AUDIT COMMITTEE CHARACTERISTICS AND ENVIRONMENTAL DISCLOSURE QUALITY AMONG MALAYSIAN ENVIRONMENTALLY SENSITIVE INDUSTRIES

This study is conducted i) to examine the level of environmental disclosure quality (EDQ) among environmentally sensitive industries (ESI) and ii) to determine the relationship between the Size, Independence, Meeting Frequency, Financial Expertise and Legal Background of audit committee (AC) and the EDQ among ESI for the year 2016. By using the purposive sampling technique, 237 final samples of ESI are selected from 938 companies listed on Bursa Malaysia. For the first objective, the results from this study found that only 45.42% of ESI are disclosed about environmental quality. While for second objective, only size of audit committee has a positive significant impact towards the environmental disclosure quality, the other for variables found that not affect the dependent variable. The limitation of this study is focusing on a single year; it only provides a snapshot of environmental disclosure. Furthermore, there are also lacks of terms in determining the criteria of each element in the index. Thus, this has caused the difficulties in determine the rating score and might have different results because the justification is based on the researchers' own judgment. This study would be significant to the related regulatory bodies to develop new requirement in inculcate and increase the awareness about the environmental disclosure to all public listed companies especially the ESIs. (C) 2020 Published by European Publisher.