CEOs Have Too Many Friends on the Audit Committee

While federal regulations in the wake of corporate scandals like Enron and Worldcom required audit committees to be solely composed of independent directors, a new study in the American Accounting Association journal The Accounting Review found almost 40 percent of studied companies have committee members with social ties to the CEO.

On average, nearly half of the audit committee members in those 40 percent of companies have these relationships -- "friendships involving voluntary, non-professional activities," according to the study of approximately 2,000 U.S. companies.

These friendships, according to the study, "have a significant negative impact on corporate financial integrity, fostering earnings manipulation, low levels of audit effort, concealment of financial distress, and cover-ups of internal-control weaknesses."

"Given the problems our study has revealed, the SEC in the U.S. and regulators in Europe should consider mandating the publication of social ties between top management and board members," stated Liesbeth Bruynseels of the University of Leuven, Belgium, who carried out the cross-Atlantic research with Eddy Cardinaels of Tilburg University, the Netherlands. Bruynseels and Cardinaels conducted the study with data from BoardEx, an international business intelligence service that provides in-depth profiles of world business leaders and the relations between them. The two focused on employment ties, educational ties and friendships from voluntary or leisure activities.

While neither employment nor educational ties were found to have a significant effect on company financial reporting, the researchers recorded the strongest correlation in the third group, which include friendships developed in elite organizations like the Chicago Club and Washington Roundtable, sports and culture groups such as the Augusta National Golf Club or Carnegie Hall Corporation, or charities like Cleveland Tomorrow and the Annie E. Casey Foundation.

"CEOs who wish to control the quality of financial reporting may be more likely to draw committee members from their friendship network than from their advisory network," according to the study. Bruynseels noted that these social ties between CEOs and committee members make a significant difference to investors, according to a new working paper by Arnie Wright and Ganesh Krishnamoorthy of Northeastern University, Jeffrey Cohen of Boston College, and Lisa Milici Gaynor of the University of South Florida.

That paper outlines an experiment of 263 informed, nonprofessional investors who demonstrated the most preference for companies in which CEOs had no social or professional ties to members of the audit committee, and the least preference for firms where these ties existed. In the experiment, those ties were said to be between the audit committee chair and another member, who were classmates with the CEO in grad school and had maintained regular social contact for the 15 years since graduation.

"Investors already sense the importance of such ties to the quality of companies' financial reporting," Bruynseels said in a statement. "It's time for regulators to catch up with investors by requiring this information to be more readily available than it is today."

The study, "The Audit Committee: Management Watchdog or Personal Friend of the CEO?" is in the January/February issue of The Accounting Review.

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