Role Effectiveness of Audit Committees’ Comparative Analysis between UK and Egypt
Abstract
In recent years, academic attention on internal audit and corporate governance has grown very much,
especially due to the collapse of many corporations around the world. Also, another motivation for this
increase in studies is related to the evolving and expanding role of internal audit as a major corporate
governance mechanism but also as an internal consultancy service. Thus, since during the last years
corporate governance has received very much attention (due to its importance), not only from regulators
but also from scholars, resulting in highlighting the significance of the internal audit, this research
focuses on changes in the internal audit conditioned by the corporate governance. The main goal of this
paper is to chart the similarities and differences, evolution and possible direction of audit committees
across the two board structures widespread today within Europe. In this respect, an empirical study of
audit committees across the UK, and Egypt will be performed. This is to encompass the unitary board
perspective prevalent in the UK, the dual-board perspective prevalent in Egypt. To assess the
similarities and differences of audit committees, a total of 6 companies and their annual reports were
analysed. The companies reviewed were selected from high capitalisation indexes in the relative
countries: The FTSE-100 for the UK and the EGX- 30 for Egypt.
Keywords: Audit committees, Corporate governance, Egypt, Internal audit, UK.
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