Three more committees sat in the UK before a revised Combined Code was published in 2003. The first of these committees was the result of the UK government wishing to extend the remit of its Company Law Review and an acknowledgement of the globalization of financial markets. lt was probably the first time that the collapse of a company in one country precipitated such a wide-ranging enquiry in another. The subsequent report of the Higgs Committee (2003) dealt with the responsibilities of non-executive directors, with recommendations that ‘at least half the board’ should be made up of non-executive directors and that they should be paid at a rate commensurate with the additional responsibility. At the same time as the Higgs Committee was sitting, the government asked the FRC to consider the particular role of audit committees within the governance framework and the relationship that they should have with the company's external auditor