Fonctionnement et efficacité du comité d’audit : une analyse des interactions entre les participants

This research tries to understand audit committee’s working and effectiveness. It aims to open the audit committee black box by analyzing the interactions between participants. The approach is comprehensive, based on analysis of 59 interviews with attendees of 32 CAC 40 companies’ audit committees. Impression management is a central phenomenon in such committee’s meetings. The risk of losing face, which is not felt in the same way by the attendees depending on their status, is a central motivation for this phenomenon. Directors perceive a risk that their impressions are cynically managed. Then they have a double strategy of comforting themselves and of putting their partners at ease. Audit committee’s chairman is a central actor in this strategy. Interactions between attendees are the consequences of these strategic behaviours. Trust relationships could develop; they are the fruit of implicit negotiations. Audit committee’s effectiveness expresses itself by a reflexive social control: the actors who report to the committee criticize themselves. Risk leads them to self-discipline; Trust leads them to follow directors’ suggestions. In fact, audit committee’s working and effectiveness are understood as the results of implicit negotiations between participants during their interactions: between trust and risk, between transparency and opacity, between tact and power.