Empowering Audit Committees: Enhancing the Efficiency of Internal Audits in Jordanian Industrial Firms

Abstract

This study aims to investigate the impact of the audit committee's empowerment on the efficiency of electronic internal audits in industrial companies listed on the Jordanian stock exchange. This article describes a new idea by monitoring the performance of the audit committee's empowerment as a fundamental aspect of governance, along with their collaboration with internal auditors to encourage improvements in their performance, especially in the digital accounting era. This study used 205 valid responses from internal auditors, audit committee members, and finance managers of Jordanian industrial companies. The authors used the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS) version 25 to analyze the collected data. The results of the linear regression test in this study revealed that the audit committee's empowerment has a statistically significant influence on enhancing the efficiency of audit processes in the examined industrial firms. The new research results supplement the prior studies by addressing the empowerment of audit committees and their significant effect on electronic internal audit efficiency and are applicable in future studies related to electronic internal audits. This paper is novel because it focuses on electronic internal audit efficiency and the role of the audit committee's empowerment in enhancing such efficiency, an issue neglected in prior research.