L’impact de la présence des comités d’audit sur la performance financière des entreprises tunisiennes

The Audit Committee plays a crucial role in protecting the interests of shareholders and other stakeholders. In fact, its effectiveness is dependent on its characteristics that relate primarily to the independence of its members, the size of the committee, the frequency of meetings and the expertise of the members of the audit committee. Indeed, we have tried to capture the effect of the characteristics of the audit committee on financial performance measured by Return On Assets (ROA) and Return On Equity (ROE). To test the validity of our hypothesis, which states the existence of a certain determinism characteristic of the audit committee on financial performance measured by ROA and ROE, we have developed two models of linear regressions. In the same furrow, we examine the effect of audit committee characteristics at each of the endogenous variables taking into account the impact of firm size and the level of debt. Our empirical validation was conducted on a sample of 26 Tunisian firms listed on the stock exchange in Tunis (Tunis Stock Exchange) over a period which lasts 4 years (2007-2010). The estimated models show satisfactory results showing the importance of the impact of the characteristics of the audit committee on the financial performance of Tunisian companies.