The Impact of Board Activity on The Audit Committee’s Effectiveness Score: Empirical Evidence from Saudi Arabia

The aim of this study is to examine the impact of board of directors’ activity on the audit committee’s effectiveness score among manufactured listed companies on Saudi Stock Exchange (Tadawul) for the period 2015-2017. The final sample of this study consists of 195 firm-year observations that represent manufactured companies listed on Saudi Stock Exchange (Tadawul) for the years 2015-2017. The data of this study in terms of board of directors’ meetings, audit committee size and meetings, firm leverage, firm performance, and firm age were hand-collected from the annual reports of the considered companies. The Pooled OLS regression’s result indicate that audit committee’s effectiveness score is influenced by the board of directors’ activity. This result gives support to the agency theory prediction. This result is also consistent with the complementary function of corporate governance mechanisms in which board of directors’ activity complements the function of audit committee’s effectiveness score. The result of this study should be useful for manufacturing companies, Saudi Stock Exchange, auditors, and regulators which relates to the association between board of directors’ activity and audit committee’s effectiveness score. This study provides a new empirical evidence on the impact of board activity on the audit committee’s effectiveness score in an interesting context which is Saudi Arabia.