Audit Committee Attributes and Financial Performance of Insurance Firms in Nigeria

Abstract

The study investigated the effect of audit committee characteristics on the financial performance of firms listed under insurance sector, on the Nigerian stock exchange group covering 2017 to 2021. The study set out four objectives that includes examining the impact of audit committee independence, audit committee size, audit committee gender diversity and audit committee meeting on the return on assets of insurance firms in Nigeria. Ex post facto research design was adopted as suitable which allowed the study to gather secondary data from annual reports of the firms. The insurance sector has twenty three firms listed under it from which seven were chosen as the sample size on the basis of judgment of the researcher. The data were analysed with the descriptive statistics, correlation and regression analysis. The results show that audit committee meeting and audit committee independence have negative and no significant effect on financial performance of insurance firms. Again audit committee size has positive no significant impact but audit committee gender diversity has positive and statistical significant impact on financial performance of Nigerian insurance firms at 5% level. The study recommends amongst others that larger percentage of the audit committee members should be drawn from women gender to maximally utilize the potentials inherent in them that drive financial performance.