| In the end of the last century, our country's financial fraud cases happened one after another, which shows the governance structure of listed companies in China is in chaos. In such a difficult situation, our country introduced audit committee in a single governance structure from Britain and the United States in 2002. But whether the audit committee is suitable to the local situation of our country and can it improve the quality of financial statements and play a supervisory role of management? Domestic scholars are still controversial about this problem. The original intention of setting up the audit committee was to facilitate Securities and Futures Commission authority to look for a powerful corporate governance, supervise the independence of auditors and ensure the quality of financial information. Therefore, this paper analyzes the validity of the establishment of the audit committee and the characteristics of the organization from the point of view of the type of audit opinion.By using the Principal-Agent Theory and Signaling Theory, the author analyzes the role of the Audit Committee in corporate governance and its existing defects .At the basis of theoretical analysis, this paper makes an empirical analysis about the data of the listed companies in our country from 2005 to 2007, and arrives at some conclusions. Firstly, whether to establish a audit committee is not significantly related to the audit opinion; secondly, the duration of the audit committee is not significantly related to the audit opinion; thirdly, the professional characters of the audit committee which include accounting experts and candidates for chairperson is, to some extent, conducive to improving the audit opinion, but its independence and scale is not significantly related to the audit opinion.To some extent, the audit committee is playing an important part in the supervision of financial performance and giving a full play to the specialty of accounting experts. But on the whole, the establishment of the audit committee failed to significantly improve the quality of the financial statements of listed companies and its function has not yet been fully, which is attributed to the relevant departments' insufficient attention to the audit committee. So far, there has not yet been a law about the audit committee. Therefore, it has been recommended that the audit committee of the listed companies in our country should be standardized and improved in terms of law and regulations, governance environment and the characteristics of the audit committee itself. |
