Audit Committees

Our study has enabled us to demonstrate that the invention of the audit committee constitutes, mainly for the United States and secondarily for France, a solution to a crisis of confidence in the financial markets as to the quality of internal control, accounting information and external audit. This explains the gradual enrichment of the recommendations relating to audit committees in order to make them effective governance mechanisms. If the Audit Committee has been a solution to restore and maintain market confidence in the United States and France, the importation of the practice of the Audit Committee in Tunisia seems to be less related to the fact that the Audit Committee was considered as a solution to confidence problems than to the fact that the legislator felt the need to establish an Audit Committee to comply with the expectations of local and foreign investors in terms of corporate governance and thus results in an insufficient and unclear legal contour for an effective practice of the Audit Committee.