committee that meet at least twice a year are more likely to employ industry specialist
auditors. Carcello and Neal (2000) explained a negative relationship between the numbers of
affiliated directors in the audit committee and the likelihood of auditors in issuing goingconcern
audit reports. In disagreement to the evidence that is informed by Carcello et al.
(2006), Abbott et al. (2003) declare that the existence of an independent audit committee and
equipped with financial expertise is positively related with audit quality. In their additional
analysis, Carcello and Neal (2003) illustrated that the independent audit committee attached
with financial expertise is more effective in supporting the auditor against dismissal after the
issuance of new going-concern audit reports. In another study, Krishnan and Visvanathan,
(2008) showed a positive association between number of audit committee meetings and a
higher audit quality. Meixner and Welker (1988) found that effective audit committee is less
likely to maintain the same auditors as long as auditors to present lower earnings
management. Indeed, audit committee who have long-lasting association with external
auditors, will engender a higher level of dependence and confidence between the external
auditor and the manager of firms. As a result, this long tenure augments the earnings
management. However, Bedard et al. (2004), Liu and Sun (2010) and Kim and Yang (2014)
showed that the long-tenured directors of the committee are negatively associated to earnings
management because of their task knowledge and experience resulting in effective monitoring
role.
García-Meca and Sánchez-Ballesta (2009) and Lin and Hwang (2010), in their meta-analysis,
concluded that the size, independence, financial expertise and frequency meetings of audit
committee is significantly related with lower earnings management. However, it is apparent
that the simple presence of an audit committee, itself does not guarantee the anticipated
advantages. They declared that the size, tenure, independence and specialization of auditor
positively associate with earnings quality.
Summary, extant empirical studies that examines the association between an effective
audit committee, audit quality and earnings quality is varied and provided mixed
findings. Therefore, we propose the following hypotheses for empirical testing: