Audit Committee Interaction with the Internal Audit Function: Evidence from Tunisia

Abstract

The role of the audit committee and the internal audit function in corporate governance has grown in recent years. In that context, the audit literature and practice has underlined the increasingly important role of support and interaction between the audit committee and the internal audit with the aim to improve the corporate governance quality.The purpose of this paper is to examine the relationship between the audit committee and the internal audit function as well as the impact of audit committee characteristics on this relationship in the Tunisian context.Data were collected by means of a questionnaire addressed to chief internal auditors of 50 Tunisian firms. The regression results suggest that the expertise and frequency of meetings of the audit committee have a positive impact on audit committee interaction with internal audit, while the size of the audit committee affects negatively this interaction. However, audit committee independence has no effect on audit committee relation with the internal audit function