**1. Introduction**

The aim of this paper is to analyse the interconnection between corporate governance characteristics and the violation of the annual report submission deadline in private micro-, small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). According to the theory of upper echelons, managers' experiences, values and responsibilities condition firms' decisions, strategy and even their performance (Hambrick and Mason 1984). One responsibility of the board of directors is the timely submission of firms' compulsory accounting information in order to make it public and accessible for the decision-making of firms' stakeholders. It has been established that board composition is associated with the transparency, correctness and timeliness of financial reporting (Beasley 1996; Abdelsalam and Street 2007; Hermalin and Weisbach 2012).

Prior studies suggest that high levels of corporate governance may reduce managers' earnings manipulations and the tendency to commit fraud, and help to achieve higher levels of information transparency or even condition credit ratings (Ashbaugh-Skaife et al. 2006; Prior et al. 2008; Scholtens and Kang 2013; Liu et al. 2017). However, most of the literature is focused on corporate governance and financial reporting disclosure practices in public and large firms (Carslaw and Kaplan 1991; Abernathy et al. 2014; Lim et al. 2014; Efobi and Okougbo 2014; Spiers 2018; Bae et al. 2018), which could be conditioned by agency problems and disagreeing objectives among shareholders in such firms. Still, reporting disclosure is also relevant for private SMEs

(Clatworthy and Peel 2016). Much of this concern stems from the recognition that small firms serve as an engine of economic growth and innovation around the world (Cowling et al. 2015).

Corporate governance and accounting information disclosure violation, but also their interconnections, are different between public and private firms. In SMEs, board and owners often overlap, and thus, different functions of these two corporate governance levels are consolidated (Gabrielsson and Huse 2005; Brunninge et al. 2007). The incentives to disclose information vary across stakeholders (Berglöf and Pajuste 2005), and even across shareholders. Consequently, the concept of corporate governance of SMEs differs from listed firms (Uhlaner et al. 2007; Voordeckers et al. 2014). Large companies are more concerned about market behaviour than private ones, which in turn are more tax-oriented (Brunninge et al. 2007) and have lower scrutiny as many of them are not audited (Höglund and Sundvik 2019). In this sense, Östberg (2006) posits that disclosure is a form of minority protection that decreases the scope of extracting private benefits by controlling shareholders. Non-audited private SMEs also need to have the information ready for creditors (Collis 2008; Peek et al. 2010). Indeed, small firms may face difficulties in accessing formal financing due to their informational opacity (Ortiz-Molina and Penas 2008). Managers of SMEs can choose, which information to divulge and which to contain, whether to present it timely or not and if it is accurate or biased information (Hoskisson et al. 1994). Thus, opportunistic information disclosure behaviours could appear more likely in SMEs.

The context of this research is Estonia, which is considered to be one of the most advanced digital societies in the world, and consequently, permits full access to SMEs' information. The Estonian legislative system and institutions are harmonized with EU regulations, which increases the comparability of Estonian SMEs with firms with similar sizes from other EU countries. Our dataset is composed of 77,212 Estonian private SMEs, using data procured from the Estonian Business Register (EBR), which contains firms' annual reports (compulsory once per year) and up to date information about firms' boards and owners. With logistic regression analysis, we show which corporate governance characteristics, representing three distinct corporate governance dimensions, increase or decrease the likelihood of violating the legal deadline set for annual report submission.

The paper contributes to the literature by presenting an original conceptual framework for the corporate governance dimensions affecting SMEs' risk behaviour, specifically timely annual report submission violation. Only a few previous studies explore corporate governance variables in the SME context (Spiers 2017). In addition, violation of annual report submission deadlines is a rarely studied topic in the case of SMEs (Lukason and Camacho-Miñano 2019).

We show that corporate governance can be used to explain annual report submission deadline violations in the SME context. Thus, this paper fills the major gap in prior research with respect to how corporate governance can affect firms' behaviour in the SME context (Li et al. 2020). For private SMEs, earlier studies have used a limited number of corporate governance factors (e.g., the number of board members), partly due to the difficulty of accessing such data. In this study, the factual corporate governance information was obtained directly from the business register, not from questionnaires as in most of the studies. Concerning annual reports, the bulk of the literature concentrates on the time of disclosure, not on the violation (Luypaert et al. 2016; Lukason and Camacho-Miñano 2019), which is the approach of this study. In addition, the institutional context has been suggested as an important issue due to the necessity of cross-cultural governance research (Uhlaner et al. 2007). According to La Porta et al. (1999), governance issues differ from one context to another, and Estonia's context is different from the Anglo-Saxon countries, based on which most of the studies have been composed so far.

The paper is structured as follows. First, the literature review section outlines corporate governance dimensions being potentially associated with timely annual report submission violation and outlines the literature-based expectations concerning the interconnections between the latter and specific corporate governance variables. Then, the study's sample, variables and method sections are presented. This is followed by empirical results, robustness tests, and discussion. Finally, the study concludes

this research arguing its main implications and limitations, while suggestions for future research are also provided.
