The Audit Committee as Component of Corporate Governance

Abstract

Recently, numerous financial scandals (WorldCom, Enron, Parmalat, eToys) have shown that plentiful companies produce manipulated financial information. Consequently, regulators have prescribed corporate governance structures to protect investors and to avoid fraudulent financial reporting which are likely to control managers and limit their opportunistic behavior. Thus, there has been much debate over the extent to which corporate governance is playing a crucial role in increasing financial reporting quality from the theoretical perspective of agency theory, signaling theory, and stakeholder theory. This chapter aims at scrutinizing the internal and external mechanisms of corporate governance mainly the audit committee in the Dutch context. Firstly, the authors expose the numerous corporate governance mechanisms. Secondly, they focus on the audit committee as the main component of corporate governance, and they present the theoretical background, the role, and the characteristics of audit committee. Eventually, they exhibit the regulatory background of the Dutch context of the audit committee.