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Research reveals that there is little empirical evidence of the internet financial reporting (IFR) phenomenon in the Gulf Co‐operation Council (GCC) region. This paper attempts to fill some of the gap in our knowledge of IFR practices in Qatar. Specifically, the purpose of this paper is two‐fold. First, it documents the extent and variety of practices of IFR by the 43 companies listed on the Doha Securities Market (DSM). Second, it seeks to examine the key factors that affect the engagement of IFR by the DSM‐listed companies. The findings of the descriptive analysis indicate that 39 of the 43 listed companies operate websites, of which only 28 provide financial information on their websites. Of these 28 companies, 25 provide a complete set of financial statements (including footnotes and the auditor’s report) for two‐year periods or more. The results also show that the majority of the Qatari companies (25 out of 28) use the PDF format to disclose their financial information, and few companies choose to use the internet to provide additional financial highlights, in the form of HTML and MS PowerPoint. The empirical analysis also finds a significant relationship between the engagement of IFR and company size, profitability, and ownership structure. The overall conclusion is that there is a seemingly limited use of the internet for IFR purpose and that IFR is still at an embryonic stage in Qatar, with many opportunities and challenges for all stakeholder parties in corporate reporting. The applicability and implications of the underlying research findings should be of value to the accounting regulators and standard‐setters in the region, particularly the Gulf Co‐operation Council Accounting and Auditing Organization (GCCAAO). The overall findings justify, in the very least, a wider and more detailed study by GCCAAO of important issues such as the major audit implications of IFR and the state of regulation on IFR in the GCC region.

The purpose of this study is to investigate empirically factors influencing Kuwaiti companies to disseminate their financial reports on the Internet. A regression model is estimated using logit analysis for a sample of 179 Kuwaiti companies listed on the Kuwait Stock Exchange for 2007 to test the hypotheses of the study. The study’s results indicate that an Internet financial report is significantly influenced by the auditor type, company size and industry type. The results, however, do not provide evidence of a significant relation between Internet financial reports and any of the corporate governance attributes that were examined in this study.

Research investigating the association between religiosity and earnings management has concentrated on accruals-based earnings management, relying heavily on society’s religiosity, but it has neglected the interaction between religiosity and formal monitoring mechanisms. This study aims to examine how the religiosity and accounting expertise traits of top leaders are associated with real earnings management (REM) and how they interact to eliminate these practices.

Using a sample of 943 year-observations from more religious settings, this paper collects data for four measures of REM, and for religiosity and accounting expertise of audit committee (AC) chair and chief executive officer (CEO). Multivariate regression is used to test the study hypotheses.

The findings are consistent with the predictions that religious top leaders are not associated with lower REM, while top leaders with accounting expertise, in some cases, are associated with lower REM. This paper also finds that a leader with religious belief and accounting expertise dramatically lowers REM. These findings are robust under a battery of sensitive analyzes. In an additional analysis, this paper observes the interaction effect between these two traits is strengthened if the board chair is religious, and persists even for larger firms or those with a highly concentrated ownership structure.

The paper provides evidence that may serve a variety of decision-makers. It is the first to show that the interaction between religiosity and expertise is crucial in curbing REM. It also provides the first evidence for the role of the AC chair in relation to REM.