majid maroufkhani

Currently, managing and supervising the activities of public joint-stock companies is one of the main issues in the economic system of various countries, including Iran. Thus, in many countries, corporate governance policies play an important role and the audit committee, as one of the committees of the board of directors in public companies, plays a key role in establishing and overseeing these policies. Since one of the most important duties and responsibilities of the audit committee is its supervisory role and the responsibility for monitoring all financial activities of the company, it is necessary to explain indicators to evaluate the supervisory function of audit committees. This study aims to explain supervisory indicators to evaluate the performance of audit committees, to formulate the supervisory indicators in the form of a questionnaire. To this end, the indicators were developed and tested by surveying professional and academic experts and also members of the audit committees of firms listed on the Tehran Stock Exchange and the Iranian OTC Market. The results showed that the supervisory indicators of audit committees in the Iranian capital market encompass four dimensions including supervision on financial reporting processes, supervision on internal controls, supervision on internal audit, and supervision on the independent auditor. Besides, these dimensions were categorized into 21 sub-indicators.

In recent years, the audit committee has played a key role in establishing and monitoring the corporate governance policies of publicly held corporation. Performance evaluating of the audit committee is an effective process for developing and improving the effectiveness of that committee. The committee should evaluate the effectiveness of itself performance and itself monitoring role.In this research, using the indicators and checklists used in evaluating the performance of audit committees in other countries and also according to the documents and conditions of the country, preparing and compiling indicators in the form of a questionnaire has been done and then in the first step, variables has been tested with using the viewpoints of professional and academic journalists, and in the next step, with using the viewpoints of the members of the audit committees of the companies accepted on the Tehran Stock Exchange and OTC, variables examination has been done.The results showed that in order to evaluate the performance of the audit committee in the Iranian capital market, the performance of the committee can be from eight main aspect including composition of committee members, committee powers, committee charter, committee meetings, business knowledge, monitoring, ethical principles and regulations and committee reporting, as well as their sixty-three sub-indicators, evaluated.Therefore, the self-assessment model was selected to evaluate the performance of the audit committee in the Iranian capital market, the preparation of a self-assessment questionnaire with the aspects and indicators resulting from this research as a proposed model was presented.