Determinants of Board of Statutory Auditor and Internal Control Committee Diligence: A Comparison Between Audit Committee and the Corresponding Italian Committees

The literature and many national regulatory frameworks have underlined the importance of audit committees as monitoring mechanisms. In the prevailing Italian firms' corporate governance system, there is no audit committee. Instead, its functions are responsibility of two different committees. One is the Internal Control Committee and the other the Board of Statutory Auditors. In this article, we try to understand whether the determinants of Audit Committee diligence, analyzed by the literature, affect both Internal Control Committee and Board of Statutory Auditor diligence in the firms listed on the Italian stock exchange over a three-year period (2005–2007).