The Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 accentuates the audit committee’s role in corporate
governance. SOX states that audit committee members are important monitors of the company’s
financial reporting process (U.S. House of Representatives 2002). In this paper, we investigate how the busyness of pivotal members of the audit committee, namely the audit committee chair and the
audit committee accounting and financial expert, impacts the audit committee’s monitoring
performance.
Our results indicate that both busy audit committee chairs and busy audit committee financial
experts are associated with lower financial reporting quality. However, we do not find any
significant association between financial reporting quality and the busyness of audit committee
members who are neither the audit committee chair nor the audit committee financial expert.
Although our results suggest that relying on overcommitted audit committee chairs and financial
experts may negatively affect financial reporting quality, we are reluctant to recommend mandating
limits on the number of audit committees an audit committee chairman or financial expert can be a
chair or financial expert. Each audit committee chair or audit committee financial expert is different.
The overall busyness of the audit committee chair or financial expert may be influenced by the
individual director’s characteristics and the companies on which they are board members