This study aimed to examine the characteristics of audit committees (ACs) on the short delay in issuing audit reports. Using data for 97 companies in the industrial and service sectors in the Jordanian context, for the period between 2017 and 2021. The results of this study showed that the independence of ACs has an important and negative impact on reducing the delay in issuing financial reporting (FR). However, the study did not find the importance of the rest of the characteristics related to ACs to reduce the delay in issuing audit reports between Jordanian companies. The study concluded that the mechanisms of corporate governance in Jordanian companies are not effective, compared to the more developed countries. Thus, policy makers are supposed to enforce governance practices in Jordanian companies in substance, rather than simply adhering to practices in form.

Construction projects more often are facing with unpredictable delays and it is one of the biggest challenges to mitigate such delays. The aim of the present study is to explore causes and effects of delays on construction projects executed in Pakistan. Empirical methodology is used and the data is collected from 37 construction companies and questionnaires are distributed to 172 professionals. Various statistical tools are applied such as multiple regression to analyze the data. The finding of this analysis show that significant causes of delay factors are associated and ordered as contractor, client, consultant, material and equipment respectively; however, there is not any effect of delay on factors such as, labor and general environment. Finally, it is analyzed that construction projects delay lead considerably to project time overrun, cost overrun, project abandonment, and litigation. All these factors can bring projects on great risk. The analysis of the study gave considerable under-standings to stakeholders of construction projects in order to formulate strategies to overcome delay and their impacts.

Delay is one of the most common causes of construction projects failure in Iran. The larger sizes of the projects, the more risks and costs of delays. In this paper, the causes of delays in EPC contracts of nonindustrial buildings were excavated from the related previous research and several interviews with experts of this subject, and adjusted by the brainstorming technique, Delphi and reconciling the nature of these projects. Then, a questionnaire was distributed among 52 experts working in the South Pars project, and the data were analyzed by descriptive and factor analysis methods. Descriptive analysis revealed that “Inflation and escalation of material prices and human resources salaries”, “Unrealistic contract duration and requirements imposed” and “Political situation” were the most significant delay factors. Meanwhile, factor analysis indicates that “Improper construction methods”, “Shortage of experienced and skilled labor” and “Long acceptance process (shop drawings, permits, tests and samples)” were the most important causes of delay.

The single machine scheduling problem aims at obtaining the best sequence for a set of jobs in a manufacturing system with a single machine. In this paper, we optimize rewards in single machine scheduling in rewards-driven systems such that total reward is maximized while the constraints contains of limitation in total rewards for earliness and learning, independent of earliness and learning and etc. are satisfied. In mentioned systems as for earliness and learning the bonus is awarded to operators, we consider only rewards in mentioned systems and it will not be penalized under any circumstances. Our objective is to optimize total rewards in mentioned system by taking the rewards in the form of quadratic for both learning and earliness. The recently-developed sequential quadratic programming (SQP), is used by solve the problem. Results show that SQP had satisfactory performance in terms of optimum solutions, number of iterations, infeasibility and optimality error. Finally, a sensitivity analysis is performed on the change rate of the objective function obtained based on the change rate of the “amount of earliness for jobs (Ei parameter)”.