| Listed companies play an important role in our national economy, but there are many governance issues. These governance issues of listed companies furthermore influent the quality of financial reporting, audit opinion types and internal control quality, etc. These will influent the judgments and decisions making such as investors. Thus the governance of listed companies becomes the focus of the society. The audit committee system was established in the tenet of seeking an independent financial management power in the board of directors, in order to perfect the governance structure of a company, strengthen internal control, ensure the independence of the external auditor, and strengthen the financial report information authenticity and reliability. The audit committee of western countries founded much earlier than our country and the governance effects were quite obvious, which proved its necessity and effectiveness as an important company governance institutional arrangement. China officially introduced the audit committee system in 2002, and the listed companies responded positively to the audit committee system. So far, most of the listed companies have established the audit committee system, and the focuses of its industry have been transferred to operation and management effectiveness's point of view. The problems that which aspects the audit committee has played a role in and to what extent play a role are needed to be clear.The empirical research from the angle of audit committee characteristics is rare throughout the domestic existing research. As for corporate governance and regulatory attention, the quality of financial reporting of listed companies in our country has improved in a certain degree, but there still exists problems such as financial fraud, surplus management act and so on, which directly affects the quality of the financial report. So what the influences the audit committee characteristics have to the quality of financial reporting is a worth exploring problem. The audit committee was endowed with the duties to hire, change and supervise external auditor duties, so how the audit committee characteristics affect the audit opinion types is worth further exploring. In addition, the listed company's internal control problem has been one of the important research areas. Under the background, to research the relationship with audit committee characteristics and the quality of internal control provides a new angle for internal control research.This paper will systematically analyze the general theory of the audit committee, emphatically analyze the audit committee features and the connotation of governance effects, review the current situation of the development about the audit committee of the listed companies in China, and summarize the directly and indirectly governance effects of the audit committee. Based on the audit committee characteristics perspective, this paper will use listed companies experience data to test the governance effects about audit committee from three aspects of the quality of financial reporting, audit opinion types and internal control quality. The results show that the audit committee's size has significant positive correlation relationship with the quality of financial reporting, and the audit opinion types a significant negative correlation. Independence has significant positive correlation relationship with the internal control quality and audit opinion types. Stability has significant negative correlation relationship with the quality of financial reporting and internal control quality. Professional does not through the significant inspection. Finally, this paper will put forward some suggestions according to the empirical conclusions, with the hope of perfecting audit committee of listed companies and gaining the ideal governance effects.These explorations will enrich the research on the governance effects of audit committee from perspective of audit committee characteristics, so as to provide beneficial reference to subsequent research of the audit committee. In addition, China's current audit committee system has not been enforced in practice, and the audit committee characteristics have many internal differences. This paper systematically analyzes and tests the governance effects of audit committee using the data of listed companies of different characteristics. The research conclusions have certain enlightening significance for audit committee of listed companies and the corporate governance in China.The innovation of this paper places are mainly two points:One is that this paper studies the governance effects of audit committee based on audit committee characteristics' view. In addition to consider the audit committee scale, independence and professional characteristics, this paper joins the audit committee stability as one of the characteristics. The other is that this paper tries to define the connotation of governance effects on theoretical definition and to quantitative measure it, and to introduce the quality of internal control as measure of the governance effects about audit committee of listed companies.The limitations of this research are three:first, due to the Shanghai stock exchange fails to annually assess the information disclosure rating, this paper only selects the listed companies of the Shenzhen stock exchange as the research objects and fails to inspect and analyze the listed companies in stock markets of Shanghai and Shenzhen contrastively. Second, because the audit committee internal operation information disclosure of listed companies is still in the voluntary stage, without obtaining the meeting data of the audit committee, this paper fails to test the governance effects of the activity characteristic. Third, Because of the small sample size for each year, this paper just do a mixture of full sample test not the sub-annual comparison test. |
