An audit committee is viewed as an essential self-regulatory internal governance instrument that is expected to provide an overseeing role over the entire process of financial reporting. It is also one of the corporate governance cornerstones that is essential for the effective monitoring of the...

Section 301 of SOX implicitly assumes that audit committees can independently determine audit fees. Critics of Section 301 have questioned this assumption, in particular, and the efficacy of Section 301, more generally. In response, the SEC issued a concept release in 2015 calling for public...

Recent post-SOX studies have consistently found that the presence of audit committee (AC) directors with multiple directorships is associated with lower financial reporting quality. An implicit assumption of these studies is that AC directors distribute their effort equally across all their...

The objective of this paper is to examine empirically the consequences for financial reporting quality of having audit committees that include problem directors, i.e. directors with prior involvement in corporate bankruptcies, major accounting restatements or other accounting scandals. An...

Financial scandals in developed countries such as the USA and the UK have highlighted the need for greater transparency and credibility in order to protect shareholders and stakeholders alike. It has been argued that the audit committee (AC) is a key mechanism for achieving this transparency and...

This paper aims to explore the role of audit committees (ACs) in the Libyan banking sector (LBS) and to investigate the impact on AC practice of the sector’s recent shift to an Islamic banking system. Little is known about the role of these committees, which were only made compulsory in Libya...

Our study is motivated by the theory of credence goods in the auditing setting. We propose that audit committee accounting expertise should reduce information asymmetries between the auditor and the client, thereby limiting auditors' ability to over-audit and under-audit. Consistent with this...

In recent years we have been inundated with news of corporations under investigation because of questionable accounting practices. In the worst case scenarios, companies have gone bankrupt and ceased to exist because of lack of oversight and controls. Greedy high-level executives have lived a...

Regulatory pressure to increase both audit committee financial expertise and board independence has resulted in lower status for audit committees relative to management. This status differential is relevant because expertise and relative status are important determinants of each party's ability...

This study focuses on U.S. shareholder derivative cases in which Audit Committee members were defendants. Three grounds for Audit Committee liability were alleged in those cases: (1) violation of the Fiduciary Duties of Care, Loyalty or Good Faith, which may include failure to provide proper...