The Relationship between Audit Committee Characteristics, Audit Firm Quality and Companies’ Profitability

Abstract

Jordan displayed keen interest in corporate governance in terms of enhancing the quality of financial statements and to restore the investors’ confidence. This study aimed to highlight the role of audit committee and external audit in enhancing companies’ profitability. Since there are contradictions in previous studies results, there is a need to test these relationships in Jordanian context to provide empirical evidence on this issue,especially after the corporate governance application became mandatory since 2009. This study has used industrial sector, which include 91 companies, only 69 companies were included in this study, the other 22 companies were excluded either newly listed or delisted during the study period (2009-2014). Multiple regression were used to analyze the data, the result showed positive relationships between audit committee meeting, audit committee size and companies profitability, while no significant relationship between audit committee composition, audit committee members literacy, audit quality and companies profitability. Such results would be beneficial to companies’ corporate governance committees to play their supervisory role.