تاثیر خبرگی کمیته حسابرسی بر کیفیت حسابرسی: شواهد از انگلستان The impact of audit committee expertise on audit quality: Evidence from UK audit fees

1. INTRODUCTION The past twenty five years have witnessed a renewed focus on the governance of companies, motivated largely by a number of high-profile corporate failures, many subsequently found to possess either weak or non-existent governance structures. The almost universal response has been the introduction of stronger governance in the hope that this will serve both to prevent unacceptable behaviour and increase the external transparency of what companies do and how they do it. In an effort to enhance the quality of firms’ governance, audit committees have been identified as an important mechanism through which the quality of financial reporting can be enhanced (Sarbanes Oxley, 2002; UK Corporate Governance Code, 2003-2016). A key component of current governance recommendations in the UK is that audit committees should possess at least one member with “recent and relevant financial experience” (UK Corporate Governance Code, 2016: C.3.1). Broadly similar provisions apply elsewhere with, for example, Section 407 of the Sarbanes Oxley Act 2002 (SOX) in the USA also stipulating that at least one member should be a financial expert. Running parallel to the evolution of audit committee governance, academic research has sought to understand the use and usefulness of various audit committee characteristics with a particular emphasis on whether these characteristics influence audit quality (Zaman, Hudaib & Haniffa, 2011; Chan, Liu & Sun, 2013; Cohen, Hoitash, Krishnamoorthy & Wright, 2014). As discussed by Armstrong, Guay & Weber (2010) and Ghafran & O’Sullivan (2013), much of this research has been motivated by the emergence of increased governance regulation and the identification of a number of characteristics that governance regulators have deemed necessary to achieve greater audit committee effectiveness. As DeFond & Zhang (2014) note in the context of audit committee changes introduced in the USA by SOX, the required changes attempt to increase audit quality by improving client governance and thereby increasing client demand for audit quality.