ARE BUSY AUDIT COMMITTEES EFFECTIVE MONITORS? EVIDENCE FROM FINANCIAL REPORTING QUALITY

10.6293/AQAFA.201912_(17).0005

Kiridaran Kanagaretnam；Khondkar Karim；SangHyun Suh

Busy Committees ； Reporting Quality ； Accrual Quality ； Accounting Conservatism ； Restatements ； Audit Committee

Advances in Quantitative Analysis of Finance and Accounting

17期（2019 / 12 / 31）

123 - 161

英文

We examine the implications of busy audit committee members (i.e., audit committee members serving on multiple committees of the same board) on financial reporting quality. Audit committee busyness is operationalized through a continuous variable that captures the average number of other committee assignments taken on by audit committee members and an indicator variable in two different combinations (membership in audit committee in addition to one or more, and two or more other committee assignments within the same board). We use three widely accepted measures of financial reporting quality: accrual quality, accounting conservatism, and restatements. In addition, we examine the effects of information enhancing role of accruals. We find that an increase in audit committee busyness is positively associated with higher levels of accruals and higher estimation errors in accruals. We also find that an increase in audit committee busyness is associated with less accounting conservatism. However, our results for restatements are somewhat weak-we find a strong negative relation between our continuous measure of audit committee busyness and restatements, but this result does not hold for the busyness measures based on discrete variables. Additionally, we find that an increase in audit committee busyness reduces the predictive ability of accounting accruals. Given that transparent financial reporting is critical for effective governance, our results show the link between reduced monitoring effectiveness of busy audit committee members and several dimensions of financial reporting quality. These results will be informative to governance practitioners and regulators.

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