to improve organisational values and effects. These findings can apply to Middle Eastern (ME) countries with similar institutional, cultural and accounting frameworks.

This study combines agency, signalling and stakeholders’ theories, motivational theories for technology adoption, institutional theories and technological acceptance theories to analyse how XBRL affects financial information. To the best of the author’s knowledge, no other scholarly study has examined how XBRL affects country-level financial information usefulness. This study illuminates XBRL’s country-level benefits and complements firm-level assessments. These are crucial for ME and Jordan’s economic growth. Jordanian data and the existing disclosure index of financial information usefulness are used for the first time to evaluate XBRL.

As organisations rely more on systems to protect their accounting data, it is critical to investigate whether cutting-edge “Accounting Information Systems (AIS)” technologies increase “Accounting Information Quality (AIQ)” in post-Covid-19 era.

The current study examined how Covid-19 modified the expected links between AIS implementation and AIQ factors. To make the “structural model”, a “web-based survey” was used. A “Multi-group Analysis” (MGA) with “AMOS.26” was employed to test the regulating effect. To look at their regression values, the 412 participants from “Family Small- and Medium-sized Enterprises FSMEs” in Jordan who took part in the MGA were split into two groups: those who had a high experience of Covid-19 impact (N = 143) and those who had a low experience of Covid-19 impact (N = 269). The study of 412 completed surveys shows that MGA uses a modified t-test to determine the significant difference between regression coefficients.

The results of the moderation effect confirm that Covid-19 has a substantial effect on AIS adoption and AIQ. All hypotheses about how AIS implementation affects AIQ in post-Covid-19 era were approved. The study finds that adopting AIS is critical for enterprises to maintain successful operations and efficiency.

This model may assist businesses in comprehending the relationship between AIS and AIQ, how it affects it in the current technological adoption phase under extremely unpredictable economic conditions and what characteristics support its widespread usage. This research offered the theoretical underpinning for examining AIS’s ability to improve AIQ among Jordanian family firms. The results can also be applied to other Middle Eastern countries and AIQ, how it affects this relationship during this period of technological adoption under extraordinarily unpredictable economic conditions and what factors support its widespread use. Practitioners and scholars must recognise how AIS can develop organisational values and impacts as the AIS environment grows. This study recommends a holistic AIS-implementation methodology and evaluates organisational implications to address this empirical challenge.

This study investigates whether adopting AIS results in significantly higher AIQ in the post-Covid-19 era. To the best of the author’s knowledge, there have been a few attempts to investigate how AIS influences data quality. Still, there is little evidence of how this relationship has evolved in the aftermath of the Covid-19 tragedy. As a result, much work remains to be done, particularly in analytical decision-making culture, which is critical to the development of the growing economies of the Middle East and Jordan. To address this knowledge gap, the Covid-19 and AIQ criteria were incorporated into the model utilised in this study. This research adds to existing knowledge and may be valuable in areas with low AIS framework frequency.

Motivated by the disastrous impact of COVID-19 on the world’s economies, the purpose of this study is to examine its effect on the association between auditor industry specialization and external audit fees, referring to two time periods: before and during COVID-19.

A quantitative analysis based on the ordinary least squares regression is performed, using 3,200 company-year observations from 2005 to 2020 in Jordan to test the hypotheses. The qualitative component is a textual analysis of firms’ annual reports that support the quantitative analysis findings.

The analysis confirms there is a direct positive relationship between COVID-19 and external audit fees, confirming the tough consequences of the crisis on audit complexity and risks. While the results show evidence that the relationship between auditor specialist and audit fees is weakened because of COVID-19, the content analysis explained that COVID-19 led to fewer requests for high-quality audit, given the urgent need to report on firms’ financial circumstances. Jordan’s capital market is controlled by family businesses, and the insolvency of several large firms during COVID-19 led auditors to offer their services at low cost.

The findings of this study have serious implications for policymakers, legislators, regulators and the audit profession, as they examine the arising difficulties during a period of economic uncertainty. The findings can help to improve laws that control the auditing industry in Jordan following the damage caused by COVID-19. As well, the outcomes can be extrapolated to other Middle East nations.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, the authors believe that this research presents the first evidence on the influence of COVID-19 on the auditing industry.