Title: The relationship between Key Audit Matters and Audit Committees: A quantitative study on 310 Swedish companies.
Level: Master Programme in Business Administration, Accounting.
Author: Albin Eriksson and Emilia Thunell
Supervisor: Asif M Huq
Date: 2023 - May
Aim: The purpose of this thesis is to see how the quality of the audit committee relates to the number of key audit matters in the audit report. The quality of the audit committee will be determined through meeting frequency, independence in the audit committee, size of the committee, diversity in the committee, if the members are getting remuneration explicit for being in the audit committee, how many words that describe the work of the audit committee in the annual reports, and if the committee is separated from the board of directors, so-called dedicated.
Method: This is a quantitative study that has been conducted with descriptive statistics, correlation analysis, VIF analysis, multivariate regression, univariate regression, and a Poisson regression to ensure the result in the multivariate analysis.
Results and conclusions: The result of this thesis shows a significant relationship between our dependent variable key audit matters and two of our independent variables, meeting frequency and remuneration. The conclusion is that the institutional structure can have an impact on the audit committee's effect on key audit matters, since Swedish companies already have a lot of corporate governance mechanisms, which can mean that companies get more ineffective in having an audit committee.
Contribution of the thesis: The theoretical contribution is a broad view on the characteristics effect on key audit matters, and a contribution to the research in a strong institutional structure. The practical contribution is that companies can use this study to evaluate if they need an audit committee or not.
Suggestions for future research: Suggestions for future research is to examine more EU countries, to see if EU regulations have a major impact on companies corporate governance, or if the institutional differences in the different countries have a bigger impact.
Key words: Key Audit Matters, Audit Committee, Agency Theory, Audit committee characteristics, Institutional structure