Proceedings

expertise which could control the management of the accounting result (Bedard et al.,
2004; Yang & Krishnan, 2005). As a consequence, the level of expertise, and
especially the accounting expertise of audit committee’s members, does represent an
important element in preventing the results manipulation which will influence the
quality of the financial information. The reliability of financial information is thus
considered a fundamental attribute depending on a series of factors. The mere
presence of the audit committee is able to improve both the financial information
reliability (fewer accounting irregularities and cases of results manipulations) and its
relevance.
As a conclusion of this second part of the paper, I appreciate that audit committee’s
role is not one neutral to the quality of audit process and of financial information. So,
audit committee could play a very important role for mitigating agency problem. It
could also replace many deficiencies of a particular company which are the causes of
agency problem. Deficiency may be lack of independence of external auditor or lack
of efficiency in the internal control systems. Although audit committees could not
have prevented the financial scandals, the empirical research studies confer to those
committees a certain effectiveness and usefulness for company’s governance systems.
The members of audit committees should cultivate closes relations with the CEO and
the CFO, with internal and external auditors in order to solve the difficulties and
shortcomings. Therefore, it is imperative for audit committees’ members to be
informed of all significant matters relating to financial reporting. The prevention of
accounting errors and frauds depends on audit committee’s characteristics. However,
a fully independent audit committee does not succeed in entirely eliminating
fraudulent financial reporting.
3. THE QUALITY OF AUDIT COMMITY IN CONDITIONS OF AGENCY
THEORY AND INFORMATION ASYMMETRY
The researches on audit committee’s role and on financial information quality get new
meanings for positive theories. On this line, this paper retains the agency theory and
the information asymmetry. Financial information’s characteristics are strongly
linked, in this case, to interest conflicts arising between actors involved in the
economic process. Auditing is a solution to information asymmetry problems which
occur between managers and shareholders or between managers and the others.
Jensen and Meckling (1976) start their research from the hypothesis that auditing
represents a monitoring activity contributing to the increase of company’s value. On
the basis of its role as corporate governance’s mechanism, auditing is focused on the
reduction of agency costs (Jensen & Meckling, 1976; Fama & Jensen, 1983) and on
guarantying information’s reliability and relevance to the information’s users. This
information is supposed to correspond to the true and fair view. Research demarches
started, usually, from the premise that economic actors do not have a free access to
financial information. The consequences of this observation highlight the idea that
information itself has a cost. Information available on market is partial and
asymmetric. The theory of information asymmetry is based on Akerlof’s study (1970)
which “analyses buyers and sellers’ behavior by abandoning the hypothesis of perfect
information in order to suppose consumer’s uncertainty regarding the quality of
purchased goods” (Raimbourg, 1997: 190). The hypothesis of information asymmetry
is strongly linked to the agency theory and to the existence of agency relations. The
agency theory was established by Jensen and Meckling in 1976. The authors offered a
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