Interaction between Audit Committee and Internal Audit: Evidence from Tunisia

The role of the audit committee and internal audit in corporate governance has grown in recent years. In this context, the audit literature and practice have underlined the increasingly important role of support and interaction between audit committee and internal audit with the aim to improve the corporate governance quality. The purpose of this paper is to examine the relationship between the audit committee and the internal audit as well as the impact of audit committee characteristics on this relationship in the Tunisian context. Data was collected by means of a questionnaire addressed to the chief internal auditors of 50 Tunisian firms. The regression results suggest that expertise and frequency of meetings of audit committee have a positive impact on audit committee interaction with internal audit, while the size of the audit committee affects negatively this interaction. However, audit committee independence has no effect on audit committee relation with internal audit.