The Corporate Governance Role of Audit Committees: Through the Lenses of New Zealand Institutional Investors

This paper explores how directors of New Zealand institutional investor entities perceive the role of audit committees in their investee firms. We find that perceptions of audit committee mechanisms by directors of New Zealand institutional investor entities are distinct in terms of: (1) the directors’ knowledge of audit committee mechanisms; (2) directors’ evaluation of the governance role of audit committees; and (3) whether and how audit committees in investee firms affect the investment decisions of institutional investors. We argue that the identities of directors and contextualising events may have contributed to the discrete views taken by the directors of New Zealand institutional investor entities. We use institutional theory and discourse analysis to design and analyse the interviews. Our paper presents evidence from New Zealand, where the adoption of audit committees has been largely driven by regulatory changes overseas. Findings from this paper may be of interest to regulators, researchers and practitioners to make informed comparisons with observations from other countries in examining the function of audit committees and in evaluating the implications of corporate governance regulatory changes. Regulators and other corporate governance stakeholders may benefit from this paper by reflecting on the reciprocal influence between an audit committee and the institutionalisation of governance practices.