À quoi servent les comités d'audit ?. Un regard sur la recherche empirique

Considering corporate governance as a monitoring device, this paper provides a conceptual framework to analyse the consequences of audit committees in terms of audit process quality (indirect effects) and financial reporting quality (direct effects). A thorough analysis of empirical research then makes it possible to assess the main contributions of audit committees, as well as the effectiveness of these structures. Broadly speaking, it comes out that audit committee?s independence often contributes to the quality of the external audit and to the reliability of accounting data (with nuances) ; and that the committee?s financial expertise promotes the reliability of internal control and the relevance of financial reports. Hence, independence and expertise seem to complete each other to achieve audit committee effectiveness. Limits and proposals for future research are finally discussed.