The Quality of Audit Process: An Empirical Study with Audit Committees‪.‬

I. INTRODUCTION Audit constitutes a solution information asymmetry problem between the leaders and the shareholders or between the leaders and the other third contracting parties. As a mechanism of governance, it has for main role to reduce agency costs and to reassure the shareholders and third party contractors concerning the reliability of the financial information communicated. Nevertheless, the quality of audit is not uniform and especially not directly apparent. The audit process is very complex and hardly observable by third parties and the audit report (the result of an audit) is so standardised in its content and format that it offers a only few possibilities for differentiation (Wooten, 2003). Generally, a higher quality audit is reliant, as part of its mandate, on an ability to reduce existing anomalies and failures. However, the majority of studies on audit quality were contented to extrapolate the "audit quality" by the "auditor quality" (De Angelo, 1981a; Citron and Taffler, 1992; Carcello et al., 1992). The audit quality approach is therefore determined by the auditor's ability, as much intellectually as through resources, to detect potential inadequacies in the audit system (detection quality) and to give an account of the "discoveries" highlighted during that work (discovery quality) (1). Because of the difficulties in observing the audit process, the majority of studies concentrate on the research of substitutes for audit quality using an indirect evaluation approach. These substitutes being perceived by the market as related to the intrinsic characteristics of these two concepts (Venkataraman, R and al; 2008; Krishnan and Schauer, 2000; Kaplan, 1995).